helia has died he cries out, "I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum."(Act V, Scene 1)
             The ghost provides Hamlet with a dilemma. In Shakespeare's plays supernatural characters are not always to be trusted (think of the three witches in Mac Beth who are instrumental in his downfall). Hamlet does not know whether the ghost is telling the truth or not. If Hamlet had killed Claudius solely on the ghost's advice then he would certainly been tried and put to death himself and there would probably have been a war to choose a new king. Being the humanitarian that he is, and taking into account his responsibilities as a prince and future king, Hamlet most likely would want to avoid a civil war because even though
             Claudius is a murderer and probably not as noble a king as Hamlet's father was yet he is still the king, bringing order to Denmark. Hamlet does not wish to plunge his country into chaos because of his own personal turmoil and realizes this will happen when he kills Claudius. To add to his quandary Hamlet is unable to combine the spiritual world (in the form of his father's ghost) with the tangible everyday world that surrounds him.
             There is much irony throughout this play. One occurrence of irony I found particularly striking was the fact that Hamlet eff
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