Candide and Hamlet

“Everything is made for an end; everything is necessarily for the best end (Voltaire 16)." This philosophical view that Pangloss, Candide’s tutor, teaches Candide is a view that is discussed throughout the novel; a philosophy that wracks the mind of Candide until he knows this belief is one that cannot be true. Hamlet’s fight with himself, in a battle between what is morally right and wrong and then his philosophical battle that takes place within him, shows the views of Shakespeare’s time and how the philosophy of this time is what is holding back hamlet from committing suicide. Both of these writings are ones that philosophy is in the very fabric of one great criticism and a play that leads a man on a path of revenge and how to justify it. In Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, and Candide, by Voltaire, the subject of philosophy is one that centers throughout both of the writings; one that is discussed with great detail and leads to the conclusion of each.

Hamlet is the character that suffers through many trials, just like Candide, in order to ponder the mystery of the times. While Hamlet discusses the subject of his suicide and tries to justify it and trying to justify the act of killing someone out of revenge, Candide has been taught a philosophic view that he faces many trials with and tries to see the truth in it but all comes crashing down. Hamlet notes that without the belief in and if one was uncertain about an afterlife everyone would commit suicide because they fear what is to become of themselves. This philosophical debate is one that is being reputed by the church and for this you will go to hell, but hamlet is trying to answer in his soliloquy in Act III Scene I; “to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from who bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than to fly to other that we not know of?(Shakespeare 84-90)”; life is left to your decision and you must make of it of what you can. His philosophical view on suicide rebels against the thinking of the church and because of this Hamlet is unable to kill himself, because church is what rules in the setting of this play(Eliot 1).

Just like Hamlet, Candide battles his thoughts on his philosophic view of life. Throughout the novel his belief that everything is for the best, taught to him by his friend Pangloss, is contradicted by the fact that everything that comes to pass in Candide’s life is against what his mentor instructed him to believe. Candide has to think about what the world truly is with his mentor’s philosophy and many people along his way having what Voltaire believes the true philosophy of the world is; such as there is no good in the world, which is a philosophy of Martin, a Manichean scholar(Maurois 6). Candide only discusses his philosophy in the very end without the influence of others which is that he believes that you must strive through life no matter what has been thrown your way which he says in response to Pangloss’ repeated philosophical view “but we must cultivate our gardens(Voltaire 113).” His philosophical