Quite the Series of Unfortunate Events

Dear bloggers, I am sorry to inform you that this post will be extrodinarily unpleasent. If you are looking for a story about spring time and forgiveness, familial love, and happily-ever-afters , I would strongly recomend reading another post about another play.

Shakespeare's famous play, Hamlet ends in quite a series of rather unfortunate events. If you get queasy at the sight of Singing gravediggers, or dead jesters' skulls, sealed letters that deceptively condemn  the deliverers, slippery suicides, deadly swordfights, and perilous poison, I implore you to read no further.

Act IV of Hamlet is a series of quick scenes, and plottings, a word which here means teeming with plots of how to avenge several unnecissary royal deaths.

The very structure by which it was written inhances the intensity of the ploting characters. So much quick dialouge, fast-paced scenes, every character running high with blood-thirsty emotion, all leading up to nearly everyone's deaths, nearly all at once.

I tried to warn you.

Almost every single character purposefully decieves. One could argue that the only one death that was needed to begin with, was Claudius', for the deliberate murder of his brother and king. All others were a sort of collateral damage brought about by all of the facades.
Everyone puts on a lying act, even the gravedigger:

"I do not lie in 't, and yet it is mine"
a phrase to which Hamlet responds: "Thou dost lie in ’t, to be in ’t and say it is thine. 'Tis for the dead, not for the quick. Therefore thou liest."

It is an extreme domino effect: Hamlet is cowardly and kills Polonius from behind a curtain, which leads to Ophelia's descent into suicide, and Leartes is then enraged to avenge them both. Claudius literally puts on a show--a swordfight, and has a back-up plan to kill Hamlet in case his "play" does not play out. (Pun intended.) He's so driven by this act, that he won't stop his wife from acting her part, even though he knows it will kill her. and eventually 'tis the death of himself too. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sort of get caught in the crossfire. In the end EIGHT deaths were, in my opinion, unnecissarily carried out.

This is more than a simple moral tale, it's not as if only the bad guy in the end gets his punishment. The consequences of a few deceptions lead to everyone's death.

T'were all terrible misfortunes, that I believe Shakespeare believed could have been prevented.