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A essay on hamlet personality
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A essay on hamlet personality
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Hamlet, the titled character of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare’s most prominent play, is arguably the most complex, relatable, and deep character created by Shakespeare. His actions and thoughts throughout the play show the audience how fully developed and unpredictable he is with his mixed personalities. What Hamlet goes through in the play defines the adventures encountered by a tragic hero. In this timeless tragedy, despite Hamlet’s great nobility and knowledge, he has a tragic flaw that ultimately leads to his ironic death.
The conception of this character dates back to as early as the 13th century. The first story that Hamlet’s tale can be traced back to is Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (“History of the Danes”). Many of the earlier Hamlet story elements are interwoven in Vita Amlethi (“The Life of Amleth”), part of Gesta Danorum (Mabillard). Some of the strong similarities between the two legends are the mother’s hasty marriage to the brother of the murdered king, the prince pretending to be insane, the prince killing a hidden spy, and the prince substituting the execution of two retainers for his own. The story was later further developed and translated in 1570 by François de Belleforest and titled Histoires tragiques. Belleforest embellished much of Saxo’s writings and pioneered the hero’s melancholy
Aristotle defines a literary tragedy as a story that “presents courageous individuals who confront powerful forces within or outside themselves with a dignity that reveals the breadth and depth of the human spirit in the face of failure, defeat, and even death” (Brainstorm Services). Hamlet’s character undergoes many of these trials and tribulations that make him a tragic hero. In order to meet the criter...
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...a hero because he is, as everyone is, at once both confused and enticed by endless dilemmas that come from being, in the end, merely human.
Works Cited
Brainstorm Services. Aristotle's Tragic Hero. 25 September 2001. 6 December 2007 .
Charters, Ann and Samuel Charters. "William Shakespeare." Charters, Ann and Samuel Charters. Literature and Its Writers. 4th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007. 1247-1251.
Cliffs Notes. "Character Analyses: Hamlet." 2001. Cliffs Notes. 6 December 2007 .
Mabillard, Amanda. "An Analysis of Shakespeare's Sources for Hamlet." 2000. Shakespeare Online. 6 December 2007 .
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. 1600.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (The New Folger Library Shakespeare). Simon & Schuster; New Folger Edition, 2003.
Hamlet, of the play, Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, is a young man with many distinctive characteristics. He is the loving and beloved son of Hamlet, the deceased King of Denmark. He is talented in many ways, as actor, athlete, and scholar. Prince Hamlet draws upon many of his talents as he goes through a remarkable metamorphosis, changing from an average, responsible, young Prince to an apparently mad, raging son intent upon avenging his father’s untimely death.
Hamlet. The son of a king. A man who could have had it all, but instead he chose the much more painful route of revenge and a life of bloodshed. The downfall of Hamlet is comparable to trying to hide a lie one has told. The deeper we try to cover the lie, the worse it gets and harder it becomes to do the right thing. The deeper the reader explores into Hamlets life, the messier and messier it becomes. With a mind full of suicidal thoughts and insanity with no effort to contain it can only lead one thing, and Hamlets downfall is the ultimate example. Pain, suffering, and extreme
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. C. Ed. Sarah Lawall. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most famous work of tragedy. Throughout the play the title character, Hamlet, tends to seek revenge for his father’s death. Shakespeare achieved his work in Hamlet through his brilliant depiction of the hero’s struggle with two opposing forces that hunt Hamlet throughout the play: moral integrity and the need to avenge his father’s murder. When Hamlet sets his mind to revenge his fathers’ death, he is faced with many challenges that delay him from committing murder to his uncle Claudius, who killed Hamlets’ father, the former king. During this delay, he harms others with his actions by acting irrationally, threatening Gertrude, his mother, and by killing Polonius which led into the madness and death of Ophelia. Hamlet ends up deceiving everyone around him, and also himself, by putting on a mask of insanity. In spite of the fact that Hamlet attempts to act morally in order to kill his uncle, he delays his revenge of his fathers’ death, harming others by his irritating actions. Despite Hamlets’ decisive character, he comes to a point where he realizes his tragic limits.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is arguably one of the best plays known to English literature. It presents the protagonist, Hamlet, and his increasingly complex path through self discovery. His character is of an abnormally complex nature, the likes of which not often found in plays, and many different theses have been put forward about Hamlet's dynamic disposition. One such thesis is that Hamlet is a young man with an identity crisis living in a world of conflicting values.
William Shakespeare is seen to many as one of the great writers in history. More specifically, the characters in his plays are reviewed and criticized and have been so for nearly four centuries. The character that many have revered Shakespeare for is perhaps the greatest such character ever in literature, Hamlet from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The commentary and response to this legend of literature is of wide array and opinion, though most, such as Pennington, believe him to be a truly magnificent character: "Hamlet is perhaps the cleverest hero ever written, the subject of the first European tragedy, a form of genius. A type Shakespeare despaired of writing thereafter, having perceived that the heroes of tragedies must be sublime idiots" (185). However, despite his clear gifts and aura, Hamlet was a doomed character from the beginning: Hamlet is dominated by an emotion that is inexpressible. It is thus a feeling he cannot understand, he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains open to poison life and to obstruct action" (Eliot 25). Thus, Hamlet, while possessing the traits of no other men of his time, a true Renaissance man, was doomed from the beginning of the play partly by forces he could not control, and also partly by his own character. It leads to a slow but definite ending to one of literature's great characters, one that he could not control. In the end, Hamlet was out of place in his environment, he was simply not meant to be.
As the play’s tragic hero, Hamlet exhibits a combination of good and bad traits. A complex character, he displays a variety of characteristics throughout the play’s development. When he is first introduced in Act I- Scene 2, one sees Hamlet as a sensitive young prince who is mourning the death of his father, the King. In addition, his mother’s immediate marriage to his uncle has left him in even greater despair. Mixed in with this immense sense of grief, are obvious feelings of anger and frustration. The combination of these emotions leaves one feeling sympathetic to Hamlet; he becomes a very “human” character. One sees from the very beginning that he is a very complex and conflicted man, and that his tragedy has already begun.
Aristotle, as a world famous philosopher, gives a clear definition of tragedy in his influential masterpiece Poetics, a well-known Greek technical handbook of literary criticism. In Aristotle’s words, a tragedy is “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play, the form of action, not of narrative, through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions”(Aristotle 12). He believes that a tragedy should be serious and complete in appropriate and pleasurable language; the plot of tragedy should be dramatic, whose incidents will arouse pity and fear, and finally accomplish a catharsis of emotions. His theory of tragedy has been exerting great influence on the tragedy theories in the past two thousand years. Shakespeare, as the greatest dramatist in western literature, also learnt from this theory. Hamlet is one of the most influential tragedies written by Shakespeare. The play vividly focuses on the theme of moral corruption, treachery, revenge, and incest. This essay will first analyze Shakespeare’s Hamlet under Aristotle’s tragedy theory. Then this essay will express personal opinion on Aristotle’s tragedy theory. The purpose of this essay is to help the reader better understand Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, is its intense focus on its eponymous character.
Hamlet is a tale of tragedy by Shakespeare which tells the story of the prince of Denmark who is on a quest to avenge the death of his father at the hands of his uncle whom subsequently becomes king of Denmark. This is what fuels the fire in the play as Hamlet feels the responsibility to avenge his father’s death by his uncle Claudius; however, Claudius assumed the throne following the death of hamlets father. It is in this context that we see the evolution of hamlets character from a student and young prince of Denmark to the protagonist and tragic hero in the play.
Hamlet is the best known tragedy in literature today. Here, Shakespeare exposes Hamlet’s flaws as a heroic character. The tragedy in this play is the result of the main character’s unrealistic ideals and his inability to overcome his weakness of indecisiveness. This fatal attribute led to the death of several people which included his mother and the King of Denmark. Although he is described as being a brave and intelligent person, his tendency to procrastinate prevented him from acting on his father’s murder, his mother’s marriage, and his uncle’s ascension to the throne.
The tragedy of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most popular and greatest tragedy, presents his genius as a playwright and includes many numbers of themes and literary techniques. In all tragedies, the main character, called a tragic hero, suffers and usually dies at the end. Prince Hamlet is a model example of a Shakespearean tragic hero. Every tragedy must have a tragic hero. A tragic hero must own many good traits, but has a flaw that ultimately leads to his downfall. If not for this tragic flaw, the hero would be able to survive at the end of the play. A tragic hero must have free will and also have the characteristics of being brave and noble. In addition, the audience must feel some sympathy for the tragic hero.
Hamlet starts of what may be considered a tragic hero but his fear and overthinking led to being influenced by the corruption around him he was neither strong nor had characteristics that position him above the average person. In every situation he got into he reacted like a normal person rather then a hero. All his actions were flawed because of his problem with those around him allowing the evilness of others to grow inside of him changing him completely. His death was inevitable it was accumulation of his mistakes.
The perfection of Hamlet’s character has been called in question - perhaps by those who do not understand it. The character of Hamlet stands by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can be. He is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility - the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from his natural disposition by the strangeness of his situation.