Hamlet
-
Upload
angelica-santi -
Category
Documents
-
view
3 -
download
1
description
Transcript of Hamlet
As defined by Aristotle, a tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy who should possess certain
characteristics. In order to analyse Hamlet as a tragic hero these characteristics will be taken
into account.
To start with, the tragic hero should be noble in social order and also in character, although
not perfect, so the audience can sympathise and feel pity, which is crucial in a tragedy. Hamlet
is popular among his people, as recognised by Claudius: “He’s loved of the distracted
multitude,” (4.2.4). He also shows his loyalty to his father and Denmark when he says “Haste
me to know ’t, that I, with wings as swift/As meditation or the thoughts of love/May sweep to
my revenge.” (1.5.29-31)
Secondly, the typical Aristotelian hero “falls from high state or fame, not through vice or
depravity, but by some great hamartia” (Aristotle 5). Being hamartia understood as an error of
judgement that will change the hero’s destiny, Aristotle calls this turn of events a “reversal of
fortune” or peripeteia. Hamlet’s hamartia would be his constant thinking and consideration of
his actions and his inability to perform. In The Invention of the Human, the scholar Harold
Bloom quotes Nietzsche’s description of Hamlet’s thinking, “seeing him not as the man who
thinks too much but rather as the man who thinks too well” (Bloom 393). In the quoted
passage Nietzsche compares Hamlet with the Dionysian man and claims that “as soon as this
everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-
negating mood is the fruit of these states… In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet:
both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and
nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of
things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world
that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the
doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as
it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no true
knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet
and in the Dionysian man.” (Bloom 393). Bradley considers that this flaw in the tragic hero is
also “his greatness” and that, in Shakespeare, “the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed
simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero
as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw.” (Bradley 12).
In Hamlet the peripeteia is a slow process of deterioration in the hero over time, being the
most significant moment when Hamlet fails in killing Claudius when he is praying in Act 3 Scene
3. Hamlet’s condition will get worse when the ghost encounters him and compelles him to
avenge his father.
After the peripeteia generated by the hero’s hamartia, a moment of recognition or discovery
should follow, in which the hero experiences what Aristotle calls anagnorisis. Shakespeare
depicts Hamlet’s anagnorisis in his soliloquy in Act 4 Scene 4:
“ Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. ” (4.4.32-66)
After this moment, Hamlet swears vengeance and is determined to take action: “My thoughts
be bloody, or be nothing worth."(4, 4, 66)
Finally, the tragic hero, according to Aristotle should die tragically and accept this fact with
courage and honour. In Act 5 Scene 2, Hamlet knows that the end has come and he is about to
die: “ O! I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit:I cannot live to hear the news from England,But I do prophesy th’election lightsOn Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,Which have solicited — the rest is silence. [Dies]” (5.2.332-337)
To conclude an interesting feature may added to this tragic hero, the humour. According to
Bradley, Hamlet could be called a humourist, “…his humour being first cousin to that
speculative tendency which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement.” (Bradley 62)