Hamlet: Fathers and Sons

 no more like my father / Than I to Hercules.

Hamlet (I,2) Hercules

Haste me to know ’t, that I, with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge.

Hamlet (I,5) Haste

 Yet I, / A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak / Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, / And can say nothing—no, not for a king / Upon whose property and most dear life / A damned defeat was made.

Hamlet (II,2) muddy-mettled rascal

I, the son of a dear father murdered, / Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, / Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words

Hamlet (II,2) heaven and hell

Why, this is ⟨hire⟩ and ⟨salary,⟩ not revenge.

Hamlet (III,3) Hire and salary

How stand I, then, / That have a father killed, a mother stained, / Excitements of my reason and my blood, / And let all sleep

Hamlet (IV,4) Stained

But now, my cousin Hamlet and my son - / (Aside) A little more than kin and less than kind.

Hamlet and Claudius (I,2) kin kind

But you must know your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his

Claudius (I,2) father father father

Hyperion to a satyr

Hamlet (I,2) sun G-d to a lustful and drunken woodland G-d

Laertes and Fortinbras, [...] are evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief

A. C Bradley, relief

Words melt into music whenever he speaks of him

A.C Bradley, Hamlet on his father

the Aristotelian tradition also holds that the violence of tragedy should ideally take place between people who know and are close to each other – friends or family – so that their suffering will evoke maximum pity. This formula for the most part holds true in the claustrophobically tight courts and families of Renaissance revenge tragedies.

Tanya Pollard

He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave / By laboursome petition

Polonius on Laertes trip (I,2)

to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Polonius (I,2) true

Neither a borrower nor a lender be, / For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

Polonius (I,2) borrower lender

I dare damnation. / […] both the worlds I give to negligence, / Let come what comes, only I’ll be revenged

Laertes (IV,5) damnation

what would you undertake […] ? - To cut his throat i’ th’ church.

Laertes (IV,7) more than words

Makes vow before his uncle never more / To give th’ assay of arms against your Majesty.

Fortinbras’ intentions for Denmark (II,2)

Witness this army of such mass and charge, / Led by a delicate and tender prince, / Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed

Hamlet on Fortinbras’ march (IV,4) #1

To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, / Even for an eggshell.

Hamlet on Fortinbras’ march (IV,4) #2

Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe.

Hamlet (I,5) globe

“Oh my offence is rank, it smells to heaven”

Claudius (I,3) rank

“A villain kills my father, and for that, / I his sole son do this same villain send / To heaven”

Hamlet (I,3) villain