Most of the moral issues raised in Hamlet arise from the role imposed on its central character: the role of revenger. To appreciate the full implications of these issues, we have to remember that the play confronts us with two starkly conflicting moralities, two radically opposed views of the task which defines Hamlet's role in the play: to be the avenger of his father's death. On the one hand, Shakespeare presents his characters against an obviously Christian background, a background much more distinctively Christian than that of any of the other tragedies. The outlook of the characters has been conditioned by Christian teaching, and the play itself is based on an acceptance of the Catholic teaching on the after-life: the Ghost returns from Purgatory, for example. Marcellus celebrates miracles at Christmas, and the burial of

For 'tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petar (3, 4, 207-8).

Does Hamlet take the Ghost's command to revenge as a moral duty, and if he does, is he right to do so? If he does, does the play as a whole insist that we approve of his attitude? In other words, is Shakespeare content to allow his hero to make his own of an anti-Christian ethic of revenge, without testing this against the Christian ethic which should govern the world in which he and the other characters live? As one might expect, there has been a wide range of answers to these questions. Many critics accept without hesitation that the revenge-ethic is the one that governs the moral dimension of the play, that Hamlet accepts it as morally valid for his situation, that given all the circumstances he has a duty to do as the Ghost commands, that he is an agent of justice as well as an avenger. There is a minority view that a ghost from Purgatory who calls for revenge must be a morally ambivalent spirit, that Hamlet, in accepting the command, is yielding to temptation. It is possible to explain these difficulties and the moral confusion surrounding the revenge theme by reminding ourselves that Shakespeare's contemporaries seemed able to accommodate both Christian and pagan ideas of revenge side by side and find justification for each. It is also possible to argue that the acute moral problems posed by the Ghost's command have their origin in Shakespeare's decision to place an essentially pagan story of revenge in a thoroughly Christian setting.

Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to underline Hamlet's tendency to consider the issues confronting him in moral terms, and to apply strict standards of moral judgment to himself and to everybody around him. In his soliloquies, he pronounces the sternest moral verdicts on himself for his failure to meet the demands of his chosen role (`Yes I/A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak/Like John-a-dreams,unpregnant of my cause', 2, 2, 554-6). In his most famous soliloquy, he deals with the most fundamental of all questions. Before he can decide whether the better moral choice for a rational, noble creature is to suffer the blows of fate in patience or to struggle against them and perhaps die in the struggle, he must decide whether death is preferable to life (`To be, or not to be' . . . 3, 1, 56).

The extraordi

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Approximate Word count = 1582
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)