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Hamlet is the protagonist of Shakespeare’s play, accused of seeking justice for his father’s murder but indecisive. He’s the prince of Denmark, involved with Ophelia, and struggles with his Protestant mind in a Catholic world. His father’s ghost claims Claudius killed him, and Hamlet’s sanity is debated. He’s unable to take decisive action, but eventually kills Claudius and names an heir to the throne. The character is a symbol of the struggle between justice and revenge and exemplifies the fundamental state of man as confusion and complexity.
Hamlet is the main character of Shakespeare’s play of the same name. As the protagonist, he’s accused of seeking justice after discovering his father’s murder, but is notoriously undecided about what to do. Scholars have debated the character’s motives, sanity, and importance for over 400 years.
In the play, the character is the prince of Denmark, son of the recently deceased king and his queen, Gertrude. He becomes romantically involved with Ophelia, the daughter of the verbose Polonius, but breaks off their relationship in the course of the play. The prince is said to have been educated in Wittenberg, Germany, the homeland of Martin Luther and the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation. Scholars often view one of the prince’s many problems as the struggle of a Protestant mind in a Catholic world.
Before the game begins, the king has died under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Soon after, Gertrude marries the brother of the dead king, Claudius. This marriage is somewhat scandalous, particularly for the young prince, as he considers his in-laws’ marriage to be incestuous. The prince is visited by his father’s ghost, who claims that Claudius killed him to seize the throne and marry Gertrude. Hamlet is then asked if the ghost was real, if he was telling the truth, and what he should have done about it.
The prince’s sanity is a source of constant contention among Shakespearean scholars. To confuse the court about his situation, Hamlet acts as if he’s gone mad. However, it is never made clear whether it is really acting or whether the character is actually delusional. Actors and directors have portrayed the character in a variety of ways, choosing to portray him sane and scheming or just plain insane based on the needs of the production.
Even if sane, the character is wracked by an indecision bordering on psychosis, rendering him unable to take any decisive action for most of the game. After realizing his uncle’s guilt, he is presented with a perfect opportunity to kill him as he prays. The prince chooses to do nothing, however, in case the treacherous Claudius goes to heaven if killed while praying.
Claudius eventually realizes his nephew’s suspicions and places him aboard a ship to England with the intention of having him killed upon arrival. In one of the most controversial sections of offstage action in all of Shakespeare, the ship is apparently attacked by pirates whom Hamlet bribes to take him back to Denmark and his family castle of Elsinore. When the prince returns, some experts argue that his pirate adventure finally compels him to act, and the character is free to make the decisions he has avoided for three acts. Though he dies in the final bloodbath, the Prince of Denmark manages to kill his uncle and name an heir to the throne.
There are seemingly endless theories about the protagonist of Shakespeare’s work. Some argue that he suffers from a Freudian obsession with his mother and is driven to murder by jealousy of his uncle’s theft of both the throne and Gertrude. Others argue that the prince is a metaphorical symbol of the struggle between justice and revenge. In his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet discusses the problem of never being able to know whether death is better than life until one dies, leading some to call him dangerously suicidal and severely depressed.
The character is the archetype of a Shakespearean-era concept called the non-self-fashioned Renaissance. While England’s Elizabethan era was philosophically concerned with defining oneself by the roles one played, the later Jacobean era posed the philosophical question of what remained when all roles had been stripped away. The incessant scholastic arguments about its meaning and his mind often seem to support the idea that Hamlet, considered Shakespeare’s first Jacobean hero, exemplifies the vision of the fundamental state of man which is confusion and complexity.
