The Characterization within Hamlet

The Characterization within Hamlet

This essay will inform the reader regarding the characterization found in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet – whether the dramatis personae are three-dimensional or two-dimensional, dynamic or static, and other aspects of the character portrayal.

John Dover Wilson in What happens in Hamlet tells how the Bard is capable of even bringing realism to a ghost:

Shakespeare’s Ghost is both a revenge-ghost and a prologue-ghost, that is to say from the technical point of view it corresponds with its Senecan prototype. But there the likeness ends; for it is one of Shakespeare’s glories that he took the conventional puppet, humanised it, christianized it, and made it a figure that his spectators would recognize as real, as something which might be encountered in any lonely graveyard at midnight.[. . .] The Ghost in Hamlet comes, not from a mythical Tartarus, but from the place of departed spirits in which post-medieval England, despite a veneer of Protestantism, still believed at the end of the sixteenth century. And in doing this, in making horror more awesome by giving it a contemporary spiritual background, Shakespeare managed at the same time to lift the whole ghost-business on to a higher level, to transform a ranting roistering abstraction into a thing at once tender and majestical. (56-57)

The genius of the Bard is revealed in his characterization. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt in Literature of the Western World examine the universal appeal of Shakespeare resulting from his “sharply etched characters”:

Every age from Shakespeare’s time to the present has found something different in him to admire. All ages, however, have recognized his supreme skill in inv...

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...tts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html

West, Rebecca. “A Court and World Infected by the Disease of Corruption.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.

Wilkie, Brian and James Hurt. “Shakespeare.” Literature of the Western World. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992.

Wilson, John Dover. What happens in Hamlet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959.

Wright, Louis B. and Virginia A. LaMar. “Hamlet: A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. N. p.: Pocket Books, 1958.