hamlet is a character of many contradictions essay

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Hamlet Character Analysis

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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Introduction, motivations and ambivalence, identity and madness, morality and conscience, impact on the narrative.

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• Shakespeare's Hamlet Main Character Contradiction

Shakespeare's Hamlet Main Character Contradiction - Essay Example

• Subject: Literature
• Type: Essay
• Level: High School
• Pages: 3 (750 words)
• Downloads: 2
• Author: collierletitia

Extract of sample "Shakespeare's Hamlet Main Character Contradiction"

A good starting point in arguing that Hamlet is not a hero is a closer look at the significant factors which make a hero. The most generally accepted definition of a hero is "a person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrifice his or her own life (Hero 1)." It should also be added that a hero "possesses abilities to perform extraordinary, beneficial deeds for which he or she is famous (Hero 1)." A hero is often contrasted to a villain is an evil character in a story.

Apparently, Hamlet is a villain. However, just because he is the main character in the story, he is mistakenly regarded as a tragic hero who, amidst his flaws and shortcomings is still dignified. Looking at the play, Hamlet killed Polonius with no remorse which drives his "beloved" Ophelia. He was also so overwhelmed with his vengeance and become directly and indirectly responsible to the death of almost all the characters. It should be noted that his demise could also be linked with his doings.

The acts of Hamlet can consider villainous as the reasons behind these are not beneficial to others but are solely self-serving. Hamlet's "honorable" deed of killing Claudius to avenge his father, together with his self-centered soliloquies are strong proofs of his evil character. It should be noted that Hamlet falls short of what a hero should be like. He is neither courageous nor noble. His quest to avenge his father by dethroning Claudius reveals his cowardice. Should Hamlet wanted true justice; he should have sought it in the proper manner.

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"Hamlets Character is contradictory". Discuss.

Brett Woodward

“Hamlets Character is contradictory”.  Discuss

Shakespeare gives Hamlet a very indecisive character in this play. This in turn leads to Hamlet becoming contradictive, more and more so throughout the play. His main problem is that he is more of a ‘thinker’ than a ‘doer’. This causes him many problems throughout the whole play.

The first example we get of this comes in Hamlets first soliloquy. Here we find out what Hamlet truly feels about the situation he finds himself in after his fathers death. After initially seeming to be willing to go along with Claudius’s and his mother’s marriage here we find out how he truly feels. He expresses his disgust at the hastiness from which his Mother has married to Claudius so soon after his fathers death. He also expresses how devastated he is at the death of his father and Claudius taking the crown, which Hamlet believes should rightfully be his.    

Hamlet once again shows this when he goes with his Fathers ghost. He comes back from this encounter determined to take revenge on Claudius but then passes up many chances to do so in order to make sure that the ghost is telling the truth. Hamlet continues this throughout the play and ironically this leads to him doing exactly the opposite of what the ghost wants by hurting his Mother and not taking revenge on Claudius when he has many chances to.

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Another appearance of Hamlets contradiction appears in his first soliloquy when he is very damning towards women:

        “Frailty, thy name is woman!”

This contradicts with his apparent infatuation with his mother, and especially with her sexual behaviour.

Hamlets contradictory character is also reflected in the many mood swings he has during the play. He constantly changes his mood one minute appearing relatively happy, the next he is at his sadistic worse cruelly teasing others with his wordplay. The worst of this comes when he is talking to Ophelia in Act 3 Scene 1, where nearly everything he says to her has a sexual double meaning. Here Hamlet has realised that he is being spied on and intend to have some fun at Ophelia’s expense as he feels that she has been used as a spy whereas in reality she knows nothing of the situation.

Hamlets character however can not just be described as contradictory, it id far too complex for that.

Hamlet could also be described as erudite, ingenious and quick-minded for the way he took advantage of the players arriving and setting up the play “Murder of Gonzago” in order to test the Kings guilty conscience and find out if he really did kills Old Hamlet.

Hamlet is also regarded as pessimistic, over – dramatic, angry, desperate and frustrated for his outlook on life and human nature and the way he feels about being denied the chance to become king after his father’s death.

Many people also feel that Hamlet is obsessive; this is shown with his fixation with his mother’s sexuality and is once again brought into light by Ophelia revealing all of the love letters that Hamlet has sent to her in the past.  

All in all I believe that whilst contradiction is one of Hamlets main characteristics, his character is too broad for it to be described as any one thing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

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Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis

Why is Hamlet a complex character? What type of character he is – good or bad? Find here the answers! In this critical analysis essay, we discuss Hamlet as a complex character and show how he transforms throughout the play.

Introduction

• Critical Analysis

In William Shakespeare’s literary works, Hamlet, Hamlet is the most fascinating character. Shakespeare concentrates on Hamlet’s emotions, dilemma as well as inconsistency to achieve his heart desires especially revenge. Hamlet’s questionable sanity and captivating character contributes to the success of the play. The inability to decide and sentient his actions signifies the complexity in his character.

Critical Analysis of Hamlet’s Character

When the reader first come across Hamlet, he is sad and mourning his father’s death, King Hamlet. On closer analysis of Hamlet’s appearance, his emotional state signifies something strong or mysterious connected to his mourning.

Furthermore he tells his mother, “for they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passeth show – These but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Shakespeare Act I, Scene 2). Hamlet is unable to speak out his mind; therefore, he expresses his feelings in form of parables. Hamlet’s is unhappy because his father’s death is fading away fast.

His mother remarries Hamlet’s uncle, King Claudius, immediately after his father’s death. Therefore, instead of exclusively mourning his departed father, he mourns his mother and uncle’s betrayal to his father. Hamlet’s emotional turmoil turns to hatred and questionable madness especially towards women including Ophelia who he had once confessed his love for her.

When Hamlet’s father requests him to avenge his death against King Claudius, he is unable to carry out his revenge. Although he is vengeful, his emotions, anxiety, and morality drag him behind his mission. He is unable to fulfill his actions even if the opportunity avails itself.

For instance, when he encounters Claudius meditating, he spares his life because he thinks the gods will forgive him. Unfortunately, his ability not to act makes him rational where he carelessly kills Polonius thinking it was a rat after, which he hides the body.

After the second appearance of his father, he secretly starts to plan on how to kill Claudius but his actions are impounded. When King Claudius, discovers Hamlet’s plan to kill him, he (Claudius) plans to kill him (Hamlet) first; unfortunately, Hamlet escapes the trap eventually killing him.

Due to the inability, to avenge his father’s death, his mission leads to the murder of Polonius, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, Ophelia, Guildenstern, and Rosencrantz. However, the author’s mission in delaying Hamlet’s revenge is to emphasize on the complexity in his emotional state and psychological well-being.

Hamlet’s return from hiding raises eyebrows especially on King Claudius who becomes uncomfortable with his presence. The confidence and moral attitude with which he presents himself is a sign of his secret plan to kill King Claudius.

Shakespeare’s ability to change Hamlet’s character from a rational, anxious, and emotional person to a cool, confident, and moral person presents him as a round character. Hamlet is unable to kill his uncle until he proves that he is guilty. Through a play, he is able to ascertain that Claudius killed his father but he is unable to revenge. The turning point of his actions comes when he returns from exile and eventually executes his mission.

In summary, Hamlets’ ability to change from an emotional, hateful, rational, vengeful and insane to cool, friendly, confident, and moral person enables him to execute his mission of killing King Claudius. Shakespeare’s description of Hamlet’s character categorizes him as a round character. In addition, Shakespeare mission to delay Hamlet’s plan to avenge his father’s death highlights the complex nature of his (Hamlet’s) emotions and psychology.

Shakespeare, Williams. Hamlet, 2003. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 28). Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-makes-hamlet-such-a-complex-character/

"Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis." IvyPanda , 28 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/what-makes-hamlet-such-a-complex-character/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis'. 28 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-makes-hamlet-such-a-complex-character/.

1. IvyPanda . "Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-makes-hamlet-such-a-complex-character/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-makes-hamlet-such-a-complex-character/.

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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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More to Explore

Contradictions in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Hamlet’s first thoughts after learning of his father’s murder are of an immediate, violent revenge upon Claudius. However, his subsequent actions do not live up to these resolutions. Over four acts he takes little deliberate action against his uncle, although the ghost explicitly demands a swift revenge. In S. T. Coleridge’s words, Hamlet’s central weakness is that he is “continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve”.   Hamlet’s first soliloquy, following a hostile conversation with Claudius and Gertrude, shows him grief-stricken, bitter and despairing. The source of Hamlet’s melancholy is “his father’s death” and the “o’er-hasty marriage” of his mother and uncle. He feels he has to do something, but he does not know precisely what. He expresses his disgust at his mother’s inconstancy and incestuous remarriage, but is bound to suffer in silence: he must “hold [his] tongue” for reasons of diplomacy. The world seems empty, and he uses imagery of corruption, darkness, disease and imprisonment to reveal his state of mind. At the beginning of the play, all Hamlet sees is a terrible situation which he has no power to change.   The ghost’s command therefore gives Hamlet purpose; a reason to live. Its instruction is unmistakable: “if thou didst ever thy dear father love…revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.” The apparition, armed “from head to foot”, then relates the story of Claudius’ treachery in graphic and horrible detail. It is now apparent to Hamlet what is “rotten in the state of Denmark”. Shakespeare makes it very clear what Hamlet’s duty is and who his enemy is. Hamlet is charged to avenge his father’s murder and free Denmark from the shadow of the king’s fratricide, regicide and incest.   Shakespeare establishes Claudius as Hamlet’s opposite and enemy in the first Act. Claudius is introduced before Hamlet, but the audience is already aware that the ghost of the old king has appeared with a message for his son. Claudius is a skillful diplomat: ingratiating, self-confident, and a good orator, he has persuaded the Danish court to accept him as king. The incestuous nature of the marriage is hinted at by Claudius himself, who calls Gertrude his “sometime sister, now [his] queen.” He presents himself as someone of wisdom and good judgment: a fitting replacement for his “dear brother.” The speech shows him to be Hamlet’s cunning and worthy adversary.   Following the meeting with the ghost, Hamlet is both physically and mentally exhausted. In a second soliloquy, his thoughts are disorganized, and he is shocked and angry. However, the mood of this soliloquy differs dramatically from the first. No longer listless and melancholy, the ghost’s wish for a great act of revenge gives Hamlet fresh hope and energy. He vows to disregard “all pressures past”, and do away with the “smiling damned villain.” Although deeply agitated, he has resolved to act. Indeed, his violent and passionate oaths seem to indicate he will, “with wings as swift as meditation”, execute a swift revenge.   Why, then, does Hamlet delay until the final Act? The first thing he does is to feign madness, which would not appear to advance his cause in any

conceivable way. It does not correspond with his previous forceful resolutions. The “antic disposition” is demonstrated in his visit to Ophelia, where he appears to her in her closet, pale and unkempt, looking “as if he had been loosed out of hell / to speak of horrors.” If Hamlet’s intention is for the king to know of his ‘madness’, this is a sure way to achieve it. Polonius directly informs Claudius that he has found “the very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy”; Hamlet, therefore, almost certainly intends to deceive Claudius and put him off his guard.   Underlying this point, however, there is the question of whether Hamlet is genuinely mad or not. His behavior to Ophelia seems like play-acting (of which, it is later revealed, he has much knowledge). Yet in Act 5 Scene 2, in an apology to Laertes, he says that he was truly mad. His behavior at Ophelia’s funeral was not under his own control; it was “Hamlet from himself….ta’en away”. It is unclear here whether Shakespeare means Hamlet was insane, or if he was carried away in genuine, uncontrollable passion. If he is not mad, his unconventional behavior may at least act as an outlet for his repressed emotion, allowing him to act without restraint. To play the role of a lunatic allows Hamlet to withdraw from society. His sarcastic, bitter, morbid remarks, and his strange conduct are attributed to madness; he therefore expresses his true opinions far more freely than he could otherwise.   Nevertheless, the “antic disposition” is a form of delay. By Act 2 a number of weeks have passed, yet Hamlet has taken no direct action against his murdering, usurping uncle. It is in fact Claudius who has acted, by summoning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the court to deal with the “too much changed” Hamlet. Hamlet confesses to them that he is again melancholy and despairing. It is only upon hearing that a company of players is coming to Elsinore that he becomes animated and interested. After hearing a passionate speech by one of the actors, Hamlet bursts into the first of two self-critical, introspective soliloquies, in which he curses his own inaction. This criticism seems appropriate: he has shown little evidence of the immediate revenge he promised his father’s ghost. Instead, the audience has seen him wasting his time playing word games with Polonius. Rather than taking his own advice, as it were, he then proceeds to create an even more complex plan to entrap his uncle: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”   Although the “Murder of Gonzago” play is another delay, its use as a device to prove Claudius’ guilt seems justified. Hamlet has begun to doubt the ghost’s honesty. It has had an ambiguous role from the first: it is the image of the “goodly king” whom Hamlet idealizes, yet “[starts] like a guilty thing” as dawn breaks. Hamlet initially tells Horatio “it is an honest ghost”, but contradicts this verdict at the end of Act 2. He is no longer sure of the ghost’s good faith: “The spirit that I have seen /

May be a devil, and the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape.”   The ghost does present Hamlet with a mass of contradictions. It says the murder of a relative is “strange and unnatural,” yet asks Hamlet to kill his own uncle. It tells Hamlet that Gertrude is not to suffer: she is to be judged by her own conscience and by God. But the ghost itself has judged and condemned Claudius. Hamlet has good reason not to follow the instructions he has been given unthinkingly; they are morally questionable. Even with these uncertainties present, Hamlet nevertheless feels an obligation to avenge his father’s murder; and the play-within-a-play is a test of both the ghost’s honesty and Claudius’ guilt.   Possibly Hamlet hopes that the play will work upon Claudius and induce him to confess. Claudius is twice confronted with a representation of the murder of Old Hamlet, once in the dumb show and once in the ‘Murder of Gonzago’ play. He now sees that Hamlet knows of his treachery: his troubled reaction “upon the talk of the poisoning” is all the evidence Hamlet feels he requires to confirm the ghost’s story. Triumphant and excited, Hamlet has proven, at least to himself, Claudius is guilty and the ghost has told the truth. Hamlet does not yet wreak his revenge, however; he is content to have proved Claudius’ guilt, and no more. To do nothing at this point is a mistake, of course; Claudius is not as impressionable or as reluctant to act as his nephew. Perceiving the threat of Hamlet’s revenge, he acts with “quick determination”, and makes arrangements to send him to England.   Left alone in the chapel, Claudius shows he is not without conscience. He tries to pray, to repent for his “rank” offence, but cannot. Hamlet comes across him, kneeling and vulnerable, and draws his sword, ready to strike. But even when given this seemingly ideal opportunity to kill his adversary, Hamlet still does not execute his revenge. He stops, arguing that to kill Claudius while praying will unjustly send him to heaven; instead, he will wait until he is about some act “that has no relish of salvation in’t.” His wish is ultimately fulfilled: Claudius is killed in the act of committing another murder. It is debatable here whether Hamlet’s decision is merely another act of procrastination. The scene may show a darker side of Hamlet’s character. Rather than doing the deed cleanly, and achieving revenge, he expresses a desire to see Claudius condemned to the same “sulph’rous and tormenting flames” that torture the ghost of his father. In this case it is Hamlet’s wish for a ‘perfect’ revenge that leads to his inaction.   The ghost’s parting words to Hamlet on the battlements of Elsinore were: “Remember me”; Hamlet seems to have all but forgotten this injunction. The ghost reappears in the ‘closet’ scene to remind him of his vow, and of his duty. Its first words to Hamlet are: “Do not forget.” As Hamlet suspects, it has come to whet the “almost blunted purpose” of its “tardy son”. The ghost explicitly demands a swift revenge,

yet Hamlet has taken no direct action against Claudius. In each case, when he might have taken his revenge, thought has overwhelmed instinct (this is most evident in the scene in the chapel). He seems to lack the fiery impulsiveness and self-confidence clearly present in the other two avengers, Fortinbras and Laertes. While Hamlet repeatedly says he will revenge, his delaying continues, suggesting that it is more conscience than cowardice that causes him to procrastinate? At the play’s conclusion, he only acts when Laertes tells him that there is “not a half hour of life” left in him. In two soliloquies, Hamlet examines and questions his own behavior, but cannot decide why there is such a discrepancy between his intentions and his actions.   The first of these soliloquies is prompted by a passionate speech from one of the players, who is so involved with the part that he plays that he sheds tears. Hamlet finds it “monstrous” that the player can cry over the death of a fictional character, while he delays the revenge of the brutal murder of his own father. He curses his failure to react with such strong emotion, when he has “the motive and the cue for passion”. The hostility that was turned against Claudius is now directed at himself: he calls himself “pigeon-liver’d”, a “coward”, and condemns his own wordiness.   Similarly, the soliloquy at the end of Act 4 again shows Hamlet reproaching himself for lack of action. He is presented with the sight of Fortinbras’ army marching to defend a worthless piece of land. Like Laertes, Fortinbras behaves as a ‘revenge hero’ should. The determination of his army, who fight only for “fortune, death and danger”, contrasts strongly with Hamlet’s own behavior. Hamlet feels both disgust and envy for the army. They are at once foolish and noble. Again there is a torrent of self-accusation: Hamlet has a “father kill’d, a mother stain’d”, yet continues to delay his revenge. Both soliloquies end, however, on a more positive note, with Hamlet expressing a new resolve. In the second, he vows in a passionate outburst that he will be strong in thought and action: “O, from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody or nothing worth.”   The theme at the heart of the second soliloquy, and indeed the play itself, is the dual nature of man. Hamlet argues that it is the possession of “reason” that separates us from animals. If God has given man “capability and godlike reason”, surely to act in unthinking passion is to be “a beast, no more.” Old Hamlet and Claudius personify these “godlike” and “bestial” elements of human nature.   Yet in his division between Hyperion and satyr, Hamlet is too simplistic. Shakespeare is careful to show that his characters are not one-dimensional. They have mixed motives, as any human being has. The ghost of the “goodly king” is hungry for Claudius’ blood; Claudius, the villain of the piece, feels remorse and the desire to repent for his actions. Similarly, Gertrude, far from being wholeheartedly on Claudius’ side, is Hamlet’s ally against him at the play’s conclusion. In the ‘closet’

scene, where her allegiances change, Gertrude says her son has cleft her heart in two. Hamlet begs her to “throw away the worse part of it / And live the purer with the other half”: this illustrates his unrealistic idealism. His wish for a perfect revenge cannot be fulfilled, any more than his desire for a perfect world can, and what does occur will never meet his expectations.   Hamlet argues that it is thought that separates man and beast, but sees his own procrastination merely as a sign of cowardice. In “Hamlet”, however, those who act on instinct are punished for it, and this is the pivot on which the play turns. Hamlet is full of scorn for his mother, as she has let her instinct, her sexuality, corrupt her judgment so entirely. Gertrude is compared to a “beast that wants discourse of reason”, and her behavior has indeed led to the “royal bed of Denmark [becoming a] couch for luxury and damned incest.” Hamlet’s own act of rash passion in killing Polonius is a serious mistake, as it leads to his exile. He has to deal with the consequences, i.e. Ophelia’s madness and Laertes’ vengeance. Laertes is another striking example of the folly of acting without thought: in his rage, he is easily manipulated by Claudius. Shakespeare has therefore demonstrated three times that reckless action leads to ruin.   In addition, while Hamlet frequently says that he will follow the example of Fortinbras and Laertes, he elsewhere expresses admiration for a much calmer, restrained approach to the world. His advice to the players is to give a natural performance, and avoid melodrama. Similarly, Laertes’ theatrical performance at Ophelia’s graveside disgusts him. Hamlet’s admiration for Horatio, who is presented as dependable, well educated, and utterly trustworthy, is because Horatio is not “passion’s slave.” He has a balance of “blood and judgment”, which are so “well commended / [Horatio] is not a pipe for Fortune’s finger.” It seems that where Laertes has an excess of “blood”, Hamlet has an excess of “judgment”, and cannot complete the task he has been given.   Hamlet is full of contradictions. He attacks his own tendency to delay, while arguing that it is “reason” that makes man almost divine. Hamlet has intelligence and discretion; he has the ability to make moral decisions (and does so), yet says he admires the behavior of Fortinbras and Laertes, who clearly represent the more “bestial” side of human nature. Whether what Hamlet says and what he thinks are the same, however, is uncertain; these inconsistencies suggest he does not truly want to play the hot-headed ‘revenge hero’.   His nature is more philosophical; this is the true reason for the delay. He questions his own thoughts and behavior, and is aware of the moral implications of his actions. The essence of Hamlet’s dilemma is this: he knows he has a duty to kill Claudius, but rewarding a murder with a murder is against his character. It may be true that “conscience does make cowards of us all”; but Hamlet’s “cowardice” demonstrates his heightened sense of morality. Hamlet does not have the simplicity,

the ferocity, of a born killer: his delay stems from conscience, not cowardice. Hamlet is given a soldier’s funeral at the end of Act 5; he dies a revenger, noble and dignified.  

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Hamlet and the Limits of Narrative

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Rebecca Yearling, Hamlet and the Limits of Narrative, Essays in Criticism , Volume 65, Issue 4, October 2015, Pages 368–382, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgv022

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HORATIO'S PENULTIMATE SPEECH, in the last few moments of Hamlet , is famously odd. The prince, dying, has just told his friend,

At this point in the play no one in the court, bar Hamlet and Horatio, knows that Claudius killed Old Hamlet: from an outsider's perspective, it must look as if the prince (believed to be subject to fits of madness and violence) has slaughtered his uncle, the rightful king, for no reason at all. Indeed, when Hamlet attacks Claudius immediately after the duel, using Laertes' poisoned rapier, the response of the courtiers is to cry, ‘Treason, treason!’ (V. ii. 275). Hamlet's concern is for his posthumous reputation; the record must be put straight about what he has done and why. Horatio agrees, and shortly afterwards gives the newly arrived Fortinbras an outline of the story he will tell:

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CHAPTER THREE. HAMLET AS A CHARACTER OF CONTRADICTIONS

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In Shakespeare’s Hamlet there can be no doubt that the play’s titular character is, through both choice and personal circumstance, forced to play a variety of roles. Through soliloquies, asides and his overall characterisation, we are able to glimpse the resulting turmoil he deals with. A close study of his character reveals many contradictions and inconsistencies in his character. However, this is not a fault of Shakespeare’s characterisation. It is a deliberate device of the playwright to highlight themes, create tension and provoke us to think more deeply about the concerns in the play.  

Hamlet is a son in mourning, describing how his outward acts of grief may be ‘actions that a man might play’ but what he feels inside cannot be expressed in word or in deed. In this way, we are shown that Hamlet is a nuanced character who feels deeply. He persists in grieving for his father when the rest of the court has moved on and it is clear that he held his father in the highest regard. When the ghost reveals to Hamlet that the ‘serpent that did sting [his] father’s life now wears his crown,’ Hamlet is filled with motivation to assume his role as revenger, declaring that ‘with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love’ he will ‘sweep to [his] revenge’. However, as this scene draws to a close, Hamlet completely contradicts himself, ‘O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right’. This inconsistency in Hamlet’s character is puzzling but it makes him a more interesting character. It also prompts the audience to question the role of the avenger. At the time, revenge plays were a very popular genre but hitherto, the protagonist simply took on the role of avenger without questioning it. In Hamlet the hero questions the role and its morality, thus giving a more detailed exploration into the nature of revenge. 

Initially Hamlet says that his revenge will be ‘swift’ and that he will focus on that alone. He declares:

‘I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past…

…And thy commandment all alone shall live.’

However, he very soon procrastinates. He worries that the spirit that he has seen may be the ‘devil’ and he devises the ‘mousetrap’ to have the ocular proof he needs. This is a brilliant ploy by the playwright to set up the ‘play within a play’. It is a compelling scene where you witness the battle of wits of ‘two mighty opposites.’ 

This procrastination itself becomes the source of much unhappiness for Hamlet. In a different soliloquy, we see him lament that he:

‘...son of a dear father murdered,

Prompted to [his] revenge by Heaven and Hell,

Must, like a whore, unpack [his] heart with words’. 

This deeply self-critical soliloquy is significant as it emphasises the complexity of Hamlet’s revolt against his role as revenger.

Hamlet’s procrastination can be frustrating but it also provides the audience with much suspense. One of the dramatic climaxes of the play occurs while Claudius is praying alone after the mousetrap scene. 

Hamlet has the perfect opportunity to kill his enemy but stops abruptly to ‘scan’ his act. He puts off the murder, declaring that it ‘is hire and salary, not revenge.’ So why did Hamlet procrastinate when he seems to have the means and motive? This apparent contradiction may serve to illuminate why Hamlet puts off his revenge. Perhaps, Shakespeare wants us to realise that Hamlet’s delays lie in the moral ambiguity of the ghost’s quest of revenge. Hamlet is presented with a task that is a duty. His father appears to him to ‘whet his almost blunted duty’ but Hamlet does not want to commit a crime.

Another great inconsistency in Hamlet’s character is his ‘antic disposition’. This ‘transformation’ is part of Hamlet’s search for truth and justice; however, it also seems to be in direct contrast to the man he was before his father’s death, who Ophelia describes as having been ‘th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state’. A great deal of emphasis is placed on the fact that ‘nor th’ exterior nor the inward man/ Resembles that it was.’ Hamlet’s ‘wild and whirling words’ and actions make compelling viewing. However, these actions can be incredibly cruel at times, particularly in his treatment of Ophelia. At her funeral he professes his intense love for Ophelia but he was ruthless and callous in his treatment of her. Shakespeare exploits this inconsistency to underline the erratic nature of deep grief. It also creates sharp tension throughout the text. 

Our interest in his character is also intensified as the questions around his sanity continue. Even the characters around Hamlet question his sanity. Polonius admits that there is ‘method’ in his madness. Claudius confesses that Hamlet’s ‘actions although strange, do not appear to stem from madness.’ However, his mother believes that he is mad and actually fears for her safety as he rails against her. He also kills Polonius in a fit of passion. Whether his madness is feigned or not, it provides the audience with a lot of comic relief. Laughter is welcome in an otherwise dark and intense play. 

To conclude, Shakespeare makes effective use of the contradictions and inconsistencies evident in Hamlet’s character for a variety of purposes. However, there is a common result of making the play even more absorbing and memorable. 

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Reading Shakespeare’s Language: Hamlet

By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions

For many people today, reading Shakespeare’s language can be a problem—but it is a problem that can be solved. Those who have studied Latin (or even French or German or Spanish) and those who are used to reading poetry will have little difficulty understanding the language of poetic drama. Others, however, need to develop the skills of untangling unusual sentence structures and of recognizing and understanding poetic compressions, omissions, and wordplay. And even those skilled in reading unusual sentence structures may have occasional trouble with Shakespeare’s words. More than four hundred years of “static”—caused by changes in language and in life—intervene between his speaking and our hearing. Most of his vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are no longer used, and many of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the theater, most of these difficulties are solved for us by actors who study the language and articulate it for us so that the essential meaning is heard—or, when combined with stage action, is at least felt. When we are reading on our own, we must do what each actor does: go over the lines (often with a dictionary close at hand) until the puzzles are solved and the lines yield up their poetry and the characters speak in words and phrases that are, suddenly, rewarding and wonderfully memorable.

Shakespeare’s Words

As you begin to read the opening scenes of a Shakespeare play, you may notice occasional unfamiliar words. Some are unfamiliar simply because we no longer use them. In the opening scenes of Hamlet, for example, we find such words as parle (i.e., discussion, meeting), soft (an exclamation meaning “hold” or “enough” or “wait a minute”), and marry (an oath “by the Virgin Mary,” which had by Shakespeare’s time become a mere interjection, like “indeed”). Words of this kind will become familiar as you continue to read Shakespeare’s language.

In Hamlet, as in all of Shakespeare’s writing, the most problematic are the words that are still in use but now have different meanings. In the first scene of Hamlet ( 1.1.14 ), the word rivals is used where we would use “companions.” At 1.1.44 we find the word his where we would use “its” and at 1.1.134 the word still used (as it most often is in Shakespeare) to mean “always.” At 1.1.67 , sensible means “attested to by the senses”; at 1.1.169 , extravagant means “wandering”; and at 1.2.66 , cousin is used (as it is generally in Shakespeare) to mean simply “kinsman.” And at 1.2.278 , where Hamlet says, “I doubt some foul play,” we would say, “I suspect some treacherous action.” Such words, too, will become increasingly familiar as you get further into the play.

Some words are strange not because of the “static” introduced by changes in language over the past centuries but because they are used by Shakespeare to build a dramatic world that has its own geography and history and story. Hamlet, for example, builds, in its opening scenes, a location, a past history, and a background mythology through references to “ the Dane ,” to “ buried Denmark ,” to Elsinore , to partisan s and jointress es, to Hyperion and Niobe and Hercules . These “local” words and references build the world of Denmark that Hamlet, Gertrude, and Claudius inhabit; they soon become recognizable features of Shakespeare’s Elsinore.

Shakespeare’s Sentences

In an English sentence, meaning is quite dependent on the place given each word. “The dog bit the boy” and “The boy bit the dog” mean very different things, even though the individual words are the same. Because English places such importance on the positions of words in sentences, on the way words are arranged, unusual arrangements can puzzle a reader. Shakespeare frequently shifts his sentences away from “normal” English arrangements—often to create the rhythm he seeks, sometimes to use a line’s poetic rhythm to emphasize a particular word, sometimes to give a character his or her own speech patterns or to allow the character to speak in a special way. When we attend a good performance of the play, the actors will have worked out the sentence structures and will articulate the sentences so that the meaning is clear. In reading the play, we need to do as the actor does: that is, when puzzled by a character’s speech, we check to see if the words are being presented in an unusual sequence.

Look first for the placement of subject and verb. Shakespeare often places the verb before the subject (e.g., instead of “He goes,” we find “Goes he”). In the opening scene of Hamlet , when, at line 73 , Horatio says “So frowned he once,” he is using such a construction, as he is at line 91 , when he says “That can I.” Such inversions rarely cause much confusion. More problematic is Shakespeare’s frequent placing of the object before the subject and verb (e.g., instead of “I hit him,” we might find “Him I hit”). When Horatio says, at 1.2.216 –17, “This to me . . . impart they did,” he is using such an inverted construction (the normal order would be “They did impart this to me”). Polonius uses another such inversion at 1.3.126 –29 when he says, “These blazes, daughter, / . . . You must not take for fire.” Ordinarily one would say “Daughter, you must not take these blazes for fire.”

In some plays Shakespeare makes systematic use of inversions ( Julius Caesar is one such play). In Hamlet , he more often uses sentence structures that depend instead on the separation of words that would normally appear together. (This is usually done to create a particular rhythm or to stress a particular word.) Claudius’s “which have freely gone / With this affair along” ( 1.2.15 –16) interrupts the phrase “gone along”; Horatio’s “When he the ambitious Norway combated” ( 1.1.72 ) separates the subject and verb (“he combated”), interjecting between them the object of the verb (“the ambitious Norway”). To create for yourself sentences that seem more like the English of everyday speech, you may wish to rearrange the words, putting together the word clusters and placing the remaining words in their more familiar order. You will usually find that the sentences will gain in clarity but will lose their rhythm or shift their emphases. You can then see for yourself why Shakespeare chose his unusual arrangement.

Locating and rearranging words that belong together is especially necessary in passages that separate subjects from verbs and verbs from objects by long delaying or expanding interruptions—a structure that is used frequently in Hamlet. For example, when Horatio, at 1.1.92 –110, tells the story of how King Hamlet won the Norwegian lands and how the prince of Norway seeks to regain them, he uses a series of such interrupted constructions:

                                our last king,

Whose image even but now appeared to us,

Was , as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,

Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,

Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet

(For so this side of our known world esteemed him)

Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a sealed compact, . . .

Did forfeit , with his life, all those his lands. . . .

                           Now, sir, young Fortinbras ,

Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full,

Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there

Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes. . . .

( 1.1.92 –110 )

Here the interruptions provide details that catch the audience up in Horatio’s story. The separation of the basic sentence elements (“our last king was dared to the combat”) forces the audience to attend to supporting details while waiting for the basic sentence elements to come together. In the second scene of Hamlet (at 1.2.8 –14), Claudius uses the same kind of interrupted construction in his opening speech,

Therefore our sometime sister , now our queen,

Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state,

Have we (as ’twere with a defeated joy,

With an auspicious and a dropping eye,

With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,

In equal scale weighing delight and dole)

Taken to wife . . . ,

( 1.2.8 –14 )

where the basic elements of the sentence are simply “we [i.e., I] have taken to wife our sometime sister [i.e., my former sister-in-law].” Claudius’s speech, like Horatio’s, is a narrative of past events, but the interrupted sentence structure here seems designed to add formality to the speech and, perhaps, to cover over the bald statement carried in the stripped-down sentence.

Occasionally, rather than separating basic sentence elements, Shakespeare simply holds them back, delaying them until much subordinate material has already been given. Marcellus uses this kind of delaying structure when he says, at 1.1.76 –77, “Thus twice before, and jump [i.e., exactly] at this dead hour, / With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch” (where a “normally” constructed English sentence would have begun with the basic sentence elements: “He hath gone by our watch”); Barnardo’s sentence that precedes the entrance of the Ghost at line 46 uses this same delayed construction, though the Ghost’s entrance breaks off Barnardo’s words before the subject of the sentence (“Marcellus and myself”) finds a verb. Hamlet, in his first soliloquy ( 1.2.133 –64), uses a delayed construction when he says (lines 158 –61) “Within a month, / Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears / Had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes, / She married.”

Shakespeare’s sentences are sometimes complicated not because of unusual structures or interruptions or delays but because he omits words and parts of words that English sentences normally require. (In conversation, we, too, often omit words. We say “Heard from him yet?” and our hearer supplies the missing “Have you.” Frequent reading of Shakespeare—and of other poets—trains us to supply such missing words.) In plays written five or ten years after Hamlet , Shakespeare uses omissions both of verbs and of nouns to great dramatic effect. In Hamlet omissions are less interesting and seem to be used primarily for compressed expression. At 1.1.31 –32, for instance, Marcellus says “Therefore I have entreated him along / With us,” omitting the words “to come” or “to go” before “along”; a few lines later, Barnardo omits the word “with” in the construction “let us once again assail your ears [with] . . . what we have . . . seen” ( lines 37 –39).

Shakespearean Wordplay

Shakespeare plays with language so often and so variously that books are written on the topic. Here we will mention only two kinds of wordplay, puns and metaphors. A pun is a play on words that sound the same but have different meanings (or a single word that has more than one meaning). When, in the second scene of Hamlet , Claudius calls Hamlet his “ son ” and asks him why his mood is so cloudy, Hamlet replies that he is, rather, “too much in the sun” (punning on son/sun). In the exchange between Gertrude and Hamlet,

Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,

Passing through nature to eternity.

Ay, madam, it is common.

QUEEN                                      If it be,

Why seems it so particular with thee?

“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems[,]”

( 1.2.74 –79)

Hamlet’s reply is a pun on “seems”; for Gertrude, the question was “Why are you acting as if this death were something particularly awful,” but Hamlet responds as if she had asked “Why are you putting on this show of grief.” In Polonius’s conversation with Ophelia in the third scene of the play, much of his dialogue is based on puns: the word tenders , for example, introduced by Ophelia to mean “offers,” is picked up by Polonius and used, first, to mean “coins” (“legal tender”), then shifted to its verb form “to tender” and used to mean “to regard,” and then, in the phrase “tender me a fool,” to mean, simultaneously, “present me,” “make me look like,” and “show yourself to me.” In many of Shakespeare’s plays, one may not be aware that a character is punning, and the dialogue can seem simply silly or unintelligible; one must thus stay alert to the sounds of words and to the possibility of double meanings. In Hamlet , puns carry a heavier burden (Hamlet packs much of his feeling about Claudius into his single-line “aside,” “ A little more than kin and less than kind ,” where “kind” has the double meaning of “kindred” and “kindhearted”; and many of Polonius’s speeches are unintelligible until one untangles the puns and related plays on words).

A metaphor is a play on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were something else, something with which, the metaphor suggests, it shares common features. For instance, when Horatio refers to the appearance of the Ghost as “ a mote . . . to trouble the mind’s eye ,” he is using metaphoric language: the mind is irritated by a question as the eye is irritated by a speck of dust. Hamlet’s description of the world as “ an unweeded garden that grows to seed ” uses metaphor to paint for us his bleak vision; behind his description of Gertrude and Claudius’s hasty marriage (“ O, most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets ”) is the metaphor of post-horses running skillfully and swiftly. Metaphors are often used when the idea being conveyed is hard to express or, for Hamlet, simply beyond normal expression; through metaphor, the speaker is thus given language that helps to carry the idea or the feeling to his or her onstage listener—and to the audience.

Implied Stage Action

Finally, in reading Shakespeare’s plays we should always remember that what we are reading is a performance script. The dialogue is written to be spoken by actors who, at the same time, are moving, gesturing, picking up objects, weeping, shaking their fists. Some stage action is described in what are called “stage directions”; some is signaled within the dialogue itself. We must learn to be alert to such signals as we stage the play in our imaginations. When, in the first scene of Hamlet , Barnardo says “ Last night of all, / When yond same star that’s westward from the pole / Had made his course t’ illume that part of heaven / Where now it burns ,” it is clear that, on the word “yond,” he points toward the imagined star. When Barnardo says of the Ghost “ See, it stalks away ,” the stage action is obvious. It is less obvious, later in the scene, exactly what is to take place when Horatio says “I’ll cross it though it blast me” ( line 139 ). The director and the actor (and the reader, in imagination) must decide whether Horatio makes a cross of his body by spreading his arms, or whether he simply stands in the Ghost’s path; as the Ghost once again exits, the lines “ Shall I strike it with my partisan? ” “ Do, if it will not stand ,” clearly involve some violent action. Marcellus describes their gestures as a “ show of violence ” and mentions their “ vain blows ,” but the question of who strikes at the Ghost and with how much vigor will be answered variously from production to production. Learning to read the language of stage action repays one many times over when one reaches a crucial scene like that of the play within the play ( 3.2 ) or that of the final duel ( 5.2 ), in both of which scenes implied stage action vitally affects our response to the play.

It is immensely rewarding to work carefully with Shakespeare’s language—the words, the sentences, the wordplay, and the implied stage actions—as readers for the past four centuries have discovered. It may be more pleasurable to attend a good performance of a play—though not everyone has thought so. But the joy of being able to stage a Shakespeare play in our imaginations, to return to passages that continue to yield further meanings (or further questions) the more we read them—these are pleasures that, for many, rival (or at least augment) those of the performed text, and certainly make it worth considerable effort to “break the code” of Elizabethan poetic drama and let free the remarkable language that makes up a Shakespeare text.

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Home / Drama / William Shakespeare / Hamlet / Characteristics of Hamlet

Characteristics of Hamlet

William Shakespeare wrote his most famous tragedy “Hamlet” in the early 17th century with certain characteristics of its protagonist Hamlet that made him one of the best tragedies ever written in the history of English literature. The play illustrates the story of Prince Hamlet. He used to study in Denmark but is summoned back on the sudden death of his father. Hamlet returns and discovers that his paternal uncle Claudius has married Queen Gertrude and assumed the throne. Prince Hamlet desires revenge from his paternal uncle on the asking of his father’s ghost. 

Critics and students of literature have analysed and interpreted the character of Hamlet in many ways due to the complexity and depth of emotion. The character of Hamlet grabs the attention of the audience due to notable characteristics which include:

• Intelligent and Thoughtful: The playwright demonstrates Hamlet as a highly intelligent person. He keeps his motives in front of him simultaneously facing the challenges of human existence and justice. He often questions the objects of nature around him. 
• Emotional and Melancholic: Hamlet becomes emotional soon after his father’s death. However, he is not a pessimist. He struggles emotionally throughout the whole play.
• Indecisiveness and Inner Conflicts: He does not act suddenly or take any decision in haste. He wants to avenge his father’s death but he fears the consequences. He thinks many a time in the play about whether to take revenge for his father’s murder. There is always a conflict in his mind in this regard. It is hard for him to reach a conclusion.
• Complexity: Hamlet has many layers. It is not wrong to say that he is multifaceted. He is lovely, loyal, and kind but at the same time, he is angry, deceitful and cruel.
• Creative Poet: Hamlet is an artist. The writer portrays him as a poet. People around him also know him as a poet. His ability to express himself makes him different from the masses. He uses metaphors and imagery when he talks or writes letters. 

Intelligent and Thoughtful

Hamlet is not only an intelligent character but also thoughtful. In fact, he is highly intelligent and educated. He thinks too much before finalising a decision. Hamlet often uses his intelligence in order to make an analysis of the world around him. There are many incidents in the play that prove Hamlet as an explorer of the philosophy of life. He tries his best to know more about human nature and its existence in this world. 

He not only debates the philosophy of life with other characters in the play but also questions himself and tries to find answers. His nature is full of suspense and questions. The writer of the play mainly focuses on the complex nature of Hamlet. In this way, Hamlet remains a central focus of the play.

A lot of incidents are there in the play that proves intelligence is one of the major characteristics of Hamlet. Some of them are: 

• Hamlet questions why he is there in this world in Act 1, Scene 2 of the play. He wants to know the purpose of human existence. He asks himself:

“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! / Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!”  Hamlet – Act 1, Scene 2

• Some philosophical debates about Hamlet from the play are worth mentioning. Most of the time he talks to himself; therefore, he thinks about life hereafter in Act 3, Scene 1 he says:

“To die, to sleep; / To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause.” Hamlet – Act 3, Scene 1

• It is the intelligence of Hamlet that tricks Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He pretends to be mad in Act 2, Scene 2. He confuses and misleads them through ticky wordings.

All these incidents prove that Hamlet does not only think about himself but questions the existence of the whole humanity. His ability to engage in deep philosophical debates and his use of poetic language to express his thoughts and emotions make him an intellectual and thoughtful character.

Emotional and Melancholic

Hamlet becomes emotional soon after the death of his father. Indeed, he was a poet before his father’s death but subsequently, he becomes melancholic too. Another reason that increases his pain is his mother’s marriage to his paternal uncle. Every time he speaks, he seems hopeless. His dialogues are full of melancholy and despair. 

Mostly, he thinks about the afterlife. He is curious to know what would happen when he would die. He wants to know what happens after the death. In fact, it is Hamlet’s melancholic personality that creates a tragic tone in the play. 

Many examples are there in the play that points out the melancholic personality of Hamlet which are:

• Hamlet knows about his father’s death in Act 1, Scene 2 of the play. He expresses his grief. In addition to the grief over his father’s death, he is shocked because of his mother’s hasty remarriage decision to his uncle. In a soliloquy, he expresses his emotions in the following words: 

“O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”  Hamlet – Act 1, Scene 2

• Another incident in the play that helps us know the melancholic characteristics of Hamlet is when he expresses his disillusionment with the world. In Act 2, Scene 2, he says:

“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world.” Hamlet – Act 2, Scene 2

• Hamlet laments the futility of human existence in Act 3, Scene 1. He says:

“To be or not to be” Hamlet – Act 3, Scene 1

• Hamlet goes to the graveyard and talks about the inevitability of death in Act 5, Scene 1.

Indecisiveness and Inner Conflicts

Hamlet cannot decide what to do and what not to do. For example, he wants to take revenge on his paternal uncle but he is not sure whether he wants to do so or not. He is burdened with so many conflicts. His overthinking stops him from doing anything. He also fears the consequences. Further, he justifies killing his uncle. He thinks that whether it is right to kill his uncle or not and whether he should do it. Moreover, he doubts his actions. He thinks about the positive and negative aspects of his actions.

Hamlet also doubts his decision to take someone else’s life. He does not want to do so for the sake of justice if it is not right. Hamlet’s internal conflicts are evident throughout the play. These moral conflicts portray the central themes of the play. These conflicts also contribute to Hamlet’s tragic end.

Indecisiveness is one of the significant characteristics of Hamlet. It is also the central conflict of this play. His inability to act decisively ultimately leads to his downfall and tragic end. Some examples from the play where these characteristics of Hamlet are evident are:

• The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in Act 1, Scene 5 and tells him that his brother is behind his murder. Hamlet does not act immediately despite making a decision of avenging his father’s murder. He does nothing until the end of the play.
• Hamlet does not commit the murder of his paternal uncle while he was praying in spite of having an opportunity to take revenge for his father’s death in Act 3, Scene 1 of the play. However, he thinks that Claudius would go to heaven. He does not want to send him to heaven but to hell. He says:

“Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying; / And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven; / And so am I revenged.” Hamlet – Act 3, Scene 1

• Hamlet realises his indecisiveness in Act 4, Scene 4 of the play. He decides to act more decisively in the future because indecisiveness costs him too much. He says:

“How all occasions do inform against me, / And spur my dull revenge!”  Hamlet – Act 4, Scene 4

• Hamlet accuses his mother in Act 3, Scene 4 of the death of his father but again he doubts whether his action of condemning her for her actions was right or wrong. 

A Complex Character

There is no denying the fact that complexity and multifaceted are two major characteristics of Hamlet. He is a character with many layers. Here is a comparison between both positive and negative traits of Hamlet that make him complex:

Hamlet is a man of contradictions. His complex nature makes him a compelling character. In the whole play, the audience does not reach the conclusion of whether Hamlet is going to take the decision or not. He doubts himself and the audience also doubts his decision. He seems determined to avenge his father’s murder but his actions suggest that he would give up soon. It is one of the main reasons for Hamlet’s downfall. 

Some important references from the play in respect of complexity as one of the major characteristics of Hamlet are:

• One of the most quoted soliloquies in Act 3, Scene 1 of the play reveals Hamlet’s struggle with his own existence. He says: 

“To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.” Hamlet – Act 3, Scene 1

• Hamlet questions himself and does not know whether to reply positively or negatively. He cannot come to conclusion on different occasions in the play which increases the complexity of his characters. He seems confident at one moment but soon he loses his confidence. He makes a decision but at the very next moment, he gives up his implementation.
• Hamlet’s indecisiveness and moral conflicts are also examples of his complex character. He is torn between his desire for revenge and his fear of damnation. Moreover, he struggles to make a decision about what to do. This internal conflict is a major theme of the play and reflects the complexity of Hamlet’s character.

Creative Poet

In spite of all the aforementioned characteristics, Hamlet is an artist. The writer gives him words containing metaphorical language and poetic expressions. Thus, he conveys his thoughts and emotions artistically throughout the play. 

Hamlet expresses his emotions many a time in the play. Even when he expresses his inner conflicts, he uses poetic language. His speeches are often filled with metaphorical expressions and vivid imagery. All these ingredients reflect his creativity and poetic sensibility.

For ready reference, the following examples are there in order to prove Hamlet as a creative poet:

• Hamlet makes a comparison between his father and the Greek mythological figure Hyperion in Act 2, Scene 2. He uses Hyperion as a metaphor for his father. He says:

“So excellent a king; that was, to this, / Hyperion to a satyr.” Hamlet – Act 2, Scene 2

• One of the most remembered soliloquies that Hamlet delivers is: “To be or not to be” in Act 3, Scene 1. He further mentions: “To sleep, perchance to dream”, which means that death might bring relief from the pain of existence.
• Hamlet uses another metaphor to express his inner self in Act 4, Scene 4 of the play. It reveals the powerlessness of Hamlet. He says: 

“How all occasions do inform against me, / And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more”. Hamlet – Act 4, Scene 4

• Hamlet writes many letters to Ophelia. Every letter contains poetic language and versification. The use of similes and metaphors in every letter shows Hamlet’s intense love for Ophelia. He expresses his emotions in a creative and poetic style. For example, in a letter, he writes

In this way, the playwright depicts intelligence, thoughtfulness, melancholia, indecisiveness, complexity, creativity and poetry as major characteristics of Hamlet.