Hamlet and the Greek Tragedy

Aristotle, a Classical Greek philosopher and writer, is the founder of the Aristotelian tradition of tragedy, which states that tragedy should be or seem to be historical. It should deal with affairs of state and the public lives of great men, whose downfall is caused by a fatal weakness in their character. Renaissance tradition held that tragedy should deal with men who were "better" than ordinary men, such as kings, heroes, aristocrats. The protagonist may be wholly or partially responsible for his own fate or may be the victim of external circumstances and the machinations of those around him. He may accept his fate stoically, or rail against it or against the nature of the human condition.

The hallmark of a tragic hero in a Shakespeare tragedy is that he is doomed and he accepts his doom without flinching. Hamlet accepts his fate despite the premonition he has in Act 5 , he is, by this stage in the play , resigned to what he knows must happen and not intimidated by the possibility of his own death in the duel with Laertes. He has undergone a process of catharsis which has been a healing process and has been able to rid himself of the passions and emotions, the "antic" disposition, which have crippled him throughout the early part of the play.

By the time he meets Laertes for the duel he is resigned to the fact that death is no longer to be feared. He may indeed be sung to his rest by "flights of angels", but the tragic reality for the audience is that the protagonist has met his doom; that he has experienced the realisation of that fate; that they themselves have experienced the cathartic purging of watching the tragedy unfold and that their sympathies have been engaged.

As we...

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... deceit and disgust which leads inevitably to his fateful downfall, and also with the idea that the state itself is precarious and uncertain. As they (and we) witness the events of the play, they and we , see how disgusting life can be. The emotion will, of course, be purged before the audience leaves the theatre, being replaced by the state which Hamlet calls "readiness" as he himself accepts his fate and his death.

Hamlet seems to embody the sense of futility which dogs human existence and which certainly accords with the scriptural view of man as essentially bad ( a sinner) and not innately good. In this way also the play differs from the Greek idea of tragedy in that it concentrates not on fear or pity but on this sense of disgust. Shakespeare regards the world as a stage and what is portrayed through the characters is a view of the human condition.