?Question
Explore how time and place are used in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to shape the audience’s understanding of corruption.

Response
In "Hamlet," Shakespeare makes heavy use of setting and the passage of time to communicate the causes and effects of corruption. The protagonist’s pursuit of justice is almost entirely determined by the conflicting demands of his Elizabethan context, positioning the audience to understand the relationship between corruption and culture. Further, Hamlet’s philosophical musings are influenced by time and place, clarifying the author’s contextual experience of corruption.
The historical setting of the play in Denmark at the turn of the 17th century gives the deception and disloyalty in the play a contextual grounding. Hamlet’s use of disease imagery in the closet scene, “do not spread compost of the weeds to make them ranker,” echoes his earlier descriptions of Denmark as “an unweeded garden.” Setting is vital is creating a sense of suffocation and isolation, evident in the metaphor, “Denmark’s a prison.” The decay that Hamlet witnesses in his environment is linked back to King Hamlet’s “foul and most unnatural murder” at the hands of his brother Claudius. In the time period, regicide was a dire sin that disrupted the Great Chain of Being with ubiquitous consequences. The nature of the crime is portrayed as all the worse given its timing. The metaphor, “he took my father grossly, full of bread;/With all his crimes broad blown” demonstrates how Claudius’ dishonourableness and cowardice enhance the corruptive nature of his actions. The dramatic device of the ghost supports this claim in act one when he tells Hamlet, “a serpent stung me.” This biblical imagery parallels the story of The Garden of Eden, where one disturbance caused eternal suffering and chaos. Comparatively when considering Gertrude’s disloyalty, time plays a vital role in the audience’s response to ...