Plato defined justice as “the preservation of what is right”. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the dilemma of justice, especially in relation to punishment, takes center stage. The characters in the play see justice as a balance that must be preserved and use revenge to preserve it. From Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway's desire to avenge his father's death at the hands of the former Danish king by invading Denmark, to protagonist Hamlet's quest for revenge against his uncle Claudius for killing his father, to Hamlet's killing by part of Laertes as punishment for his father Polonius. ' death, protagonists and antagonists recklessly try to re-establish a balance, fair or not. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Hamlet's perception of justice as a balance that can be restored through punishment is perhaps the purest of all characters: he is driven to restorative punishment by a sense of duty rather than vengeful passion. Hamlet's line, "O cursed spite, that I was ever born to make things right!", indicates that Hamlet is far from eager to seek his father's justice: rather, he acts out of a sense of loyalty and duty to his father. This is further established almost indisputably towards the end of Act II, when Hamlet decides to test Claudius to ascertain his guilt rather than begin plotting immediately. His hesitation suggests that Hamlet cares deeply about the balance of justice: he is only willing to take revenge if he is sure that punishment will restore the balance, and he is tired of upsetting the balance further. Even if he is misled into thinking that shedding more blood will actually restore a balance of justice, he at least has principles and operates more consistently than others under the assumption that justice is the preservation of a balance in the beneficial and harmful effects of justice. . actions that people take towards each other: a balance that can and should be preserved through gratitude or revenge. He is naturally prone to temper, but Hamlet's apparent outbursts of passion should be attributed first to his discomfort with exacting revenge and his weariness with making things worse, and then to his search for Lex Talionis-type justice, whereby he believes that the balance can only be restored if it is restored in exactly the way it was upset. Hamlet's search for an uncompromising punishment suited to the crime is unexpectedly revealed when he sees his first chance to kill Claudius. Rather than take action and avenge his father without risk of failure, Hamlet loses his temper and instead decides to wait for the chance to eliminate Claudius when the latter has sin on his mind, so that he has no chance of revenge. Ironically, this progression in Hamlet's attitude toward vengeance for his father and his stricter understanding of justice lead him to act irrationally and unjustly when he recklessly kills Lord Polonius only a few lines later, presumably mistaking him for King Claudius but apparently attacking blindly anyway. After realizing that Polonius is the one he has killed, Hamlet recognizes that he has upset the balance and may have to do the same again to finally get retribution in his father's name, saying, "So evil begins and worse remains behind ". This is the first indication that Hamlet's quest for justice is failing: he has further upset the very balance he sought to re-establish, and his tragicdescent from his initially pure goals suggests that he is right in realizing that little good will come from his commitment. future attempts, but is mistaken in hoping that the worst is over. The deterioration of Hamlet's values ​​is a quintessential example of a protagonist's descent, and the result of Hamlet being too weak in character to prevent the external imbalance regarding his father's unavenged death from unsettling his own peace of mind. . However, he doesn't simply limit his focus to killing Claudius and blocking the rest of the world; when he says "[I] will answer well to the death I have given him", Hamlet shows clarity: he recognizes that he has disturbed the balance of justice even more and also recognizes that he will answer for Polonius' death once the balance has been restored. As Hamlet becomes more and more unpredictable, he decides to be more and more brutal and targeted in his revenge. While Hamlet thinks little about details and perfect balance when he discovers his uncle Claudius' betrayal, he becomes increasingly obsessed with precise punishment and convinced that he too will be a victim of the balance. The details provided by Shakespeare about Hamlet's moral lineage, as it would probably appear to most, call into question the validity of a balancing view of justice. As Hamlet's revenge is fomented, he only causes further injustice; invariably proves the old adage that "two wrongs don't make a right." Shakespeare develops the character of Hamlet in this way to suggest that justice cannot exist as a line of equilibrium, that is, as if approached and deviated sinusoidally with the innumerable and unpredictable actions of people. Instead, the implication is that nature is somehow unbalanced, or so incomprehensibly balanced that it is not possible to determine whether the balancing effects are correlated at all, so that a disturbance to the status quo or a shift from equilibrium must be in some accepted way. While completely ignoring an offense is unfair as turning a blind eye makes no attempt to preserve what is right, Shakespeare certainly indicates that restoring perfect balance is impossible and dangerous, and the preservation of what is right should be approached with a spirit of general conservation rather than precise restoration. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Ultimately, Hamlet's search for what he perceives as justice is a failure. The fact that he kills Claudius and avenges his father is overshadowed by the general carnage that consumes the viewer at the end of the opera. One after another the main protagonists and antagonists die, ruining themselves in the defense of a false justice or becoming involved in the calamity. The assassins are all killed; Ophelia, Hamlet's lover and Laertes' sister, also kills her murderer by committing suicide. He is apparently an innocent victim of other people's passions and mistakes, but his crime is the same. They all receive the punishment of death that corresponds to their crime of murder, and that is a tragically unsurprising conclusion. Shakespeare suggests through Hamlet's descendants that the series of murders he triggered is unjust; ultimately, “what is right” is not preserved. In fact, the opposite triumphs: death and tragedy, archetypes of what is wrong. The search for justice that ends in total injustice is intended to be ironic, but not paradoxical. Hamlet's tragic flaw, which he shares with Laertes and the others, lies in his simplistic view of what is right: he neglects that the nature of violence and murder is destructive?