What are we to learn from Shakespeare's tragedy of Hamlet?

Art is an amazing thing that speaks to each person who
interacts with it differently. Two people can see the same play, but it may speak to
them in vastly distinct and separate ways.

Shakespeare's
Hamlet is one of my favorite Shakespearean plays, and I find that
it has many messages or lessons for its audience.

Hamlet is
a seemingly happy young man, with a family he loves, called home at his father's
unexpected death. When he arrives at Elsinore Castle, he is as prepared as he can be for
the loss of his father, but then discovers that his mother has married his father's
brother (considered an incestuous marriage in Elizabethan times), and that his uncle,
Claudius, now sits on the throne of Denmark.

If this is not
enough, Hamlet's father's ghost appears and charges his son to avenge Old Hamlet's
murder.

There are several important life lessons in this
play, for me.

First of all, life can change with one beat
of the heart. Life holds no guarantees.

Secondly, I believe
it is important to allow people to help you and have faith in those you love. Hamlet
quickly decides he cannot trust Gertrude (his mother) or Ophelia (his sweetheart). Had
he been able to do so, surely his burden would have been lighter, and Ophelia might not
have died.

There are times when life asks us to do things
we do not want to do. In Act I, scene five, Hamlet complains that he is required to
avenge his father's murder:

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O cursed spite,
That ever I was born
to set it right!
  (210)

Finally, one of the
play's most important themes comes, ironically, from the mouth of one of the play's most
foolish characters: Polonius. Polonius has wonderful advice, but never takes it. This
famous line speaks to us, hundreds of years after Shakespeare wrote
it:

This
above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the
day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.  (I, iii,
82-84)

Hamlet is called upon
to fix a situation with which he has no experience. He does not feel he can speak to his
family, or Ophelia and her family, but he does not spend a great deal of time trying to
work things out with Horatio. And although Horatio is a man who Hamlet can trust, the
young prince decides to "put on an antic disposition" to trick those he feels he cannot
trust.

None of this comes naturally to Hamlet; we sense he
is a young man who is given to speaking his mind honestly, without deception.

Hamlet is unable to follow this advice, but must present
himself as something he is not: a man crazed with love, or grief, or both. Since
Claudius is a murderer, it stands to reason that Hamlet cannot speak his mind regarding
his father's murder, but had he leaned on others, and remained true to his own
sensibilities, rather than trying to be what he imagined would help him decide the path
he must take to avenge his father's death, perhaps his fate might have been different,
hypothetically.

These are some of the main themes or
messages I find in Shakespeare's Hamlet.