CHARACTER OF
HAMLET
INTRODUCTION
Hamlet—Shakespeare's longest play
 Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo
Grammaticus and a prose work by the French writer
François de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques.
Shakespearean device, a play within play, a literary device
or conceit in which one story is told during the action of
another story.
Shakespeare was able to take an unremarkable revenge
story and make it resonate with the most
fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance.
Tragic hero
A tragic hero has the potential for greatness but
is doomed to fail.
He makes some sort of tragic flaw, and this
causes his fall from greatness.
Realizes he has made an irreversible mistake
Faces and accepts death with honor
Meets a tragic death
The Prince of Denmark, the title character,
and the protagonist.
Hamlet is the son of Queen Gertrude and the late
King Hamlet, and the nephew of the present king,
Claudius.
Hamlet is melancholy, bitter, and cynical,
full of hatred for his uncle’s scheming and
disgust for his mother’s sexuality.
studied at the University of Wittenberg
The character of Hamlet is itself a pure
effusion of genius
It is not acharacter marked by strength of will…..
He is a young and princely novice…
He seems incapable of delibrate action and is only
hurried in extremities
At other times, when he is most bound to act,he
remains puzzled
For this reason he refuses to kill the king
And now I’ll don’t,and so he goes to heaven
And so am I REVENGE’D:that would be scann’d.
He kill’d my father,and for that,
I,his sole son,send him to heaven.
Hamlet is a man of radical cotradictions……
Shows no compunction
He uses Ophelia as an outlet for his disgust
Hamlet’s tremendous grief is intesified by this lack
of feeling by those around him.
So excellent a king, that was to this:
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly; Heaven and earth
Must I remember?.....
Hamlet: I mean,my lord head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing my lord?
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s
legs.
Hamlet’s Age
In Act V, scene i, the prince asks the First
Gravedigger how long he has "been a gravemaker,“ .
"been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.“
"hath lain i‘ th' earth three and twenty years.“
"I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a
thousand times”.
If Hamlet is thirty, and Yorick has been dead for
twentythree years, the prince would have been no
more than seven when he last rode on the jester's
back.
Tragic flaw
A tragic flaw is the failing of a tragic hero, a character
who suffers a downfall through the tragic flaw in
mistaken choices or in personality.
Hamlet’s tragic flaw is his inability to decide
about the ghost
about vengeance
to act to take revenge for his father’s death
leads him and many others to their bloody
graves
Hamlet’s Tragic flaw
Procrastination means to postpone
doing something. The person really doesn't
want to do what they are putting off.
Procrastination is when a person puts things
off.
Soliloquies
Although Hamlet's soliloquies give
expression to his inner conflict they also reflect the
world and the people around him. Hamlet's father, his
mother, Claudius, make their presence felt, and they
come alive in the imagination....Thus the term
"introspective" which is often used to describe the
essence of the soliloquies is not entirely adequate.
What Hamlet has just seen or experienced is shaped
in the soliloquies into recollections, admonishments
or mental confrontations with counterfigures against
whom he tries to match himself.
FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION
SIGMUND FREUD held that Hamlet suffered from the
Oedipus Complex
He said in his essay "The Oedipus-Complex as an
Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive
“His moral fate is bound up with his uncle's for good
or ill. The call of duty to slay his uncle cannot be
obeyed because it links itself with the call of his
nature to slay his mother's husband, whether this is
the first or the second; the latter call is strongly
"repressed," and therefore necessarily the former
also”.
One authority compiles a list of the prince's
inconsistencies:
“Hamlet, as a character, was notorious as an
example of the union of the most incompatible
qualities: impetuous, tho' philosophical; sensible of
injury, yet timid of resentment; shrewd, yet void of
policy; full of filial piety, yet tame under oppression;
boastful in expression, undetermined in action ...”
Wolfgang Clemen
In the soliloquies it becomes apparent that Hamlet is
fighting not only against the world around him but also
against the overpowering strength of his own
emotions, against the antagonism of his own heart.
T.S.ELIOT states,
"We find Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' not in the
action, not in any quotations that we might select, so
much as in an unmistakable tone...".
GOETHE
“ A lovely pure, noble, and most moral nature,
without the strength of nerve which forms a hero,
sinks beneath a burden which he bear and must not
cast away…..”