Ok, so I'm going to start off by saying I absolutely hate this play already. It's such a pain in the butt to try to comprehend with the speeches that last a million pages and the countless footnotes that take up half the page. Just saying. Now, on to my actual response.

So, in Act 1 there seems to be a couple very prominant themes. The first is that the death of a family member could cause suicidal thoughts. When Hamlet enters the stage he is still weraing all black though the occasion is a wedding and, from what I can tell, he is trying to escape all the craziness that is going around the castle by going off to study in Wittenberg. I mean, his mom is marrying his uncle of all people! And only a little more than a month of his fathers passing (murder). It's bound to cause some kind of emotional distress. Then when he is going to follow the ghost and his friends are trying to convince him to leave it alone, he basically asks them "Why not? There not much else to live for."

The second theme is that the murder of a family member leads to a wanting of revenge and more emotional turmoil. After Hamlet and the ghost talk, he finds out his father had been murdered by his uncle. This causes him even more grief because his supposedly inoccent mother is now sleeping with a murderer. It also causes him anger because it appeared as though his uncle actually did care about him when he wanted Hamlet to stay. Hamlet may even be thinking that his uncle is out for his own life! Overall they seem to have a pretty disfunctional family.

*Tina