hamlet

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HAMARTIA tragic flaw of revenge.

Hamlet is part of a literary tradition called the revenge play, in which a person—most often a man—must take revenge against those who have wronged him. As in those works, a hero plays minister and scourge in avenging a moral injustice, an affront to both man and God. In this case, regicide (killing a king) is a particularly monstrous crime, and there is no doubt as to whose side our sympathies are disposed. Hamlet, however, turns the genre on its head in an ingenious way: Hamlet, the person seeking vengeance, can't actually bring himself to take his revenge. When Hamlet attempts to direct the fate of his uncle and stepfather, King Claudius, he commits the mistake of pride (hubris), which then becomes his fatal flaw (hamartia)

He is not an innocent; in fact, in some ways, he can be seen as contributing to the moral corruption that exists at the heart of the Danish court.

He publicly humiliates Ophelia with his vulgar language, he murders Polonius as well as his once friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and despite his father's warning against it, he shames his mother. He installs himself as the moral police of the court, despite his own significant flaw(s).

This necessitates his own death, in addition to the deaths of his mother and stepfather, in order to cleanse Denmark and free the country from the family's corrupting influence. In order for Denmark to move forward, to make a fresh start, everyone who has contributed to the "rot" at the heart of the country must be cut out. Hamlet's hubris has made him a part of this rot.

HUBRIS pride and self-assumed power of judgement.

As Hamlet struggles throughout the play with the logistical difficulties and moral burdens of vengeance (when he did not want to kill Claudius as he was praying because he wanted to ensure Claudius goes to hell), waffling between whether he should kill Claudius and avenge his father once and for all, or whether to do so would be pointless, cruel, or even self-destructive, William Shakespeare’s unique perspective on action versus inaction becomes clear. 

    religion, honor, revenge
As Hamlet begins considering what it would mean to actually get revenge—to actually commit murder—he begins waffling and languishing in indecision and inaction. His inability to act, however, is not necessarily a mark of cowardice or fear—rather, as the play progresses, Hamlet is forced to reckon very seriously with what retribution and violence in the name of retroactively reclaiming “honor” or glory actually accomplishes. This conundrum is felt most profoundly in the middle of Act 3, when Hamlet comes upon Claudius totally alone for the first time in the play. It is the perfect opportunity to kill the man uninterrupted and unseen—but Claudius is on his knees, praying. Hamlet worries that killing Claudius while he prays will mean that Claudius’s soul will go to heaven. Hamlet is ignorant of the fact that Claudius, just moments before, was lamenting that his prayers for absolution are empty because he will not take action to actually repent for the violence he’s done and the pain he’s caused. Hamlet is paralyzed in this moment, unable to reconcile religion with the things he’s been taught about goodness, honor, duty, and vengeance. This moment represents a serious, profound turning point in the play—once Hamlet chooses not to kill Claudius for fear of unwittingly sending his father’s murderer to heaven, thus failing at the concept of revenge entirely, he begins to think differently about the codes, institutions, and social structures which demand unthinking vengeance and religious piety in the same breath. Because the idea of a revenge killing runs counter to the very tenets of Christian goodness and charity at the core of Hamlet’s upbringing—regardless of whether or not he believes them on a personal level—he begins to see the artifice upon which all social codes are built.

Could Hamlet's madness be his tragic flaw? Or is his flaw that he believes he is pretending to be mad? Are words his tragic flaw? Or could his tragic flaw be that he possesses the same hubris that kills all the great tragic heroes — that be believes he can decide who should live and who should die, who should be forgiven and who should be punished? Then, perhaps, is the ghost a manifestation of his own conscience and not a real presence at all?

Which leads to the question students must ultimately consider: Is Hamlet a tragic hero at all? The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined the tragic hero with Oedipus as the archetype a great man at the pinnacle of his power who, through a flaw in his own character, topples, taking everyone in his jurisdiction with him. Hamlet has no great power, though it is clear from Claudius' fears and from Claudius' assessment of Hamlet's popularity that he might have power were he to curry it among the people. His topple results as much from external factors as from his own flaws. Nevertheless, he certainly does take everyone with him when he falls.

MOIRA fate of decisions n death.
Ultimately, as the characters within the play puzzle, pontificate, and perish, Shakespeare suggests that there is no inherent morality in either action or inaction, insofar as each option is tied to vengeance: whether one acts or does not, death inevitably comes for everyone.

Hamlet is ultimately a product of his religious and social context, which are brought into conflict throughout the play. He has been raised to be a nobleman of honor and loyalty, yet this same honor puts him in the impossible position of choosing between upholding his religious ideals and remaining loyal to his father. As he lays dying, Hamlet says that "the potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit," referring literally to his fast approaching death but also perhaps figuratively to the corrupting effects of revenge on his immortal spirit.

    INDECISION

And yet, words also serve as Hamlet's prison. He analyzes and examines every nuance of his situation until he has exhausted every angle. They cause him to be indecisive. He dallies in his own wit, intoxicated by the mix of words he can concoct; he frustrates his own burning desire to be more like his father, the Hyperion. When he says that Claudius is " . . .no more like my father than I to Hercules" he recognizes his enslavement to words, his inability to thrust home his sword of truth. No mythic character is Hamlet. He is stuck, unable to avenge his father's death because words control him.

Every society is defined by its codes of conduct—its rules about how to act and behave. In Hamlet, the codes of conduct are largely defined by religion and an aristocratic code that demands honor—and revenge if honor has been soiled. As the play unfolds and Hamlet (in keeping with his country’s spoken and unspoken) rules) seeks revenge for his father’s murder, he begins to realize just how complicated vengeance, justice, and honor all truly are. As Hamlet plunges deeper and deeper into existential musings, he also begins to wonder about the true meaning of honor—and Shakespeare ultimately suggests that the codes of conduct by which any given society operates are, more often than not, muddy, contradictory, and confused.

Ultimately, Hamlet resolves too late to kill Claudius—Claudius and Laertes have already put a plan to kill Hamlet as revenge for the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia into action. Hamlet succeeds in killing Claudius—but not before realizing that his own death from being slain by Laertes’s poisoned rapier is imminent. Hamlet has acted at last, but has staved off his actions for so long that Shakespeare seems to be using Hamlet’s idleness to suggest that neither action nor inaction has any bearing on morality, or any influence on the ultimate outcome of one’s life.

He laments to Horatio that all men, whether they be Alexander the Great or a common court jester, end up in the same ground. Finally, he warns off Horatio’s warning about dueling Laertes by claiming that he wants to leave his fate to God. Hamlet’s devil-may-care attitude and his increasingly reckless choices are the result of realizing that the social and moral codes he’s clung to for so long are inapplicable to his current circumstances—and perhaps more broadly irrelevant.

When Hamlet finds the skull of Yorick, a former court jester, while paying a visit to the graveyard just beyond the walls of Elsinore, he is flung into an existential despair—and one of the play’s most profound moments of reckoning with the finality (and the foulness) of death and decay unfolds. As Hamlet laments that all the parts of Yorick he knew in life—the man’s “infinite jest,” warmth, and geniality, but also his physical attributes, such as his tongue and his flesh—are gone forever, he realizes that all men, be they formidable leaders like Alexander the Great or a lowly fool, return to “dust.” Hamlet is both disturbed and soothed by the specifics of the body’s process of decay, and even asks the gravediggers working in the yard for detailed descriptions of how long, exactly, it takes for flesh to rot off of human bones. Hamlet’s continued fixation on the undignified but inescapable process of dying and decay shows that he feels incapable of stopping whatever is festering at the heart of Denmark—and indeed, in the end, a foreign leader named Fortinbras is the only one left to take over the Danish throne after Hamlet, Claudius, Laertes, and Gertrude all perish. Denmark had to rot in order to flourish—just as human flesh decays and fertilizes the ground beneath which it lies.

The skull of Yorick, the former jester of Hamlet’s late father, represents the inevitability of death and the existential meaninglessness of life in light of this fact. When Hamlet and Horatio come upon a pair of gravediggers working merrily in spite of their morbid task in the first scene of Act 5, Hamlet finds himself drawn to a skull one of the gravediggers has found and blithely tossed aside. As Hamlet examines the skull, he laments how death comes for everyone, stripping people of their dreams and personalities, annihilating all they were while they lived. When Hamlet asks the gravedigger who the skull belonged to, the gravedigger replies that it once belonged to Yorick. Hamlet remembers Yorick well, and laments to his friend Horatio that the same man who used to tell him jokes and give him piggy-back rides through the castle is now rotting in the ground. Horatio’s skull, then, is a symbol of Hamlet’s ever-deepening existentialism and indeed nihilism in the wake of his father’s death. When Hamlet encounters Yorick’s skull, it represents a point of no return in his inner intellectual and spiritual journey throughout the play. Hamlet is filled with a kind of nihilism as he realizes that all humans return to dust, no matter how they live their lives on Earth—whether a man is good or evil, joyful or plaintive, common or noble, he will wind up in the ground. Yorick’s skull and the revelation it inspires lead Hamlet to at last resolve firmly to kill Claudius in the following scene. However, Hamlet’s plans for securing vengeance will go awry and he himself is killed, an ironic confirmation of the inescapability of death.

SETTING REALITY: Elsinore Castle

Other characters who bring into question the gulf between appearance and reality include the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, Polonius, and Ophelia. 

The ghost of Hamlet’s father claims to be the late King Hamlet—but Hamlet himself has reservations about the ghost’s true nature which are further called into question when the ghost appears to Hamlet a second time inside of Gertrude’s chambers. Gertrude claims to not be able to see the ghost, allowing for several possibilities: the ghost may indeed be a figment of Hamlet’s own imagination, or Gertrude may be pretending not to be able to see the ghost for fear of admitting to her complicity in his murder (or simply her indifference to marrying his killer to retain her own political position). The ghost itself tampers with the denizens of Elsinore’s ideas about “reality,” inspiring awe and fear in Horatio, Marcellus, and other watchmen and sentinels. 

Gertrude, meanwhile, appears innocent and ignorant of her husband’s murder—but she may, in reality, be affecting innocence just as Hamlet affects madness as a cover for a darker motive. Polonius, too, is guilty of presenting a version of himself that runs counter to the truth of who he is: he makes claims about himself and offers advice that contradict his own actions, such as when he tells Laertes “to thine own self be true,” contradicting his own behavior as a fawning courtier loyal to the whims of his superiors, or when he claims that “brevity is the soul of wit” before embarking on several lengthy, long-winded monologues. Ophelia claims to be pure, honest, and undesirous of Hamlet’s sexual or romantic attention—and yet their interactions seem to suggest that she and Hamlet have a long (and lurid) history, making her desperate attempts at purporting her purity all the more pathetic when seen through Hamlet’s eyes. Ultimately, Hamlet, who has been pretending to be mad for so long, drives himself to the edge of sanity, adopting a kind of nihilism when it comes to questions of life and death, morality, and reality itself. Gertrude, who pretends to be an innocent victim, becomes one when she unwittingly drinks poisoned wine intended for Hamlet. Polonius, who sacrificed his moral compass in service to a corrupt crown, is held up as a tragic loss for the court after his death, revered and mourned by the king. Ophelia, who denied her love for Hamlet in an attempt to appease her father, is buried as a virgin, in spite of the play’s suggestion that she was not pure when she died. All of these characters become the things they once merely pretended to be—and the line between appearance and reality grows blurrier and blurrier as the play progresses.

WOMEN- catharsis
Though there are only two traditionally female characters in Hamlet—Ophelia and Gertrude—the play itself speaks volumes about the uniquely painful, difficult struggles and unfair fates women have suffered throughout history. Written in the first years of the 17th century, when women were forbidden even from appearing onstage, and set in the Middle Ages, Hamlet exposes the prejudices and disadvantages which narrowed or blocked off the choices available to women–even women of noble birth. Hamlet is obsessive about the women in his life, but at the same time expresses contempt and ridicule for their actions—actions which are, Shakespeare ultimately argues, things they’re forced to do just to survive in a cruel, hostile, misogynistic world. Gertrude and Ophelia are two of Hamlet’s most misunderstood—and underdeveloped—characters. Hamlet himself rails against each of them separately, for very different reasons, in misogynistic rants which accuse women of being sly seductresses, pretenders, and lustful schemers. What Hamlet does not see—and what men of his social standing and his time period perhaps could not see if they tried—is that Gertrude and Ophelia are products of their environment, forced to make difficult and even lethal decisions in an attempt to survive and stay afloat in a politically dangerous world built for men, not for women. 

GERTRUDE
When Gertrude’s husband, King Hamlet, dies, she quickly remarries his brother, Claudius—who actually murdered him. There are two possibilities: the first is that Gertrude knew about the murder, and the second is that she didn’t. The text suggests that while Gertrude was likely not directly involved in the murder, she was aware of the truth about Claudius all along—and chose to marry him anyway. While Hamlet accuses his mother of lusting after her own brother-in-law, killing her husband, and reveling in her corrupted marriage bed with her new spouse, he fails to see that perhaps Gertrude married Claudius out of fear of what would happen to her if she didn’t. Gertrude, as a woman, holds no political power of her own—with her husband dead, she might have lost her position at court, been killed by a power-hungry new or foreign king, or forced into another, less appealing marital arrangement. Marrying Claudius was perhaps, for Gertrude, the lesser of several evils—and an effort just to survive.

Hamlet judges his mother's grief as false, noting the "unrighteous tears" in her "galled eyes." He accuses his mother of weakness, a complaint he then extends to all women: "Frailty, thy name is woman!" In act 3, Hamlet directly confronts his mother, using harsh and, at times, graphically sexual language to accuse her of immodesty and hypocrisy. Confused, Gertrude tells her son that his words are like "daggers" entering her ears and that he has "cleft [her] heart in twain." It is never revealed to what extent Gertrude is aware, if at all, of Claudius’s crimes, but her genuine shock in this scene suggests that she is likely ignorant of his treachery. In the final scene of the play, Gertrude eventually falls victim to Claudius's scheming herself.

OPHELIA

Ophelia’s trajectory is similar to Gertrude’s, in that she is forced into several decisions and situations which don’t seem to be of her own making, but rather things she must do simply to appease the men around her and retain her social position at court. When Ophelia is drawn into her father Polonius and Claudius’s plot to spy on Hamlet and try to tease the reason behind his madness out of him, she’s essentially used as a pawn in a game between men. 

Ophelia’s obedience is often remarked upon as a positive character trait. However, it is her blind obedience to her father’s will that ultimately destroys her life. Rather than trusting her own instincts and continuing her courtship with Hamlet, she cuts him off, ultimately leading him to deny any former love he had for her.

Polonius wants to see if Hamlet’s madness is tied to Ophelia, and so asks Ophelia to spurn Hamlet’s advances, return gifts and letters he’s given her in the past, and refuse to see or speak with him anymore to see test his hypothesis. Ophelia does these things—and incurs Hamlet’s wrath and derision. Again, as with his mother, he is unable to see the larger sociopolitical forces steering Ophelia through her own life, and has no sympathy for her uncharacteristic behavior. After the death of her father—at Hamlet’s hands—Ophelia loses her sanity. Spurned by Hamlet, left alone by Laertes (who is off studying in France, pursuing his future while his sister sits at court by herself) and forced to reckon with the death of her father—after Hamlet, her last bastion of sociopolitical protection—she goes mad.

Even in the depths of her insanity, she continues singing nursery songs and passing out invisible flowers to those around her, performing the sweet niceties of womanhood that are hardwired into her after years of knowing how she must look and behave in order to win the favor of others—specifically men. 

Indeed, when Ophelia kills herself, it is perhaps out of a desire to take her fate into her own hands. A woman at court is in a perilous position already—but a madwoman at court, divorced from all agency and seen as an outsider and a liability, is even further endangered. Though Ophelia kills herself, she is perhaps attempting to keep her dignity—and whatever shreds of agency she has left at the end of her life—intact.

In Act 4, following the death of Polonius, his daughter Ophelia goes mad. Spurned by her lover Hamlet, who himself seems to have lost his mind, and left alone in a castle with no one to trust, Ophelia loses her grip on reality. As she prances through the halls of Elsinore singing songs that range from childish to bawdy to macabre, she passes out invisible “flowers” to those she meets, the eclectic variety of which symbolize her own complex personality. She passes out rosemary (traditionally carried by mourners at funerals), pansies (whose name is derived from the French word pensie, meaning “thought” or “remembrance”), fennel (a quick-dying flower symbolizing sorrow), columbines (a flower symbolizing affection, often given to lovers), and daisies (symbols of innocence and purity, and the flower of the Norse fertility goddess Freya). But Ophelia states that she has no violets left—they all withered when her father died. Violets are symbols of modesty, often tied to the Virgin Mary, implying that Ophelia no longer cares about upholding shallow social norms in the wake of such a devastating tragedy. Ophelia’s “bouquet” is contradictory: there are flowers associated with sorrow and mourning, but also happy remembrances; there are flowers that denote purity and chastity alongside flowers given as tokens of sexual or romantic love between partners. Ophelia’s flowers, then, symbolize her many-faceted personality and desires, which have been stripped, squashed, and corrupted by society’s expectations. Ophelia’s imaginary flowers tie in with the thematic representation of women’s issues throughout the play: Ophelia has had to change so much to survive in the world of men that she’s literally driven herself mad. It is significant that later on in the play, after her suicide by drowning, Ophelia’s body is found covered in “fantastic garlands” of flowers. In her final moments, Ophelia chooses to ring herself in emblems of all that she was and all that she could have been, had the world around her not shrunken and shriveled her until hardly anything was left.

Regardless of how one reads Ophelia, her death stands as a testament to the double-standard present between men and women in her society. While Laertes is told “to thine own self be true,” Ophelia is treated as an object whose worth depends on her denying her own needs and desires. Even in death, Ophelia is treated as an object; Laertes and Hamlet compete over who loved her more, with neither man able to recognize the role he played in her tragedy.


Hamlet was written and first performed in a deeply patriarchal society, and this social context is well-represented in the play itself. Through Gertrude and Ophelia, the only two women in the play, modern audiences can come to understand how the limited and challenging gender roles of this period left little hope for a woman’s personal happiness or fulfillment.

Gertrude and Ophelia are subject to paternalistic condescension, sexual objectification, and abuse. They are also subject to the constant psychological and emotional weight of knowing that no matter how dehumanizing and cruel the treatment they must face at court may be, things are even worse for women of lower social standings—and if the two of them don’t keep in line, lose their positions at court and face far worse fates. Gertrude and Ophelia make the decisions they make out of a drive simply to survive—and yet Hamlet never stops to imagine the weighty considerations which lie behind both women’s actions.

H-catharsis

Hamlet fulfills the Aristotelian requirement that the tragic hero invoke in us a deep sense of pity and fear, that we learn from him how not to conduct our lives. Hamlet is our hero because he is, as we are, at once both confused and enticed by endless dilemmas that come from being, after all, merely human.

imagery is that of bodily corruption and disease. Throughout the play, Hamlet is preoccupied with the degeneration of the Danish court and the foul implications of Claudius and Gertrude's incestuous relationship. Although images of corruption and disease run throughout the play, they are never associated with Hamlet himself; however, a sense of infection underscores Claudius's crime and Gertrude's sin. Further, the description of disease and corruption exceeds the visual dimension and operates on an olfactory level (relating to the sense of smell). Shakespeare offers a vivid depiction of decay and stench by employing imagery of cancerous infection, rotting flesh, and the sun as an agent of corruption. These rank odors highlight the cunning and lecherousness of Claudius's evil crime, which has poisoned the whole kingdom of Denmark. War imagery is another important visual pattern that frequently occurs in Hamlet. In fact, images of war occur more frequently than those of corruption and decay; their dramatic function is to underscore the notion that Hamlet and Claudius are in a duel to the death.