There are actually five. The first three are obvious.
There is Hamlet's revenge for his father, there is Prince Fortinbras' revenge for his
father, and then Laertes' revenge for his father, Polonius. But there are two
more.
The exposition the Player King recites for Hamlet at
the end of 2.2 has an irony because Pyrrhus' slaughter of King Priam is an act of
revenge for the death of his father, Achilles. The images here are stark. The object
of Pyrrhus' revenge should be Paris, son of King Priam, who killed Achilles, but Paris
is already dead. Revenge though is unreasoned blood lust. Pyrrhus doesn't just kill the
"Old grandsire" Priam, he made "malicious sport" in "mincing" Priam's limbs. This
snippet of a play has preserved historically and as somewhat mis-remembered by Hamlet,
shows Pyrrhus to be "hellish" like the "Hyrcanian beast" with "black purpose". In other
words revenge is not an admirable endeavor. But through this all Hamlet makes no note of
it.
The next revenge is a little more obscure. It involves
Julius Ceasar, who is referenced three times in the play. And by coincidence he was the
focus of of one of Shakespeare's recently written plays. A play that has these ominous
words spoken by Mark Antony:
And Ceasar's spirit ranging for
revenge
With Ate by his side come hot from
hell
Shall in these confines with a monarch's
voice
Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of
war
Ate, pronounced Ah-tay,
was the goddess of rashness and folly.
Legend has it that
in Shakespeare's company of actors, the actor playing Julius Ceasar was the same actor
who would play Polonius. Brutus and Hamlet would also share the same actor. So the
undercurrent of the humor in 3.2 when Polonius tells us he enacted Julius Ceasar and
was killed in the capitol by Brutus and then Hamlet offers that it was a brute part of
him (Brutus) to kill so capital a calf there just drips with irony when the brute part
of Hamlet in his rash lust for blood kills the "unseen good old man" and father of
Laertes.
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