hamlet a tragic hero essay

Hamlet as a Tragic Hero

First, Hamlets flaw of irresolution is shown when he sees a play and the passion one particular actor had. A group of players has arrived and Hamlet arranges a personal viewing of The Murder of Gonzago with a small portion of his own lines inserted. Hamlet then observes one portion of the play in which one of the players put on a great display of emotion. Hamlet, besieged by guilt and self-contempt, remarks in his second soliloquy of Hamlet of the emotion this player showed despite the fact that the player had nothing to be emotional about.

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Hamlet as a tragic hero

Of all the plays Shakespeare has written, “ Hamlet ” is his most celebrated play and the play’s main protagonist Hamlet is the most controversial and talked about character in the history of English literature.

Aristotle in his book “ Poetics ” outlines that a tragic hero is a noble-born with heroic attributes and whose destiny changes as a result of a tragic flaw (most of the time arising from the character’s own heroic attributes) that eventually causes the tragic hero’s awful downfall. The character, Hamlet, undoubtedly complies with the concept of a tragic hero based on these points and can be considered as a perfect tragic hero. 

Table of Contents

Hamlet’s high status:

Hamlet is a high-born or a prince in the kingdom of Denmark. Hamlet has high philosophical thoughts as he was a student of philosophy and we witness his philosophical mind when Hamlet contemplates the principles of death and life. As a noble-born, Hamlet also knows sword skills which we can see in his duel against Laertes. Hamlet is also depicted as a diligent and clever person who is accepted among the public and will without a doubt make a potent monarch. Despite having all these heroic qualities, the ‘tragic flaw’ in his character eventually leads to his destruction and makes him a typical tragic hero. 

  Hamlet’s tragic flaw

According to Aristotle, a tragic hero must have a tragic flaw and Hamlet’s tragic flaw is his incapacity to take action or his indecisiveness. He is oftentimes upset by his own manners of ‘self-analysis’ . This tragic flaw leads him to many unwanted outcomes. For example, when Hamlet had the opportunity to kill, the murderer of his father Claudius, Hamlet halts because Claudius was praying at that time. According to Hamlet, if he had killed him while praying, he would have advanced to heaven. Likewise Act III Scene VI, in conversation with his mother, Hamlet had murdered Polonius, suspecting that it was his uncle Claudius. Extremely grieved by the demise of his father, Ophelia killed herself. If we look at all these incidents from a wiser point of view, then we can say that had Hamlet killed Claudius earlier, Hamlet would have already avenged his father’s death. Accordingly, Polonius, whom Hamlet killed would have lived and also his daughter Ophelia and besides all these Hamlet would also be able to spend the rest of his life well. So Hamlet’s own tragic flaw leads to his downfall and this also makes him a tragic hero.

Conflict as an essence of a tragic hero

Conflict is an important characteristic of a tragic hero. Tragic heroes like King Lear, Brutus, Othello, Hamlet also face internal and external conflicts . Hamlet’s inner conflict is between his ethical principles and his duty of taking revenge. His attachment to his father, the disgrace of his mother Gertrude, and the wickedness and double-dealing of his uncle Claudius stimulate him to take revenge while his integrity, moral principles, resists such inhuman action. The outcome is that Hamlet breaks within himself and endures psychological torment. 

If we talk about Hamlet’s main external conflict, then it is with his uncle, Claudius. For Hamlet, Claudius is a murderer of his father, a seducer who seduced and married Hamlet’s mother, and a usurper of Denmark’s crowned head. So for all these reasons Hamlet wants to take revenge on Claudius. 

We can also see Hamlet’s external conflict with Laertes. Laertes has a touch of dislike for Hamlet when he learns that his sister Ophelia had some connection with Hamlet. But Laertes’ dislike of him turns violent when he learns that his father has been killed by Hamlet. Such internal and external conflicts are the essence of a tragic hero.

The self-realization of a tragic hero:

Usually, in a tragedy, the hero comes to know about a truth about which he was previously unaware and uninformed. No doubt, Hamlet goes through a shift, a growth in perception and self-realization. But this transformation of Hamlet comes quite late to prevent his downfall. The self-realization of Hamlet starts with his brooding on the performer’s speech about Hecuba; it moves along with the bedroom scene and gets to its peak in the grave-diggers’ scene. It is in the gravedigger’s scene where Hamlet declares “the readiness is all” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet) . Aristotle called this self-realization of the hero “anagnorisis” . Most of all, in any case, Hamlet was manage to accomplish his essential aim – to kill the murderer of his father.

Role of fate and chance in Hamlet’s tragedy:

It might be argued that the personality of Hamlet’s character is not the only reason that is accountable for his downfall; external situations are also blameworthy for forming Hamlet a tragic hero. The arrival of the Ghost in the form of Hamlet’s father and its disclosure is an instance of fortune. There are many other incidents that happen in Hamlet’s life are by accident. The killing of Polonius, the attacking of pirates, and his returning to Denmark are nothing but an accident. So chance and fate affect not only the life of Hamlet but also the lives of the other characters. But this also does not mean that fate and chance are the only cause of Hamlet’s tragedy ; ultimately it is he himself who is answerable for his tragedy.

Conclusion:

In the end, we can say that the character of Hamlet as portrayed in the play and as advocated by the aforesaid qualities can be regarded as a tragic hero . Hamlet is not known for his bravery and goodness, he is such a hero who wanted to do something right but in the process, he keeps on making mistakes one after another. His ambitions and accomplishments are coordinated by defeats and misdeeds. Hamlet is a character in which virtue and evil coexist.

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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William Shakespeare: Hamlet Tragic Hero

This essay will explore the character of Hamlet as a tragic hero in Shakespeare’s play. It will discuss Hamlet’s tragic flaw, his internal conflict, and the series of events leading to his tragic end, and how these elements conform to the characteristics of a classical tragic hero. Moreover, at PapersOwl, there are additional free essay samples connected to Hamlet.

How it works

 Someone once said, “Grief is like living two lives. One is where you “pretend” everything is alright, and the other is where your heart silently screams in pain” (Unknown Author). In William Shakespeare’s playwright, Hamlet, the main character undergoes situations of dealing with the loss of his father. Hamlet is lost and is seeking answers to compensate for his pain.

In Act I Scene 2, Shakespeare uses Hamlet’s exclamations and mythological comparisons to show how the way one reacts to the loss of a loved one can reveal their true character.

Hamlet expresses deep sadness for the loss of his father right as an entry. He bemoaned the fact that he cannot commit suicide and explains in lines 335-336 that “self-slaughter” is not an option because it is forbidden by God. However, if suicide was not forbidden he would willingly end his life right there.

Hamlet portrays a man that is lost and stuck in a deep black hole. He would rather be united with his father in the heavens, than witness the replacement of his father’s throne. As seen in the first two lines, he is saying he doesn’t want to exist any more.“O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” (Shakespeare, 333-334). The repetitive use of “too” could serve as a way to reveal Hamlet’s uneasy nature. He indeed is saddened by his father’s death, which is causing him to be in a shaken mental state. If he was in a stable mindset his words would be presented not so repetitively or rushed. Hamlet wants to dissolve into a puddle serving no use because that is how he feels at the moment.

Readers can get a sense of the deep relationship Hamlet had with his father. His father was his everything and true inspiration as to what he sought to be when he was older. When that was all vanished in the midst of a short amount of time, all the joy was gone out of life and its pleasures in his eyes. As stated, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” (Shakespeare, Lines 337-338). Hamlet’s choice of words all share the meaning of feeling useless or drained in a sense.

His depressing connotations make readers concerned for the sake of his mental health. He is rather depressed and sees life as an option rather than an honor. Hamlet’s questionable nature of life is presented greatly in the beginning of his soliloquy. He exemplifies a tone of being unsteady through his negative feelings towards life. A powerful comparison of life was made by Hamlet, “Fie on’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature” (Shakespeare 339-340).

Hamlet compares life to a garden that has been allowed to run wild and grow gross and disgusting things in it as a result of a lack of tending. His mental state is revealing the worse perspectives he has deep within. The disgusting matters that roam the gardens could be in direct correlation to his uncle. When gardens are left unattended for too long it can turn into something unpleasant. In a way, the death of Hamlet’s father left the throne unattended. Then his brother took the throne, which was frowned upon greatly by Hamlet.

Not only does Hamlet express his internal feelings towards his father’s death, but he depicts his father as a figure that is incomparable. Hamlet says his father is a great king and compares him to Hyperion, who is one of the mythological Titans. He compares his uncle to Claudius a satyr. “So excellent a king; that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother” (Shakespeare, 343-344). Hyperion is known to be a god of light and wisdom. Whereas, Claudius is a mythical part-human-part-animal monster with a constant, exaggerated erection.

He goes on to say his father was so loving to his mother that he would stop the very winds from blowing too hard against her face. Takeaways from such comparisons could be that his father is seen as significantly mightier than his uncle. His uncle is presented as this man that may cast a false appearance on the outside, but in reality is dark and wicked within. Hamlet does not have the best relationship with his uncle, which makes this new adjustment of him as king rather difficult. He views his uncle as unfitted and weak in spirit for such a role his father used to uphold. Not to mention, Hamlet is upset with his mother’s speedy recovery over such a loss. His father showed immense love for his wife and the love was reciprocated.

However, her actions after his death could reveal that upholding her royal status was more important than mourning over the loss of her beloved. Hamlet compares his mother’s remorse for his father to the actions of Niobe, a figure in Greek mythology. “Like Niobe, all tears; — why she, even she” (Shakespeare, Line 353). Niobe was a woman who wept for nine days and nights when all her children were slain by the gods. Hamlet implies that even still, his own mother didn’t stay faithful to his father’s memory for long. She put on a character for being upset temporarily, but moved on rather quickly. Her actions evoke her as being an individual who may have humane attributes, but is selfish. Hamlet reveals his opinions of woman being the embodiment of weakness, but his opinions are biased in a sense. He is taking all of his anger out on his mother because he idolized his father so much.

Once that idol was gone before his eyes, he immediately blamed his anger towards his mother’s actions, which is a normal human attribute. This common use of mythological comparisons is executed even towards the very end of his soliloquy. O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn’d longer, — married with mine uncle” (Shakespeare 354-359). Hamlet claims that even a brainless beast would have mourned a loved one longer. He discusses how his mother not only didn’t mourn for long, but she married her dead husband’s own brother.

He also states that Claudius and King Hamlet were as different from each other as Hamlet himself is from Hercules. Shakespeare wanted his readers to understand that serious, scholarly, melancholy Hamlet is very different from the mythological hero, Hercules. Hercules is a man of great strength and courage, which Hamlet views himself as drastically different. He is confused as to why his mother would want to marry a man so different from his father and this only adds to his anger from the whole situation.

Overall, Hamlet is mourning over his father’s loss alone. He doesn’t have a figure to turn to that would reciprocate the same feelings he has deep within. He is angry at the world and wishes for only answers as to why everything is the way it is. Hamlet’s father was depicted as a man who held great character and status while on the throne. That is why it’s so difficult for him to accept the fact that his mother chose a man quite the opposite.

Hamlet, his mother, and uncle are all dealing with the loss of King Hamlet rather differently. However, the ways they chose to react reveal who they truly are as human beings. That being said, the same implies for the world we live in today. When individuals take time to mourn, it shows their vulnerability and humane side. Individuals that move on quickly are seen as being insecure and not wanting to face problems head on.       

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Tragic Hero?

Just what is a tragic hero? Obviously someone who is ‘tragic’ has suffered a great deal and we feel sorry for them. Someone who is a ‘hero’ is someone we admire and respect. The definition of the tragic hero in literature is only slightly more complex. You need to look for the following three elements.

The tragic hero

• commands our respect and sympathy
• possesses some human flaw in character or judgement which partially brings about his downfall
• recognises that he is somewhat to blame

Two other elements are worth mentioning. The first is that the consequences far outweigh the fault – in simple terms, he suffers far more than he deserves to. The second is that his suffering provokes an emotional response in the reader – the ‘tragedy’ is created because we are filled with grief & sympathy at the unfairness of what he has to endure.

If we apply this definition to Hamlet you’ll see that he

• Immediately commands our respect & sympathy . He obeys his mother despite his disgust at her behaviour. He values honesty “I have that within which passes show”. He is grieving his dead father & attempts to come to terms with his mother’s betrayal which evokes our sympathy. He is suicidal but moral “o that the everlasting had not fixed his cannon against self-slaughter” and aware of his duty to obey the King “it is not nor it cannot come to good but break my heart for I must hold my tongue”. He is described by Ophelia as ‘honourable’ and treats Horatio as a friend rather than as a subject (proving that he has no sense of being ‘better’ than others despite his royal blood).  You then need to look at how our sympathy for him ebbs and flows however. There are moments when we struggle to accept his behaviour – for example his reaction to killing Polonius, his decision to send R&G to their deaths and his treatment of Laertes in the graveyard. However, he regains his nobility somewhat when he exchanges forgiveness with Laertes, when he finally kills Claudius, when he saves Horatio, and in the tributes paid to him by Horatio & Fortinbras. (THIS IS A SUMMARY – YOU MUST OFFER A MORE IN DEPTH ANALYSIS WITH QUOTES)
• Possesses some human flaw in character or judgement which partially brings about his downfall . His ‘flaw’ is his procrastination, although this is a flaw we can admire. He is determined to establish Claudius’ guilt before he kills him, showing that he is a person who believes in doing the right thing. The deaths of many characters – Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes, even R&G can be either directly or indirectly viewed as a consequence of Hamlet’s ‘delay’, his rage at his own inability to act and then his impulsive ‘rash and bloody deed’ in killing Polonius, thinking it was Claudius behind the arras. (THIS IS A SUMMARY – YOU MUST OFFER A MORE IN DEPTH ANALYSIS WITH QUOTES)
• Recognises that he is somewhat to blame . Throughout the play Hamlet makes reference to his tendency to think rather than act. Almost all of his seven soliloquies involve deeply self-critical commentary. He cannot explain, justify, or even understand “why yet I live to say this thing’s to do”. He is filled with shame when he compares himself to Fortinbras & Laertes. Thus Hamlet absolutely recognises his flaw. (THIS IS A SUMMARY – YOU MUST OFFER A MORE IN DEPTH ANALYSIS WITH QUOTES)

The entire play dramatically presents a battle between rage & despair in Hamlet’s soul as he struggles to come to terms with the fact that he must carry out a deed which is anathema to his personality “the time is out of joint o cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right”. Thus we respect him, feel sympathy for him, recognise (as he does) his flaws and experience his death as deeply tragic yet in some ways inevitable. He ticks all the boxes so a question asking you to discuss whether or not Hamlet is a tragic hero could be fairly straightforward if you just keep these three things in mind!

You could complicate it further IF YOU WANTED TO make your answer more original.

Let’s think for a second about the idea of the anti-hero . This is a character who we ‘admire and feel sympathy for’ so that box is still ticked. What makes the antihero different is their personality – something in their character is different to our usual definition of a ‘hero’. In Hamlet’s case he doesn’t behave the way we expect the hero to behave in a revenge tragedy – we expect him to carry out his revenge quickly and unequivocally, without hesitation. Instead he examines the morality of what he must do, gets sidetracked into arguments with the women in his life, thinks long and hard about killing himself (but as with everything else he talks about, he doesn’t do it!), gives a lecture on good acting to some actors, fails to kill Claudius because he wants him to burn in hell forever, kills Polonius by accident, is sent away, makes a deal with some pirates, comes back and again gets sidetracked – this time into a fencing match which will prove fatal for all of the major characters who aren’t already dead. So his ‘flaw’ (procrastination) is also the thing which makes him more antihero than hero. If you wanted to you could describe him as a tragic antihero rather than as a typical tragic hero. Or you can stick with the simpler definition above.

Now think about this for a second. Do you like him? I find myself torn between sympathy (your mom’s a bitch) and frustration (just do it already!). Psychologists say the traits you most dislike in others are often the things you most dislike about yourself. Let’s apply that to Hamlet for a second – he annoys me because he talks about doing things instead of just doing them. Then I think about myself – I talked about doing this website for well over a year before I actually did anything about it. I keep talking about going to NY but I’ve never been. Right now I should be finalising things for the short story competition but I’m putting it off. Now think about yourself for a minute. Think about all the time you waste talking about and thinking about studying but not actually doing it! If Hamlet irritates you maybe that’s because he is so goddamned HUMAN. So weak, so flawed and so like all of us. Maybe we want our ‘heroes’ on telly, in the movies, in plays, to be more heroic and less real. Paradoxically however, the fact that he is so real, so ordinary, so flawed, so weak, so impulsive and so insecure is what makes him so fascinating, so compelling and so tragic.

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Hamlet as a Tragic Hero

By: Jack   •  Essay  •  2,431 Words  •  December 16, 2009  •  4,652 Views

Essay title: Hamlet as a Tragic Hero

Webster’s dictionary defines tragedy as, “a serious drama typically describing a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force (such as destiny) and having a sorrowful or disastrous conclusion that excites pity or terror.” A tragic hero, therefore, is the character who experiences such a conflict and suffers catastrophically as a result of his choices and related actions. The character of Hamlet is a clear representation of Shakespeare’s tragic hero, as he possesses all the necessary characteristics of such a hero. Hamlet is seen as a tragic hero as he has doomed others because of a serious error in judgment, also Hamlet is responsible for his own fate and Hamlet has been endowed with a tragic flaw. These character traits and distinctiveness make Hamlet a Tragic Hero.

Firstly, one of the defining traits of a tragic hero is that he or she is responsible for their own fate. Hamlet has chosen to believe the Ghost and attempt to prove that Claudius did, in fact, murder King Hamlet. Hamlet has chosen to invite danger and he has chosen to put on an antic disposition. To begin, Hamlet was not totally convinced about what the Ghost had described to him so Hamlet took it upon himself to prove Claudius’s guilt. For example, “I’ll have these players play something like the murder of my father before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks; I’ll tent him to the quick; if he but the blench, I know my coarse. The spirit that I have seen may be the devil: and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape / The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” (Hamlet II.ii 592-603) Hamlet schemes to determine Claudius's guilt through the play. Claudius views the play and becomes very uncomfortable with the situation to the point of stopping the play and leaving. This confirms Claudius's guilt to Hamlet, and

Hamlet again sets out to avenge his father's death. Hamlet could have prevented much suffering by exacting his revenge earlier on in the play but Hamlet is too educated to be persuaded by a Ghost. As hamlet said “The spirit that I have seen may be the devil: and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.” (II.ii 596-597)

Next, Hamlet continues to invite danger as he is in his mother’s room and he stabs blindly into the curtains and kills Polonius. (Conversation between King and Hamlet) “Now Hamlet, where’s Polonius? / At supper / At supper! Where? / Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: well fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean begat is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.” (IV.iii 17-26) Hamlet has chosen this fate for himself. It was his choice to hide the body from Laertes as well as the king. Hamlet knows that Laertes will be looking for him, seeking revenge for the death of his father. In addition to that, Hamlet insults the king in front of a room of people. Hamlet has chosen to walk the path of danger just as Macbeth did. Macbeth was already king but he believed in the prophecy so much that he had to send three mercenaries out to kill Banquo. Macbeth also sent murders to kill Macduff’s wife and child. These actions were unnecessary they only draw more attention to ones wrong doings and just as Macbeth doomed himself to demise, Hamlet is walking the same path.

Lastly, Hamlet realizes that he cannot fulfill the wish of the Ghost unless he has evidence of his own. To do that Hamlet must devise a way where he can act in a manner in which he can investigate the king without drawing too much attention to himself. For example, “Here, as before, never, so help you mercy, How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself, As I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on, That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, with arms encumber’d thus, or this head shack, or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase….” (I.v 170-175) Hamlet knows by putting on this disposition that he will be left alone and much of his behaviour will be pardoned. Elizabethans firmly believed that the insane were touched by God and, in a sense, were revered and left to their own devices. If Hamlet acts like a noble, he has no cover for his accusations, if he acts insane the behavior becomes expected by everyone around him.. In summary, Hamlet is in control of his own fate. When he believed the evil ghost, Hamlet knew that proving Claudius’s guilt would not be easy. When he hid the body of Polonius and invited the wrath of Laertes he was in control of his own fate as well as when he put on an antic disposition to elude the attention way from his real plan.

Another way that Hamlet fits the description of a Shakespearian tragic hero is that he has he has doomed the others because of a serious

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet Theme — A Mad Tragic Hero as one of the Themes in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’

A Mad Tragic Hero as One of The Themes in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'

• Categories: Hamlet Hamlet Madness Hamlet Theme

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Words: 2725 |

14 min read

Published: Aug 14, 2023

Words: 2725 | Pages: 6 | 14 min read

Table of contents

Hamlet's break from reality and unintended consequences, hamlet's tragic obsession with ghosts and the blurring of reality, hamlet's self-critique: the descent into madness, references .

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