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This document contains different articles on the character of Hamlet, collected from books and internet sources.

Essay 1:
Hamlet’s Character
Hamlet is an enigma. No matter how many ways critics examine him, no
absolute truth emerges. Hamlet breathes with the multiple dimensions
of a living human being, and everyone understands him in a personal
way. Hamlet's challenge to Guildenstern rings true for everyone who
seeks to know him: "You would pluck out the heart of my mystery." None
of us ever really does.
The conundrum that is Hamlet stems from the fact that every time we
look at him, he is different. In understanding literary characters, just as
in understanding real people, our perceptions depend on what we bring
to the investigation. Hamlet is so complete a character that, like an old
friend or relative, our relationship to him changes each time we visit
him, and he never ceases to surprise us. Therein lies the secret to the
enduring love affair audiences have with him. They never tire of the
intrigue.
The paradox of Hamlet's nature draws people to the character. He is at
once the consummate iconoclast, in self-imposed exile from Elsinore
Society, while, at the same time, he is the adulated champion of
Denmark — the people's hero. He has no friends left, but Horatio loves
him unconditionally. He is angry, dejected, depressed, and brooding; he
is manic, elated, enthusiastic, and energetic. He is dark and suicidal, a
man who loathes himself and his fate. Yet, at the same time, he is an
existential thinker who accepts that he must deal with life on its own
terms, that he must choose to meet it head on. "We defy augury. There is
special providence in the fall of a sparrow."
Hamlet not only participates in his life, but astutely observes it as well.
He recognizes the decay of the Danish society (represented by his Uncle
Claudius), but also understands that he can blame no social ills on just
one person. He remains aware of the ironies that constitute human
endeavor, and he savors them. Though he says, "Man delights not me,"
the contradictions that characterize us all intrigue him. "What a piece of
work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form
and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in
apprehension how like a god!"
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As astutely as he observes the world around him, Hamlet also keenly

critiques himself. In his soliloquys he upbraids himself for his failure to
act as well as for his propensity for words.
Hamlet is infuriatingly adept at twisting and manipulating words. He
confuses his so-called friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — whom he
trusts as he "would adders fang'd" — with his dissertations on ambition,
turning their observations around so that they seem to admire beggars
more than their King. And he leads them on a merry chase in search of
Polonius' body. He openly mocks the dottering Polonius with his word
plays, which elude the old man's understanding. He continually spars
with Claudius, who recognizes the danger of Hamlet's wit but is never
smart enough to defend himself against it.
Words are Hamlet's constant companions, his weapons, and his
defenses. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play that was
later adapted into a film, playwright and screenplaywright Tom Stoppard
imagines the various wordplays in Hamlet as games. In one scene, his
characters play a set of tennis where words serve as balls and rackets.
Hamlet is certainly the Pete Sampras of wordplay.

References
https://www.cliffsnotes.com
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Hamlet and revenge

Kiernan Ryan, 15 Mar 2016

Hamlet shows Shakespeare intent on sabotaging the

conventions of revenge tragedy. Kiernan Ryan explains why.

The procrastinating prince

For centuries critics have tied themselves in knots trying to solve the
baffling problem Hamlet appears to pose. Commanded by his father’s
ghost in Act 1 to ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ by his
brother Claudius, who has robbed him of his wife and throne as well as
his life, Hamlet swears that ‘with wings as swift / As meditation, or the
thoughts of love,’ he will ‘sweep to [his] revenge’ (1.5.25, 29–31). He then
spends almost the entire play spectacularly failing to keep his oath,
despite the ghost's reappearance in Act 3 to remind him: ‘Do not forget!
This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose’ (3.4.110–11).
Indeed after his departure for England, Hamlet’s obligation to avenge his
father seems all but forgotten, and on his return he shows no sign of
planning to take his uncle’s life. When he does at last kill Claudius in the
dying moments of Act 5, he does so suddenly, without forethought,
poisoning the King in revenge for conniving to poison him and for
accidentally poisoning Gertrude.e

It’s only by chance, in other words, that Hamlet finally avenges his
father’s murder, which might otherwise have remained unavenged. The
retribution he happens to exact is exacted too late, moreover, to prevent
all the deaths that need not have occurred, if only he had killed Claudius
sooner. As a direct or indirect result of his procrastination, Hamlet slays
Polonius instead of Claudius; Ophelia goes mad after her father’s murder
and drowns; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dispatched by Hamlet to
their deaths; and in the play’s climactic duel Hamlet’s mother drinks
from the lethal cup intended for her son, who is fatally wounded by
Laertes in revenge for the deaths of his father and sister. On the face of
it, it’s hard to resist the conclusion most critics have drawn, which is that
the main cause of the whole tragic train of events is Hamlet’s compulsion
to postpone. And for those who assume that to be the case, all that
remains is to crack the conundrum with which the play confronts them:
why does Hamlet delay?
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The crux of the matter

There’s no point asking Hamlet why, because Hamlet himself is baffled
by his inability to act promptly. He rebukes himself bitterly in Act 2 after
watching an actor weep, convulsed with simulated sorrow for an
imaginary character, who means nothing to him. The actor’s
performance ‘But in a fiction, in a dream of passion’ (2.2.552) puts
Hamlet to shame, because ‘the motive and the cue for passion’ (2.2.561)
that Hamlet has are real and compelling, yet all he can do, as he says, is
mope about ‘Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause’ (2.2.568). A
whole act later, Hamlet is still at a loss to explain why, ‘laps’d in time and
passion’, he still ‘lets go by / Th’ important acting’ of his father’s ‘dread
command’ (3.4.107–08). Deep into Act 4 he finds himself shamed yet
again for dragging his heels, this time by the sight of Fortinbras’s army
marching headlong to their doom, merely ‘to gain a little patch of ground
/ That hath in it no profit but the name’ (4.4.18–19). And he voices his
bewilderment at his inexplicable inertia once more in his last great
soliloquy: ‘I do not know / Why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do”, /
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do’t’
(4.4.43–46).
The same soliloquy makes it clear that Hamlet finds neither of the
reasons he considers for his delay convincing. That the cause might be
‘some craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on th’ event’
(4.4.40–41), as a result of which action becomes impossible, might seem
plausible. But it doesn’t square with Hamlet’s obvious ability to act
decisively when he wants to, as he does when he charges fearlessly after
the ghost; when he sets The Mousetrap ‘to catch the conscience of the
king’ (2.2.605); when he runs his sword through Polonius in the belief
that he’s stabbing the king; when he foils Claudius’s plot to have him
murdered in England, consigning his treacherous friends to the fate
meant for him; and when he kills Claudius without hesitation in the heat
of a duel he has no qualms about fighting. On this evidence, too, the
other charge Hamlet levels at himself – that he’s guilty of cowardice –
doesn’t hold up either. Nor does the surmise that he’s secretly deterred
not just from taking revenge, but from taking another life at all, by the
Christian objections of his conscience. Hamlet isn’t troubled in the least
by such objections, as he proves by his keenness to kill Claudius in a
damnable state of sin rather than the state of grace his father was denied.
And for the deaths of Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he feels
not a twinge of guilt.
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The real tragedy

Not that Hamlet’s failure to find a solid reason for his quandary has
stopped critics from furnishing explanations of their own, the most
common being that he’s suffering from some kind of psychological
disorder. A.C. Bradley, for example, diagnosed the prince in his
influential study Shakespearean Tragedy as afflicted by the form of
depression called melancholy in Shakespeare’s day, taking his cue from
Hamlet’s remarking ‘I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all
my mirth’ (2.2.295–96). For Ernest Jones, on the other hand, whose
classic Freudian reading of the play in Hamlet and Oedipus has proved
equally influential, the unconscious source of Hamlet’s suicidal
melancholy and pathological reluctance to avenge his father must be his
repressed desire for his mother, for by killing his mother’s lover, her new
husband Claudius, he would be killing the mirror image of his secret
Oedipal self.What’s wrong with all these attempts to account for
Hamlet’s delay – including Hamlet’s own conjectures – is the same
fundamental misconception. They all accept that the prince has a
legitimate obligation to avenge his father’s murder and thus restore the
status quo – the fact that the murderer is the sovereign himself leaves
him no option but to take the law into his own hands to achieve through
revenge what Bacon called ‘a kind of wild justice’. So the tragedy of the
situation is seen as Hamlet’s unfortunate possession of some emotional,
intellectual or psychological flaw, however virtuous its origin, which
prevents him from fulfilling that obligation without delay. The
assumption is that if Hamlet’s character hadn’t been marred by what he
calls ‘some vicious mole of nature’ and ‘the stamp of one defect’ (1.4.24,
31), the tragic catastrophe wouldn’t have occurred and the only corpse
left at the end would have been Claudius’s.But what if we proceed on the
opposite assumption? What if Hamlet’s tormented resistance to
performing the role of revenger expresses a justified rejection of a whole
way of life, whose corruption, injustice and inhumanity he now sees
clearly and rightly finds intolerable? What if everything we see and hear
in the play confirms Hamlet’s conclusion that the world as it stands is a
prison, ‘in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons,
Denmark being one o’ th’ worst’ (2.2.245–47)? In that case the tragedy
turns out to be something quite different. It’s the tragedy of having to
live, love and die on the soul-destroying terms of such a world at all,
despite feeling the need and the potential to dwell in a world fit for what
human beings could be – ‘the beauty of the world, the paragon of
animals’ (2.2.307) – instead of one fit only for the scoundrels, pawns and
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parasites – the ‘quintessence of dust’ (2.2.308) – that societies like this

force most of them to become.
From this standpoint, Hamlet’s retreat into the dramatic limbo of his
‘antic disposition’ (1.5.172), the cryptic quibbling of his feigned madness,
isn’t a symptom of some mysterious malaise that’s incapacitated him,
but the only sane response to an insane predicament in a society that no
longer makes sense. Critics who regard it as normal and necessary to
comply with convention and maintain the status quo have inevitably
found Hamlet’s disinclination to do so a source of endless puzzlement
and made this tragedy ‘the most problematic play ever written by
Shakespeare or any other playwright’, as Harry Levin famously dubbed
it. But once one has grasped that it’s the time that’s ‘out of joint’ (1.5.188)
and not Hamlet, and that not being in tune with his time makes Hamlet
a hero ahead of his time, the problem ostensibly posed by the play
disappears.

‘Now could I drink hot blood’

The fact that it doesn’t disappear as far as Hamlet’s concerned, and that
a true understanding of his tragic plight eludes him, is hardly surprising.
As a Renaissance prince, steeped in the values of his class and culture,
Hamlet is naturally appalled to find himself failing to play the prescribed
royal part of righteous avenging son.
Acutely aware that the part is a theatrical cliché, he strives repeatedly to
stick to the stage revenger’s script, whipping himself up into a
melodramatic rage whenever his resolution flags: ‘Now could I drink hot
blood, / And do such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on’
(3.2.390-92). But every attempt to conform to the culturally approved
stereotype proves futile, because right from the start, even before the
ghost’s revelation and demand for revenge, Hamlet has ‘that within
which passes show’ (1.2.85): a grief-stricken sense of disillusionment so
complete that ‘all the uses of this world’ seem ‘weary, stale, flat, and
unprofitable’, and he wishes ‘that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His
canon ’gainst self-slaughter’ (1.2.132).Usage terms

Shakespeare seems to have borrowed the basic elements of the play’s

revenge plot from the version of the tale he read in François de
Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, a tale Belleforest had found in Saxo
Grammaticus’s collection Danorum Regum heroumque Historiae. He
was also indebted, directly or indirectly, to Thomas Kyd’s trailblazing
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play The Spanish Tragedy, whose phenomenal success spawned a host

of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies. The similarities between
Kyd’s plot and Shakespeare’s – a ghost, a loyal friend called Horatio, a
play within the play, a female suicide, and a brother who kills his sister’s
lover – are striking. But the more conscious one becomes of how closely
Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy resembles Kyd’s prototype as well as
Belleforest’s version of Saxo, the more obvious its radical difference from
them, and from all the other revenge tragedies of the period, becomes.In
Hamlet Shakespeare deliberately sabotages the whole genre of revenge
tragedy by creating a tragic protagonist who refuses, for reasons he can’t
fathom himself, to play the stock role in which he’s been miscast by the
world he happens to inhabit. Shakespeare makes his purpose plain by
juxtaposing Hamlet with Fortinbras and especially Laertes, two
conventional sons who are also determined to avenge their fathers, but
who don’t have the least scruple about doing so. He makes it plainer still
by refusing to reduce the cause of Hamlet’s tragedy to ‘the stamp of one
defect’ in him, because that would mean pinning the blame on the
protagonist alone, instead of calling into question the society that
trapped him in such an impossible predicament in the first place.

‘Here’s fine revolution’

It’s surely not difficult, after all, to see how impossible that predicament
is for a prince so alienated from everything his rank entails and his
society expects that he holds sovereignty itself, indeed hierarchy as such,
in contempt. ‘The King is a thing’, Hamlet retorts to Rosencrantz, ‘Of
nothing’ (4.2.28–30) before proceeding to prove to Claudius ‘how a king
may go a progress through the guts of a beggar’ (4.3.30–31). And as he
watches the upper-class skulls of those who once owned and ruled
Denmark being turfed up by a common gravedigger’s spade, the
symbolic significance of the scene doesn’t escape him: ‘Here’s fine
revolution’, he observes to Horatio, ‘and we had the trick to see’t’
(5.1.90–91). What would be the point of obtaining the private ‘wild
justice’ of revenge for a king’s son who realises that the entire kingdom is
founded on inequality and thus inherently unjust? Whatever personal
satisfaction killing Claudius might afford him would be purchased at the
price of complicity with a ruthless society that’s bound to foster crimes
like Claudius’s. It would mean becoming a clone of Claudius, the
mirror-image of his father’s murderer, and believing like Laertes that
taking revenge is enough to right the wrong and settle the matter.
But taking revenge could never settle the matter for Hamlet, because the
root cause of his quandary lies deeper than his uncle’s villainy. Because
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‘The time is out of joint’, there’s no way he could ‘set it right’

(1.5.188–89) just by killing Claudius, who’s merely a product of the
barbaric era in which Hamlet finds himself stranded. So with no
adequate course of action open to him, paralysed by the futility of the
revenge his society demands that he seek, Hamlet wavers and stalls,
playing for time until circumstances force his hand and he kills Claudius
in anger on the spur of the moment. Shakespeare ensures that Hamlet
does avenge his father in the end. But not before his revolt against his
role has revealed Shakespeare’s time as a time that only the ‘fine
revolution’ Hamlet glimpses in the graveyard could set right.

------------------

● Kiernan Ryan is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Royal

Holloway, University of London, an Emeritus Fellow of Murray
Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and an Honorary
Senior Research Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute,
Stratford-upon-Avon. He is the author of Shakespeare (3rd
edition, 2002), Shakespeare’s Comedies (2009), Shakespeare’s
Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution (2015) and the Introduction
to the Penguin Classics edition of King Lear (2015). His next book,
Shakespearean Tragedy, will be published by Bloomsbury in
2020.

Reference

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/hamlet-and-revenge
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Character Analysis Of Hamlet

16th May 2017

Hamlet is very brave in that he does not fear a challenge. Hamlet at

times can prove to be very cautious, at times he thinks when he should
act, however when you are king there can be advisors for such matters.
“Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, Bear’t that the opposed
may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each
man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse
can buy, But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft
proclaims the man.” (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 1 Scene 3)
Many times in history leaders should have thought, when instead they
acted on impulse, for example Odysseus, from “The Odyssey” when he
and his men escaped the island of the Cyclops instead of tucking his tail
and being happy with his slight victory after taking numerous loses, he
instead taunted the Cyclops and brought harm near his crew and to
himself. For Odysseus did not know that the father of this monster was
the water god Poseidon. Odysseus like all heroes, his main downfall was
hubris, and because Hamlet thinks so before he acts he avoids mistakes
like this adding to his attributes as a good leader. He can also be as brave
as Hercules, for instance when he travels to see the Ghost of his father
for the first time, he could have sunk back and ran from the very sight of
it, but instead he ran after it and confronted the Ghost and demanded
answers. He did not fear what he could not understand as his
companions that accompanied him did, instead he was assertive and got
to the bottom of the matter. Another account when Hamlet showed quick
thinking and bravery was when he intercepted a letter from his Uncle
Claudius to the King of England ordering the death of Hamlet on his
arrival to England, instead of running and hiding Hamlet used his wits
and changed the letter from his head to be had to that of his deliverers.
Then in a challenge of swords by Laretes, known to be one of the very
best swordsman in his land, Hamlet does not back down. Hamlet takes
the challenge head on proving his worth in battle.

The fact that Hamlet is his father’s son is very important, he was there
behind his father always watching and observing how a king did and
should behave, he saw his father’s bravery and his mistakes and Hamlet
could use all these experiences to make himself a better king even better
than his father. He is of a bloodline of kings, a tradition that is to be kept
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and Hamlet would have been next in line. The job of taking the throne
was in his blood when he assumed the responsibility, ready or not he
would have known what to do. “There is nothing either good or bad, but
thinking makes it so.” (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 2 scene 2)

Hamlet portrayed loyalty to his country his father and his mother. He
even showed love and loyalty to his mother after he found out the role
she took part in aiding Claudius to take the life of her first husband, the
king and take the throne and her bed. She knowingly lay in bed with the
man that killed her husband the king and Hamlet still loved and forgave
her. He became angry with her at times but his loyalty was not shaken.
He showed an immense amount of loyalty to one person unwaveringly
throughout the play, Horatio. Horatio was Hamlet’s confidant and best
friend throughout much of the play Horatio was the only person that
Hamlet could truly trust. Horatio was the only man that did not play
pawn to the king in an attempt to change and alter the feelings of Hamlet
in the matters of his father’s death and his new uncle-father-in-law.
Hamlet’s ultimate allegiance lied with his father, his father asked Hamlet
to avenge his death by any means necessary and if it meant to slander his
name or the name of his family so be, it or if it ultimately meant death
then he shied away from that neither. “Neither a borrower nor a lender
be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge
of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must
follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
(William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 1 scene 1)

Hamlet attended the University of Wittenberg and he was not there just
as a noble trophy he learned and he was a highly educated man.
Throughout much of the play Hamlet is drunk with anger, vengeance
and sorrow, and these emotions clouded his mind and altered his
actions. While Hamlet was not himself at times and he would say things
that many thought off the wall or out of the ordinary, his next words
could make complete sense and be beautifully stated. Hamlet showed his
intelligence by expressing his thoughts and feelings on complex ideas
such as; life and death, humanity, human nature, and light and dark. “To
be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer. The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by
opposing end them? To die: to sleep: No more; and by a sleep to say we
end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir
to,–‘t is a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To
sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death
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what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long
life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s
wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s
delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the
unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare
bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country
from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will And makes us
rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of
resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises
of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And
lose the name of action.” (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 3 scene 1)

Hamlet loves his country and in return his country loves him, he would
without a doubt have the faith and respect of his country. Respect, a very
important aspect to a relationship, every relationship that is to work
must have respect. The love shown to him by his country may very well
have kept Hamlet alive throughout much of the play. In the play before
his father’s death everyone in Denmark wanted to be with or more like
Hamlet, he was a national icon. After the death of Hamlet’s father the
nation wept for him and showed him pity, for they loved their prince. In
the prince was the faith of the people.

Claudius became the king through the act of treason, killed his brother
and committed other crimes like incest that would question his ability to
serve as a “good” king. That does not mean he is incapable of serving as a
true leader but there is evidence that he may be prone to corruption.
Claudius had the desire to be king and he had some of the basic traits of
a good leader but that was not enough to get him through. Claudius like
Macbeth suffers from similar evils, they kill the king to become king and
the only thing that becomes of their advancement is lies, murder and
destruction. They are not able to even enjoy their spoils because the
unsolved murder looms over their heads and rains down upon them a
shower of lies and blood that haunt their dreams. Shakespeare follows a
trend in his plays there is a pot stirrer in each of the plays in Macbeth it
was Macduff, always from the start questioning Macbeth’s loyalty and
kingship, and then in Hamlet it was the Prince Hamlet that would not let
the issue of the murder of his father leave the forefront of Claudius’ mind
leaving him forever unsettled. When sorrows come, they come not single
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spies, but in battalions. (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Claudius,

Scene V)

In comparison to Hamlet, Odysseus is clearly a hero, especially when he

faces moral dilemmas and chooses not to fall prey to his temptations. He
makes decisions that would characterize him as a hero when he chooses
hardship and death with his family. “My lady goddess, here is no cause
for anger. My quiet Penelope-how well I know- Would seem a shade
before your majesty, Death and old age being unknown to you, While she
must die. Yet, it is true, each day I long for home, long for the sight of
home. If any god has marked me out again For shipwreck, my tough
heart can undergo it. What hardship have I not long since endured At
sea, in battle! Let the trial come.” The question that presents itself is, is
Odysseus a good leader or a good king in Odysseus case they work
separately. Odysseus is a ruler of his lands but he is never there to rule
his lands or his people. He instead embarked on quests to gain glory and
honor, these were self-fulfilling ambitions. A kings stead is in his people,
a king must be self-less and but his peoples best interest before his own if
he wished to be a good king. He was not out fighting for his people, his
land or his family but he was seeking glory, a goal that solely benefitted
him. Odysseus was not present, not meaning that he did not care, or at
times he wanted to return more than anything but it was simple, he was
not present to rule, not making him an ideal king. As Odysseus’s rule as a
leader of his crew of men, he had their utmost respect and they trusted
him and served him above all to the death. Odysseus put his men before
himself in certain situations but at other times he used his men as mere
pawns to reach his goal. For instance when Odysseus returned home and
found the suitors battling for his wife’s heart, instead of taking action
and taking back his home and family he played with them and toyed with
them as if he played a game chess.

Macbeth above all else showed a burning desire to be king, so strong was
his desire that he would kill for it. “If chance will have me king, why,
chance may crown me.” (Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3) Aside from this
Macbeth was a liar a murderer and a dark cloud of his actions followed
him wherever he went. Macbeth was lost to a spiral out of control of his
actions, lies compounded more lies and to cover his tracks he had to kill
and to cover that up he had to lie and kill another until the process
needed to be repeated, never ending.

Hamlet is very brave in that he does not fear a challenge. Hamlet at

times can prove to be very cautious, at times he thinks when he should
act, however when you are king there can be advisors for such matters.
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“Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, Bear’t that the opposed
may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each
man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse
can buy, But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft
proclaims the man.” (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 1 Scene 3)
Many times in history leaders should have thought, when instead they
acted on impulse, for example Odysseus, from “The Odyssey” when he
and his men escaped the island of the Cyclops instead of tucking his tail
and being happy with his slight victory after taking numerous loses, he
instead taunted the Cyclops and brought harm near his crew and to
himself. For Odysseus did not know that the father of this monster was
the water god Poseidon. Odysseus like all heroes, his main downfall was
hubris, and because Hamlet thinks so before he acts he avoids mistakes
like this adding to his attributes as a good leader. He can also be as brave
as Hercules, for instance when he travels to see the Ghost of his father
for the first time, he could have sunk back and ran from the very sight of
it, but instead he ran after it and confronted the Ghost and demanded
answers. He did not fear what he could not understand as his
companions that accompanied him did, instead he was assertive and got
to the bottom of the matter. Another account when Hamlet showed quick
thinking and bravery was when he intercepted a letter from his Uncle
Claudius to the King of England ordering the death of Hamlet on his
arrival to England, instead of running and hiding Hamlet used his wits
and changed the letter from his head to be had to that of his deliverers.
Then in a challenge of swords by Laretes, known to be one of the very
best swordsman in his land, Hamlet does not back down. Hamlet takes
the challenge head on proving his worth in battle.

The fact that Hamlet is his father’s son is very important, he was there
behind his father always watching and observing how a king did and
should behave, he saw his father’s bravery and his mistakes and Hamlet
could use all these experiences to make himself a better king even better
than his father. He is of a bloodline of kings, a tradition that is to be kept
and Hamlet would have been next in line. The job of taking the throne
was in his blood when he assumed the responsibility, ready or not he
would have known what to do. “There is nothing either good or bad, but
thinking makes it so.” (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 2 scene 2)

Hamlet portrayed loyalty to his country his father and his mother. He
even showed love and loyalty to his mother after he found out the role
she took part in aiding Claudius to take the life of her first husband, the
king and take the throne and her bed. She knowingly lay in bed with the
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This document contains different articles on the character of Hamlet, collected from books and internet sources.

man that killed her husband the king and Hamlet still loved and forgave
her. He became angry with her at times but his loyalty was not shaken.
He showed an immense amount of loyalty to one person unwaveringly
throughout the play, Horatio. Horatio was Hamlet’s confidant and best
friend throughout much of the play Horatio was the only person that
Hamlet could truly trust. Horatio was the only man that did not play
pawn to the king in an attempt to change and alter the feelings of Hamlet
in the matters of his father’s death and his new uncle-father-in-law.
Hamlet’s ultimate allegiance lied with his father, his father asked Hamlet
to avenge his death by any means necessary and if it meant to slander his
name or the name of his family so be, it or if it ultimately meant death
then he shied away from that neither. “Neither a borrower nor a lender
be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge
of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must
follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
(William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 1 scene 1)

Hamlet attended the University of Wittenberg and he was not there just
as a noble trophy he learned and he was a highly educated man.
Throughout much of the play Hamlet is drunk with anger, vengeance
and sorrow, and these emotions clouded his mind and altered his
actions. While Hamlet was not himself at times and he would say things
that many thought off the wall or out of the ordinary, his next words
could make complete sense and be beautifully stated. Hamlet showed his
intelligence by expressing his thoughts and feelings on complex ideas
such as; life and death, humanity, human nature, and light and dark. “To
be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer. The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by
opposing end them? To die: to sleep: No more; and by a sleep to say we
end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir
to,–‘t is a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To
sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death
what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long
life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s
wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s
delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the
unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare
bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country
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This document contains different articles on the character of Hamlet, collected from books and internet sources.

from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will And makes us
rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of
resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises
of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And
lose the name of action.” (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Act 3 scene 1)

Hamlet loves his country and in return his country loves him, he would
without a doubt have the faith and respect of his country. Respect, a very
important aspect to a relationship, every relationship that is to work
must have respect. The love shown to him by his country may very well
have kept Hamlet alive throughout much of the play. In the play before
his father’s death everyone in Denmark wanted to be with or more like
Hamlet, he was a national icon. After the death of Hamlet’s father the
nation wept for him and showed him pity, for they loved their prince. In
the prince was the faith of the people.

Claudius became the king through the act of treason, killed his brother
and committed other crimes like incest that would question his ability to
serve as a “good” king. That does not mean he is incapable of serving as a
true leader but there is evidence that he may be prone to corruption.
Claudius had the desire to be king and he had some of the basic traits of
a good leader but that was not enough to get him through. Claudius like
Macbeth suffers from similar evils, they kill the king to become king and
the only thing that becomes of their advancement is lies, murder and
destruction. They are not able to even enjoy their spoils because the
unsolved murder looms over their heads and rains down upon them a
shower of lies and blood that haunt their dreams. Shakespeare follows a
trend in his plays there is a pot stirrer in each of the plays in Macbeth it
was Macduff, always from the start questioning Macbeth’s loyalty and
kingship, and then in Hamlet it was the Prince Hamlet that would not let
the issue of the murder of his father leave the forefront of Claudius’ mind
leaving him forever unsettled. When sorrows come, they come not single
spies, but in battalions. (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”, Claudius,
Scene V)

In comparison to Hamlet, Odysseus is clearly a hero, especially when he

faces moral dilemmas and chooses not to fall prey to his temptations. He
makes decisions that would characterize him as a hero when he chooses
hardship and death with his family. “My lady goddess, here is no cause
for anger. My quiet Penelope-how well I know- Would seem a shade
before your majesty, Death and old age being unknown to you, While she
must die. Yet, it is true, each day I long for home, long for the sight of
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This document contains different articles on the character of Hamlet, collected from books and internet sources.

home. If any god has marked me out again For shipwreck, my tough
heart can undergo it. What hardship have I not long since endured At
sea, in battle! Let the trial come.” The question that presents itself is, is
Odysseus a good leader or a good king in Odysseus case they work
separately. Odysseus is a ruler of his lands but he is never there to rule
his lands or his people. He instead embarked on quests to gain glory and
honor, these were self-fulfilling ambitions. A kings stead is in his people,
a king must be self-less and but his peoples best interest before his own if
he wished to be a good king. He was not out fighting for his people, his
land or his family but he was seeking glory, a goal that solely benefitted
him. Odysseus was not present, not meaning that he did not care, or at
times he wanted to return more than anything but it was simple, he was
not present to rule, not making him an ideal king. As Odysseus’s rule as a
leader of his crew of men, he had their utmost respect and they trusted
him and served him above all to the death. Odysseus put his men before
himself in certain situations but at other times he used his men as mere
pawns to reach his goal. For instance when Odysseus returned home and
found the suitors battling for his wife’s heart, instead of taking action
and taking back his home and family he played with them and toyed with
them as if he played a game chess.

Macbeth above all else showed a burning desire to be king, so strong was
his desire that he would kill for it. “If chance will have me king, why,
chance may crown me.” (Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3) Aside from this
Macbeth was a liar a murderer and a dark cloud of his actions followed
him wherever he went. Macbeth was lost to a spiral out of control of his
actions, lies compounded more lies and to cover his tracks he had to kill
and to cover that up he had to lie and kill another until the process
needed to be repeated, never ending.

Reference

UKEssays. (November 2018). Character Analysis Of Hamlet. Retrieved

from
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