Alex, 

   This is a pretty good "serious" paper on the role of love in Hamlet.   Your 
writing is also very solid.  The main comment I have is that even though 
everything you say is pretty much on the mark, I don't think you went very deep 
in your analysis of some of the relationships or used the episodes in the play
to back up your points as fully as you could have.  In terms of the structure of the 
essay this means that your concluding paragraph ends up mostly just repeating 
things you said in the opening paragraph.  Ideally, in an essay like this, you 
would like the opening paragraph to lay out what the topic will be and what your 
main point (the "thesis") is.  Then the conclusion can sum up what you have 
presented and that can take you beyond what was in the opening paragraph.  Your 
opening paragraph is fine, but there's not too much to add later because you haven't 
addressed some of the subtleties.  

See the comments below for some specific ideas:

"The entirety of the play is based around the love Hamlet had for his father, and 
how that love drove Hamlet to do something he would not normally have done."
This is actually an overstatement because there's a lot more here besides that.
It would be better to say something like "The love Hamlet had for his father is 
the primary engine driving the plot of the play."   

"It took an amazing amount of devotion to his father to get Hamlet to commit such
an action" -- You might go into more detail here -- what he did to convince himself
that Claudius was actually guilty, how he hesitated instead of acting many times,
etc.  You want to present more evidence from the play to back this up.   

"Hamlet’s love for Ophelia was a little more inconsistent."  This is a HUGE
understatement!  I don't think any relationship in the play is quite as ambiguous
as this one. 

"Their relationship fits into the typical boyfriend-girlfriend category, but typical 
boyfriends do not treat their girlfriends the way Hamlet treated Ophelia."  
You're uncomfortably close to contradicting yourself in this sentence. But part
of that comes from the ambiguity.  To me, the best explanation for some of Hamlet's 
behavior is that some of Hamlet's anger at his mother (for her too-quick remarriage, 
etc.) has "slopped over" into his ideas about women in general, and hence his relationship 
with Ophelia.  This is a complicated topic and you don't really do it justice.  For
instance, from Ophelia's side, you also have to take into account that she's still
quite young and immature and she has lost both her father and her boyfriend/lover(?) in
a short span of time.  

"The reason I bring this up is that it shows that Gertrude and Claudius must have had 
a great deal of love for one another if they were willing to kill King Hamlet, Gertrude’s 
husband and Claudius’s brother, in order to be together."  You seem to be taking it
as a fact that Gertrude was involved in the plot to kill King Hamlet.  There's really
nothing in the play clearly indicating that that was the case.  The Fenwick Theater
production we saw was effectively hinting in that direction, but you should be aware 
that this is a choice Prof. Isser made as director.  There are other possible ways
to "read" Gertrude too that don't make her an accomplice to the murder Claudius 
carried out.  This is yet another extremely ambiguous relationship that needs a 
deeper investigation.

"Polonius did not want him to go, but he also did not want to stand in his way because 
he wanted Laertes to be able to his life."  Not quite sure what this means.

I think it's very natural to read Polonius's attitudes toward his children as love, and 
it's clear that in the production we saw in Fenwick Theater, Prof. Vineberg's portrayal
of Polonius emphasized that aspect of his character.  However, I think it's good to realize
that other possible readings exist too. Sometimes Polonius is portrayed as a much less 
loving "control freak" and busybody who simply wants dominance over his children for the 
ways they can increase his power and influence in the court.  (Recall the way he 
basically sends "his man" Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris in Act 2, scene 1.)


Content -- B

Structure/Mechanics -- A-