In the play Hamlet, the young man is faced with some serious dilemmas. His
             father, King of Denmark, has died under suspicious circumstances. The
             king's brother Claudius ascends the throne -- and takes his widowed sister-
             in-law as his wife. To Hamlet, this amounts to incest. Claudius, good at
             maneuvering, acknowledges his prior relation with his new wife but
             "To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
             To be contracted in one brow of woe,
             Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
             That we with wisest sorrow think on him,
             Together with remembrance of ourselves.
             Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
             The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
             Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,--
             With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
             With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
             In equal scale weighing delight and dole,--
             Taken to wife: ... " (Act I: ii)
             Hamlet is terribly offended by the marriage of Claudius and his mother
             Gertrude, but that alone does not justify murder to Hamlet, who is the heir
             to the throne. However, after this scene, Hamlet meets a ghost claiming to
             be his deceased father. His friend Horatio sees the ghost first, and brings
             Hamlet to see it in Act I scene v. There is no doubt to Hamlet; the ghost
             resembles his father and tells a terrible tale, that Claudius, his own
             brother, murdered him as he lay sleeping in his orchard. He describes his
             "Murder most foul, as in the best it is,
             But this most foul, strange, and unnatural."
             The ghost goes on to use the imagery of treachery, referring to
             Claudius as a serpent who stung him. He says the whole "ear" of Denmark has
             been changed by his death. The reference to the ear is significant, for the
             ghost says Claudius poisoned him by pouring the elixir of poisonous herbs
             into his ear as he slept. He explains that...