Hamlet's "vicious responses- are his wishes to seek revenge upon Claudius, to avenge his father and to satisfy himself for the hatred he has for Claudius and Gertrude's betrayal to him and his father: "Oh most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damnéd villain!- .
During Claudius' first speech to the Court, Hamlet is rude and sarcastic towards him, who is now "a little more than kin and less than kind-. Hamlet's play on the word "kind- presents no affection, as he is still grieving for his father. He is hurt by the callousness that Gertrude and Claudius have displayed towards to his father's death and he displays disgust towards their relationship in his first soliloquy:.
"Things rank and gross in nature.
Possess it merely. That it should come to this - .
But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two!.
So excellent a king, that was to this.
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother.
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven.
Visit her face too roughly-. I.II.
The Ghost voices an idea about Claudius when it says: "that incestuous, that adulterate beast-. Hamlet's metamorphosis from a grieving son to a ruthless man, hell-bent on performing his revenge, stems from his encounter with the Ghost. Alex Newell addresses the question of Shakespeare's ambivalent handling of the revenge issue, arguing that "the play's view of revenge is rendered not by explicit reflections on the ethics of revenge by Hamlet the thinker but rather by what happens to him, what he undergoes in becoming a revenger".
Throughout the play, there is a sense of closeness between Hamlet and Gertrude. Later in the play when Ophelia exits after her maddened singing and Claudius is conversing with Laertes, he says: "the Queen his mother lives almost by his looks-. This reveals the need for Hamlet in his mother's life. The Closet Scene in which Hamlet mistakenly kills Polonius best exemplifies Hamlet's relationship with Gertrude, and perhaps provides evidence that Hamlet is suffering from what Freud called an Oedipus Complex .