Hamlet As Hero Essay Research Paper We

Hamlet As Hero Essay, Research Paper

We often wonder why Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, in the play Hamlet, waited

so long after bring told by the ghost, about the evil deed, before carrying out

his plan. Everyone contains a tinge of Hamlet in his or her feelings, wants, and

worries. Hamlet is not like other tragic heroes of his period. He stands apart

from other Shakespeare’s heroes in his much discussed innocence. Is this

supposed tragic hero maybe an ideal hero, one without the tragic flaw, which has

been a part of the formula for the tragedy since the Golden Age of Greece. This

is a question that has been the field for many literary critics’ battles. The

main, and, most often, the only flaw that has been attributed to Hamlet was his

delay. This seems to constitute the central part in Hamlet. Critics seem to

cling to this detail, as if trying to save the status of Hamlet as a typical

Elizabethan tragedy of revenge. According to Aristotle, " the definition of

tragedy, there should exist a flaw in the character of the main hero, who is a

great personality that is engaged in a struggle that ends

catastrophically".(Aristotle, 459) If Hamlet had no flaw, what kind of

tragic hero is he. No doubt, Hamlet is a tragical drama, for it has many

characters that end up losing their lives. But the play would not lose it’s

tragic tone if Hamlet was an ideal hero instead of a tragic one. Which is

exactly the case. If just all critics realized this, maybe today we would not

have that much trouble trying to decipher Hamlet’s character, just like

Elizabethan audiences never raised any questions concerning Hamlet’s delay.

Alice Griffin, a drama critic, lecturer, states " it was only in the last

two centuries, that the audience and their perceptions have drastically changed,

which causes this confusion concerning the character that was created by

Shakespeare for the common people, some ignorant ones among them, perhaps".

(Griffin, 63) Hamlet is an ideal hero with a flaw, a flaw that sparks many

questions among critics everywhere, these questions can be answered in a simple

concentration of one scene. Hamlet is like a soldier that is thrown into a war

where he has to do some things he rather would avoid doing, but under the given

circumstances he bites his teeth and carries himself well. In this war, the

circumstances brought on by Claudius’s murdering of King Hamlet are Hamlet’s

enemy. Morris Weitz, a critic of Shakespearian plays, states, "His dead

father, and destroyed country, is the painful truth which leaves so much hatred

and resentment in his heart". (Weitz, 15) Being a loyal prince and son, and

one whom an entire kingdom respected, he should seek revenge and bring justice

back in the royal court. The whole play would be very simple if this murder was

an open assassination. But no, Shakespeare made sure that this murder was a

secret, that no one, except maybe Claudius, knew about it. Bernard Grebanier,

another critic that focuses on the piece of literature, says, "this puts in

a completely different context to the play that was written by Thomas Kyd, a

play that is titled Ur-Hamlet, which Shakespeare used as a basis for his Hamlet

play".(Grebanier, 111) This way, Shakespeare accomplished very different

development of action, and ultimately one of the best plays in that history.

Along with that, Shakespeare created disagreement concerning reasons why Hamlet

waited so long before killing Claudius. A careful reader can notice that more

than two months pass between Hamlet being told by the aspiration about the evil

deed, and Hamlet following through with his plan. One can argue that from this

follows that Hamlet procrastinated, have that one flaw – being passive, not

daring to act. But Shakespeare never payed attention to this time interval.

According to Grebanier, "an audience was not aware of it, because

Shakespeare didn’t want it to be… the rather large time interval was of no

consequence, and truly one cannot notice this without a conscious

calculation". (Grebanier, 179) More critics, especially during popularity

of Freud, have tried to explain Hamlet’s delay exclusively from psychological

point of view. But how can one psychologically analyze a character that does not

exist in a physical world; whose existence is dependent is merely on his actions

and reactions to the events and other characters from the play. J. Dover Wilson

summarized it by saying that Hamlet is a "character in a play not in

history". (Weitz, 107) From the point of view of these critics, it follows

that character preceded the plot, thus shaping it for its needs. But

Shakespeare, not to mention all the other play writers, followed Aristotelian

view. "Tragedy is an imitation of life … and thus the plot precedes the

character". (Aristotle, 459-460) Th

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