SOURCE: “The Wheel of Fortune, the Wheel of State, and Moral Choice in Hamlet,” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 57, No. 4, November, 1992, pp. 21-38.

In the following essay, Tkacz interprets imagery of the wheel of fortune and the decaying state as these relate to the morality of Prince Hamlet's actions in Hamlet.

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, not only the action of the play, but two fascinating wheel images turn on the point of the prayer scene, for the choices that Hamlet and Claudius make then subject the wheel of state (3.3.15-22) to the wheel of Fortune (2.2.464-68) and thus lead to the “boist’rous ruin” of the royal house of Denmark. Between the crowded and turbulent mousetrap scene and the verbally and physically violent closet scene—which, significantly, includes the play's first onstage death—is the deceptively quiet prayer scene. Not simply the calm before the storm, this is the...