Keys to Interpreting HamletWilliam Shakespeare's Hamlet is, at heart, a play about suicide. Although surrounded by a fairly standard revenge plot, the core of the play is an intense psychodrama about a prince driven mad by the pressures of his rank and his unrequited love for Ophelia. He desires definitive liberation from suicide, but why? In this regard, Hamlet is ambiguous: he provides different motivations depending on the situation. But we learn to trust his soliloquies - his thoughts - more than his actions. In Hamlet's speeches we find indications on the methods we should use for his interpretation. The reason for Hamlet's suicide is the death of his father, the late King Hamlet - or at least that's what he tells the world. In his first soliloquy (1.2.133-164) he claims the death of his father as the reason, but the testimonies he provides lead us to other reasons. In the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy, he says, "Who would endure... the sufferings of a love scorned... when he himself could make his quietus / with a naked truncheon?" (3.1.78-84). The word "despised" is interpreted as "unrequited" - and thus we are led to speculate that Ophelia, and not the late king, is the true cause of his suicidal impulses. The statement of mourning his father seems to me, at best, an excuse: in the eyes of the audience that he is, Hamlet cannot sink so low as to be driven to kill himself by a woman. This is an example of a phenomenon we notice throughout Hamlet the separation of what is stated on the surface from the implications of some underlying layer. The play works on two levels: the revenge drama functions as a backdrop for Hamlet's internal psychodrama. It is clear that Shakespeare intends Hamlet's thoughts to be superior to his outward actions in interpreting the play. After listing all the outward signs of his depression, he tells his mother that he would prefer to be thought of according to his thoughts: “These indeed 'seem'/Because they are actions a man might perform;/But I have this within which the steps show/These are but the ornaments and raiments of misfortune” (1.2.86-89). Yet Hamlet, for all the disdain for the play he displays here, also appreciates its power, in his remarks on the player's soliloquy on Hecuba. (2.