Dramatic irony is when the audience or reader knows the words and actions of the characters in a literary work, but some characters in the history do not know them. The reader or audience has a better understanding of many of the characters themselves. Shakespeare employs dramatic irony in many of his tragedies; so that the audience is engaged and can witness the characters' mistakes in their actions, predict the characters' fates, and experience feelings of tragedy and grief. As a tragedy, Hamlet deals with the problems resulting from Hamlet's attempt to avenge his father's death. Throughout the play, Hamlet is searching for himself, as his actions shape who he really is. As he tries to find himself, his actions go too far and cause many deaths, even his own, and he never gets the chance to find his true self. According to the Whit Cream team, “your soul-shaping choices, values, and perspectives” define you. The play begins with the changing of the guards on a platform at Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Recently, the spectral likeness of the dead King Hamlet appeared to the guards. Horatio and Marcellus leave the barricades of Elsinore with the intention of seeking help from Hamlet, who returns from school, dejected by the "hasty marriage" of his mother to his uncle less than two months after the funeral of the father of Hamlet (Gordon, 128). There is a court social gathering after the coronation, at which Claudius pays homage to the memory of his deceased brother, the former king, and then with Queen Gertrude. Sending Cornelius and Voltemand to Norway to settle the Fortinbras affair, speaking to Polonius and Laertes about the latter's return to sc...... middle of paper ......eltThaw and resolve in dew! Or that the Lord had not fixed his canon against self-mutilation! O God! God ! How tired, stale, flat and useless it is, It seems to me that all the uses of this world! ah fi! it is a garden without weeds, which grows from seed; things of a gross and crude nature simply possess them. (1.2) One of the essential problems is the conflict between Hamlet's compelling need to believe in the ghost of his father, who is the towering figure in his life, and the awareness that he lacks a realistic knowledge of the truth. Hamlet embarks on a mixed mission of accusation, revenge, and the search for his true self. Even though Hamlet is the protagonist at the end of the play, he ends up as the antagonist because his rage leads him to end several lives, even his own, without discovering his serenity..