William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a remarkable, well constructed, dramatic play that communes many flaws and challenges of humans today. Despite contextual differences between Elizabethan times and that of the 21st century, Shakespeare has maintained the textual integrity of the play through his effective characterization of Hamlet’s paradoxical nature – this inconsistency of character makes it possible for the audience to connect and even relate to Hamlet. With consideration of critical responses, use of language and structure, and through a close analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquies, the role of Shakespeare’s characterization of Hamlet in shaping the enduring power of the text is appreciated to a further extent.
Hamlet’s personality is many-sided and his character is greatly complicated by outside factors. He can be regarded as one of the most complicated characters which Shakespeare has ever created. It is not easy to explore this character and “it is very difficult to generalize about Hamlet, because every observation will have to admit its opposite” (Bloom, p. 409). His personality is full of inconsistency; he is cautious yet reckless, courteous yet uncivil, tender yet ferocious. Hamlet can sometimes be “gentle and thoughtful, but on numerous occasions throughout the play, he is cruel and bitter – especially with his mother and Ophelia” (Mulherin, Frost, and Payne, p. 28). In addition to this, Hamlet’s personality is constantly changed by different factors. It is the sudden death of his much-loved father and the hasty remarriage of this mother to his uncle (Hamlet considers Claudius vastly inferior to his father) that traumatizes Hamlet, and transforms him from a once life affirming, friendly extrovert into a withdrawn, unhappy and introspective man. All this diversifies Hamlet’s character and results in his producing a number of universal themes.
The brightest of the themes which Hamlet produces are love, family values, confusion, grief, and revenge; at this, the last three are closely intertwined. His pure and passionate love for Ophelia is hard to look through. His love letter to Ophelia suggests a man given to idealizing those he loves: “To the celestial, and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia” (Act 2, Sc. 2). This scene shows Hamlet’s commitment to relations and his giving himself up to love and passion. We see the same tendency to idealize in his descriptions of his dead father, throughout the play, as godlike. Hamlet’s desire to take revenge for his father’s death emphasizes his devotion to family values. It is namely this devotion that “enmesh(es) Hamlet in a web of anxiety, deceit, and death: tragedy stems from the commitment the family elicits” (Barroll, Pitcher, Lindsey, and Cerasano, p. 252). Quite remarkable is Hamlet’s expression of confusion, grief, and revenge. The famous soliloquy “To be or not to be” (Act 3, Sc. 1) illustrates this mixture of themes and inconstancy of Hamlet’s character. These words express Hamlet’s confusion and his hesitation to kill Claudius. He struggles between taking revenge and acting against his conscience for “his conscience cannot convince him that the act is good” (Wells, p. 47). These features make Hamlet an immortal character giving the play enduring power over centuries.
Complexity of Hamlet’s character and his producing numerous universal themes makes him a significant representation of humanity today. Shakespeare portrays Hamlet as a self-critical person, which is clear from the other soliloquy, namely “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave I am!” (Act 2, Sc. 2) This self-induced verbal abuse reveals a certain disgust that Hamlet feels for his unsatisfactory reaction to his current situation. He analyzes and examines every nuance of his situation until he has exhausted every angle – he is irresolute because of this exact reflective and speculative state of consciousness. He concludes that the reason for the cowardly inaction which he despises in himself is that he thinks too much, and over intellectualizes his problems to the point of inertia. Despite race, gender, age and contextual values, people always have and always will sympathize with Hamlet’s character in pertaining to his indecisiveness and how arduous and frustrating our own irresolution can sometimes be. Thus, our own ability to understand the nature of indecisiveness, in a way, reflects our own ability to understand and relate to the indecisiveness of Hamlet.
The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics. Thus, Coleridge once mentioned: “I have a smack of Hamlet in myself, if I may say so” (cited by Bradbrook 151), as Hazlitt noticed that “It is we who are Hamlet’ (cited by Pennington, p. 3). Namely this ability of Hamlet to produce unforgettable impressions on the readers and his unpredictability makes his character interesting for any kind of a reader. His experience spans the entire spectrum of human emotion; he feels almost every emotion which humanity has ever been capable of feeling. This is one of the reasons why he is such an enduring character. As long as people experience any of these emotions, Hamlet’s character will continue to persist and resound within audiences.
Certainly, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most psychologically complex character, balancing grief and affection so perfectly – as the critic James Agate once said, “Hamlet must make us cry one minute and shudder the next” (cited by Herbert, p. 343). Despite vast contextual margins, Hamlet continues to inspire and connect to audiences even today. His characterization to feel varying human emotion, his complexity and drastic contradiction of personality, his expression of universal values – all contribute to Hamlet’s endurance and unchanging power over centuries of literature.
Works Cited
- Barrol, John L., Pitcher, John, Lindsey, Robert, and Cerasano, Susan. Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England. Madison, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
- Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.
- Bradbrook, M.C. Shakespeare: the Poet in His World. New York: Routkledge, 2005.
- Herbert, I. London Theatre Record. Detroit: The University of Michigan, 1989.
- Mulherin, Jennifer, Frost, Abigail, Payne, and Roger. Hamlet. London: Cherrytree Books, 2001.
- Pennington, Michael. Hamlet: A User’s Guide. London: Nick Hern Books, 1996.
- Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Classic Books Company, 2001.
- Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.