Hamlet as A Tragic Hero

HAMLET AS A TRAGIC HERO

Coleridge says:

“All that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet”.

Hamlet is one of the most popular tragic characters of Shakespeare. In fact, the play, “Hamlet”, is popular for its main character, Hamlet. He is one of the immortal and unforgettable characters. He plays a role of vital significance and confuses the readers, critics and viewers by his complex personality and contradictory actions.

The character of Hamlet has been discussed by the various critics but still no one claim that he has understood this character fully.

Like other tragic heroes of Shakespeare, he is endowed with extraordinary qualities like royal birth, graceful and charming personality and popularity among his own countrymen. He has a high intellectual quality. In spite of all his qualities, the flaw in his character leads him to his downfall and makes him a tragic hero. The tragic flaw in Hamlet’s character is that he thinks too much and feels too much. He is often disturbed by his own nature of ‘self-analysis’. Hamlet’s soliloquies are the true reflection of Hamlet’s character.

Several causes account for Hamlet’s delay and inaction. By nature, he is prone to think rather than to act. He is a man of morals and his moral idealism receives a shock when his mother remarries Claudius after his father’s death which was later proved murder.

Character is not the only factor which is responsible for Hamlet’s tragedy. Hamlet has been made a tragic hero by some strange strokes of fate and chance. A number of things take place by chance. For example, Hamlet kills Polonius by chance. Hamlet’s ship is attacked by pirates. His mother drinks poisoned wine by chance and dies. Thus, chance and fate influence the whole situation. Fate puts the hero in such circumstances in which the hero has to say:

                                          “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,

                                        That ever I was born to set it right!”

Like other tragic heroes, Hamlet too has to face conflict, both internal and external. The internal conflict is within his mind while the external conflict is with Claudius and Laertes. Hamlet is a hero whose tragic role is to punish and be punished, to do evil along with good.

In a tragedy, the hero normally comes to the realization of a truth of which he had been hitherto unaware. In the beginning of the play, Hamlet is in the state of melancholy and depression and sees Denmark as an “Unweeded Garden” but he becomes a truly philosophical and noble soul by the end of the play. He had once been an ideal personality as Ophelia told us, by the time of the final act of the play, he is before us with a greater stature than he even had before. Just before the fatal fencing match, he says:

“The readiness is all”.

In the beginning, he laments that he was born to set right what was out of joint but in the end, he realizes that there is:

“A divinity that shapes our ends.”

To conclude, we can say that Shakespeare with his creative imagination and artistic skill could not make Hamlet a conventional avenger. Hamlet has to become a different kind of avenger as the play proceeds, Hamlet becomes gradually mature and dies before our eyes as a great man. Hamlet has all the qualities of tragic heroes. Shakespeare has shown his artistic skilled heroes.

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