hamlet resilience thesis

Resilience of Hamlet and Oedipus by W.Shakespeare

Hamlet and Oedipus are both complex characters who have struggled much and experienced many difficulties throughout their lives. Although they were created in different historical periods and settings, they had much in common, and, at some point, they both faced problems that appeared as a test of their resilience. Many researchers have analyzed Hamlet and Oedipus Rex multiple times, evaluating the central characters of literary works and assessing how they deal with their issues. Specifically, there is an open debate on who is more resilient – Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Sophocles’ Oedipus. This paper aims to answer that question by analyzing the main characters of both works and comparing their behaviors. Oedipus is more resilient than Hamlet since serious conditions precede his suffering, he does not have a personal motive, and his highly complicated life is not finished when the tragedy ends.

First, it is essential to understand that Hamlet’s role has always been a controversial subject in the literary community. As it is known, there are thousands of books and articles written on Hamlet which interpret his personality differently. Hamlet has proven to be one of the most complicated characters of all time in theatre. Konstantin Stanislavsky, who is considered to be a great theatrical director of the last century, once said that playing Hamlet on stage is a stumbling block in the actor’s profession (Shakespeare 1). Hamlet was one of the most entangled Shakespeare’s creations, and the creator himself was probably the only person to understand his character entirely. Thus, it would be challenging to analyze Hamlet’s resilience separately since there are many contradictions and controversial opinions on this topic. However, the analysis becomes less complex if conducted as a part of a comparison of Hamlet and another literary character – Oedipus, in this case.

The first reason why Oedipus is – or has to be – more resilient than Hamlet is the conditions in which the actions take place in both tragedies. Oedipus is the son of Laius, king of Thebes, who sends his son away from the royal family because of a deadly prophecy (Sophocles 26). The events of the tragedy occurred in ancient Greece many hundreds of years before the events of Hamlet. As it is known, Greek mythology, including its gods, supernatural events, and mysteries, was perceived earnestly in former times. A single prophecy could fear an entire city’s population, and many people would do everything in their power to avoid certain prophecies or even cancel them. On the opposite, many people believed that prophecies were inevitable, and those who had become their victims – like Oedipus – could only face the prophecy and embrace its consequences. Hamlet, in his turn, is only a victim of a palace intrigue, which makes his resilience look less exerted (Shakespeare 43). In other words, the problems of Oedipus appear much more widescale as he deals with celestial matters, and he has to withstand their pressure.

Another reason why Oedipus is more resilient than Hamlet is that both characters’ motives are completely different. Although Hamlet has the right to grieve and mourn his dead father, his further actions are motivated by vengeance, not by grief (Shakespeare 43). He pretends to be insane while watching the situation to make sure that Claudius, his uncle and his mother’s new husband, has murdered his father, the former King of Denmark, to claim his throne. Once Hamlet acknowledges that Claudius is indeed guilty, he takes a series of actions that eventually lead him to kill his uncle and take his vengeance. Hamlet demonstrates resilience going through these events, but he only does what he thinks should be done, while Oedipus does what he has to do, and his fate was predicted long before his birth. Hamlet could embrace his fate and make peace with it, though it was not the best option. However, Oedipus does not have such an option at all. His motive appears obscure as he does not even have one: Oedipus follows his determined fate.

Furthermore, the hero of Sophocles has suffered since he was a little child as his father ordered his people to kill Oedipus. The man who was supposed to do it could not take a child’s life, which is why he gave the king’s son to a shepherd from Corinth. Trying to avoid the prophecy, Oedipus leaves his adoptive parents and kills his birth father on his way to Thebes. His wandering, filled with struggles and awful deeds, has brought him much pain, and he tells his children that none of them is as sick as he is (Sophocles 3). Summing up, Oedipus has to live as an adopted child, deal with the deadly prophecy, leave his parents to save them, and then fulfill the prophecy, unknowingly killing his actual father. His problems start when he is just an innocent child. On the contrary, Hamlet’s struggle begins when he is a grown man who has some life experience and a fully formed mind and whose beliefs are already established. He starts as a prince with more resources and opportunities than Oedipus, meaning that the character created by Sophocles has to be much more resilient to withstand the burden of his misfortunes.

Finally, Oedipus has to deal with the consequences of his actions after all the main events of the tragedy, and Hamlet dies after he kills Claudius, ending his suffering. Death frees Hamlet from his burdens and the necessity to be strong and resilient since there is no need for all that in the afterlife. Although death is mostly considered a negative phenomenon, for Oedipus, it is a luxury that he cannot afford, which is why he cuts his own eyes off and becomes blind (Sophocles 49). This decision represents his way of punishing himself for all he has done, and his life continues, full of reflections and constant thinking about his past. People need resilience most not at the moment they act but when they have time to reconsider their actions. Therefore, Oedipus is much more resilient than Hamlet, as Shakespeare’s character does not have to reflect on his life.

Overall, Oedipus is more resilient than Hamlet because of the conditions he was raised in, the absence of personal motive, and his complex life, in which he reflects on the consequences of his actions. First, Oedipus is a victim of the inevitable deadly prophecy, while Hamlet is only a victim of the royal intrigue related to seizing the throne. Second, Oedipus’s suffering is not personally motivated, while Hamlet seeks vengeance for his father. Third, Oedipus has had a much more complicated life than Hamlet, and he does not let himself die in the end, giving him time to reflect on his deeds. Everything mentioned above illustrates that Oedipus has to be a much more resilient person than Hamlet to deal with the burdens of his life.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Yale University Press, 2003.

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Counter Corporation, 1991.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 )

With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet , for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive; but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized; and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness; sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. These, in their broadest terms, have been—for Hamlet, as we interpret him—the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act.

—Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet

Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. The many-sided Hamlet—son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger—is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture. The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes—Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote—who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. “It is we ,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.”

Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth , Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters—from royals to gravediggers—and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Hamlet also bristles with a seemingly inexhaustible array of ideas and themes, as well as a radically new strategy for presenting them, most notably, in transforming soliloquies from expositional and motivational asides to the audience into the verbalization of consciousness itself. As Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “In its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity.” Hamlet, more than any other play that preceded it, turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche struggling to cope with a world that has lost all certainty and consolation. Struggling to reconcile two contradictory identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—Prince Hamlet becomes the modern archetype of the self-divided, alienated individual, desperately searching for self-understanding and meaning. Hamlet must contend with crushing doubt without the support of traditional beliefs that dictate and justify his actions. In describing the arrival of the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold declared that “the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” Hamlet anticipates that dialogue by more than two centuries.

Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1570). This early version of the Hamlet story provided Shakespeare with the basic characters and relationships but without the ghost or the revenger’s uncertainty. In the story of Amleth there is neither doubt about the usurper’s guilt nor any moral qualms in the fulfillment of the avenger’s mission. In preChristian Denmark blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation, not a potentially damnable moral or religious violation, and Amleth successfully accomplishes his duty by setting fire to the royal hall, killing his uncle, and proclaiming himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare’s more immediate source may have been a nowlost English play (c. 1589) that scholars call the Ur – Hamlet. All that has survived concerning this play are a printed reference to a ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” and criticism of the play’s stale bombast. Scholars have attributed the Ur-Hamle t to playwright Thomas Kyd, whose greatest success was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the earliest extant English tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy popularized the genre of the revenge tragedy, derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Latin plays of Seneca, to which Hamlet belongs. Kyd’s play also features elements that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet, including a secret crime, an impatient ghost demanding revenge, a protagonist tormented by uncertainty who feigns madness, a woman who actually goes mad, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that includes the death of the avenger himself. An even more immediate possible source for Hamlet is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), another story of vengeance on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist.

Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions. Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a heartbroken maiden, a fistfight at her burial, and a climactic duel that results in four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and core existential truths. Shakespeare put mystery, intrigue, and sensation to the service of a complex, profound epistemological drama. The critic Maynard Mack in an influential essay, “The World of Hamlet ,” has usefully identified the play’s “interrogative mode.” From the play’s opening words—“Who’s there?”—to “What is this quintessence of dust?” through drama’s most famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”— Hamlet “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.” The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind the play’s conflicts, complicating Hamlet’s search for answers and his fulfillment of his role as avenger.

Hamlet opens with startling evidence that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has been seen in Elsinore, now ruled by his brother, Claudius, who has quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. When first seen, Hamlet is aloof and skeptical of Claudius’s justifications for his actions on behalf of restoring order in the state. Hamlet is morbidly and suicidally disillusioned by the realization of mortality and the baseness of human nature prompted by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty, and in Hamlet’s view, incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

A recent student at the University of Wittenberg, whose alumni included Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus, Hamlet is an intellectual of the Protestant Reformation, who, like Luther and Faustus, tests orthodoxy while struggling to formulate a core philosophy. Brought to encounter the apparent ghost of his father, Hamlet alone hears the ghost’s words that he was murdered by Claudius and is compelled out of his suicidal despair by his pledge of revenge. However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. Is the ghost truly his father’s spirit or a devilish apparition tempting Hamlet to his damnation? Is Claudius truly his father’s murderer? By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? Despite swearing vengeance, Hamlet delays for two months before taking any action, feigning madness better to learn for himself the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet’s strange behavior causes Claudius’s counter-investigation to assess Hamlet’s mental state. School friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are summoned to learn what they can; Polonius, convinced that Hamlet’s is a madness of love for his daughter Ophelia, stages an encounter between the lovers that can be observed by Claudius. The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. Moreover, the suspicion of his father’s murder and his mother’s sexual betrayal shatter Hamlet’s conception of the world and his responsibility in it. Pushed back to the suicidal despair of the play’s opening, Hamlet is paralyzed by indecision and ambiguity in which even death is problematic, as he explains in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the third act:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these 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 traveller 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.

The arrival of a traveling theatrical group provides Hamlet with the empirical means to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the ghost and Claudius’s guilt. By having the troupe perform the Mousetrap play that duplicates Claudius’s crime, Hamlet hopes “to catch the conscience of the King” by observing Claudius’s reaction. The king’s breakdown during the performance seems to confirm the ghost’s accusation, but again Hamlet delays taking action when he accidentally comes upon the guilt-ridden Claudius alone at his prayers. Rationalizing that killing the apparently penitent Claudius will send him to heaven and not to hell, Hamlet decides to await an opportunity “That has no relish of salvation in’t.” He goes instead to his mother’s room where Polonius is hidden in another attempt to learn Hamlet’s mind and intentions. This scene between mother and son, one of the most powerful and intense in all of Shakespeare, has supported the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in which he is stricken not by moral qualms but by Oedipal guilt. Gertrude’s cries of protest over her son’s accusations cause Polonius to stir, and Hamlet finally, instinctively strikes the figure he assumes is Claudius. In killing the wrong man Hamlet sets in motion the play’s catastrophes, including the madness and suicide of Ophelia, overwhelmed by the realization that her lover has killed her father, and the fatal encounter with Laertes who is now similarly driven to avenge a murdered father. Convinced of her son’s madness, Gertrude informs Claudius of Polonius’s murder, prompting Claudius to alter his order for Hamlet’s exile to England to his execution there.

Hamlet’s mental shift from reluctant to willing avenger takes place offstage during his voyage to England in which he accidentally discovers the execution order and then after a pirate attack on his ship makes his way back to Denmark. He returns to confront the inescapable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 in which he realizes that even Alexander the Great must return to earth that might be used to “stop a beer-barrel” and Julius Caesar’s clay to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia’s funeral procession. Hamlet sustains his balance and purpose by confessing to Horatio his acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his voyage to England: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will.” Finally accepting his inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Agreeing to a duel with Laertes that Claudius has devised to eliminate his nephew, Hamlet asserts that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

In the carnage of the play’s final scene, Hamlet ironically manages to achieve his revenge while still preserving his nobility and moral stature. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths. Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Meanwhile, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup Claudius intended to insure Hamlet’s death, and, after the remorseful Laertes blames Claudius for the plot, Hamlet, hesitating no longer, fatally stabs the king. Dying in the arms of Horatio, Hamlet orders his friend to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and transfers the reign of Denmark to the last royal left standing, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras. King Hamlet’s death has been avenged but at a cost of eight lives: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet. Order is reestablished but only by Denmark’s sworn enemy. Shakespeare’s point seems unmistakable: Honor and duty that command revenge consume the guilty and the innocent alike. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard.

Fortinbras closes the play by ordering that Hamlet be carried off “like a soldier” to be given a military funeral underscoring the point that Hamlet has fallen as a warrior on a battlefield of both the duplicitous court at Elsinore and his own mind. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust? To be or not to be?

Hamlet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Hamlet’s Wisdom

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Sean Keilen, Hamlet’s Wisdom, The Cambridge Quarterly , Volume 50, Issue 4, December 2021, Pages 323–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfab034

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In his earliest speeches , Hamlet stubbornly refuses to forget: he is conspicuous not only for his grief, but also for his insistence on remembering. So it is striking that, following his first conversation with the Ghost, Hamlet declares that he will obliterate all traces of the ‘books’ – whatever they may be – that have made an impression on him. Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter.           (I. v. 98–104) 1

Hamlet does not specify which books he valued highly enough to copy out or learn by heart. Presumably they run the gamut of the poets, historians, and moral philosophers, both sacred and profane, that a Renaissance scholar might read for self-cultivation. ‘Let no day pass that you do not read, or listen to, or write, something which will augment your knowledge, your judgement, or your virtue’, advised the sixteenth-century educator Juan Luis Vives – in a passage that itself imitates a letter written by the first-century Roman philosopher Seneca. 2 About such great works of the past, Vives asked, ‘Do they not contain the knowledge of antiquity and of all human memory, of so many words and deeds … by which practical wisdom is cultivated and helped?’ They do, Vives answered, and that is why we should remember what they say: ‘They contain all that knowledge, that encyclopedia which leads to the life of the greatest usefulness, in which what has been observed and thought has been diligently consigned to posterity.’ 3

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Oedipus and Hamlet Characters’ Contrast and Comparison Essay

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Introduction

Works cited.

There are many literary genres, each of which inclines either to great joy or to deep sorrow. The tragedy describes the grief that came because of the decisions made by the main character. Various literary disputes filled the minds of people even in the heyday of multiple kinds of mythologies when all the accumulated ideas about the world were necessarily linked into a fundamentally indivisible philosophical system that, regardless of the environment in which it was woven, always had two poles in itself: man – woman; light-darkness; good – evil. The tragedy is created precisely by the theme of fatality, which comes from the main character’s decision and leads him to a significant fall or death. The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast one of the main characters of literature – Oedipus and Hamlet, as well as to determine the qualities and skills of people which make them steadfast under challenging situations.

The most ambitious of all the problems of a person, including a tragic hero, remains the problem of his finiteness, or rather death, and even more precisely – the feeling of a foregone conclusion of everything. In the play of Sophocles, Oedipus, the king of Thebes, plays the role of a tragic hero struggling with an unsolvable, fatal problem. The idea expressed by Sophocles expresses the senselessness of fighting with one’s fate. That is, Oedipus predicted that he would kill his father and marry his mother. No matter how he tries to avoid it, in the end, he kills his father, marries the dowager queen – his mother, and realizing this, he puts out his eyes and leaves his kingdom, becoming a tramp.

Shakespeare creates his tragic hero – Hamlet, who is also at war with the fate that took his father. In addition, Hamlet also fights with himself in an attempt to give answers to impossible questions. Hamlet’s dilemma is more profound and morally more sophisticated than that of Oedipus. It is the sum of all his mental tosses. Comparing the positions of Hamlet and Oedipus, it can be seen that they both came to a tragic end with terrible consequences of their own decisions.

Probably, there may be such an opinion that fate led both heroes to this path. Gleiser claims that there is such a thing as free will, and it is defined as the ability of a people to make their own choice (Gleiser). That is, the situation of both heroes is quite complicated, Oedipus – by the will of fate, was destined to kill his father and marry his mother, and in Hamlet-he decided to kill everyone with the freedom of his own choice. After all, both heroes could avoid such consequences by making informed decisions, but hasty decisions led them both to a tragic end. In this case, fate could still play a big role, but the heroes tried their best to change it and escape from what was destined.

Oedipus had such a complex multi-faceted character trait as hubris. That is arrogance, ambition, stubbornness, and excess pride (TedEd). Of course, the man who defeated the sphinx and saved Thebes from the monster is worthy of respect and reverence, but in Oedipus, the trait of arrogance is too clearly demonstrated. Hamlet was not endowed with a feature of arrogance, but hamartia leads him to a similar ending. People and specific literary characters need to have several qualities that will help them to withstand difficult situations. Such attributes include the ability to think quickly in difficult situations, the ability to think through their steps and their consequences, as well as mercy.

In both of the articles studied, the authors highlight that it is impossible to influence a person’s decisions, and I agree with this opinion. This is because decisions are often based on many external factors that play an essential role in decision-making. In the article, The Choice Is Yours: The Fate Of Free Will author claims that there is someone who makes decisions for a person, but this is not true (Gleiser). Undoubtedly, when someone can contribute their opinion or advice, a person will listen to it and change their opinion. Still, even in this case, the actions directly depend on the individual himself. The author of this article also seeks to show that some decisions are conscious since first, a person thinks and then does. Some actions are already predetermined (as in Oedipus), and nothing will change this. The author suggests that scientists will have the opportunity to redefine people’s actions before they realize their choice.

The author of the article Is Free Will an Illusion? seeks to show, based on scientific research, that people’s consciousness is only a part of the brain process. That is, this author also assumes that people’s actions are predetermined (Nichols). Naturally, this idea takes place, which applies not only to the heroes of plays and myths but also to ordinary people in real life. On the other hand, it is important to understand that people often think through their steps and the brain also participates in this process. There are situations in which people, even after thinking for a long time, make the wrong decisions.

Comparing Hamlet and Oedipus, it can be concluded that Hamlet showed the most significant resistance. He gives himself up to thoughts, he is tormented by doubts, but this time of the hero’s life is by no means barren. Reflection leads Hamlet to the knowledge of life in its most profound contradictions. He buys this knowledge at a high price, at the expense of torment and suffering, but Hamlet passes this learning path with dignity. He is not afraid of any terrible truths that arise before him as a conclusion from his reflections and observations. A weak person by nature would not have survived such a test. Not every soul is capable of knowing the truth through grief and suffering.

In conclusion, the genre of tragedy can be described as an intense struggle of solid characters and passions, which ends with a catastrophic outcome for the characters. Oedipus and Hamlet became characters of exactly this genre, and each of them had their destinies that led to a similar result and free will, which still pre-determined their actions. Oedipus was a successful king, a hero who was proud of and eventually became a blind tramp. Hamlet had a good life, and a beloved woman, but he killed everyone and eventually died himself. They both did not expect that fate would lead them to such an outcome, and even though each of them tried to avoid it, fate decreed that they were both dead.

Gleiser, Marcelo. “The Choice Is Yours: The Fate Of Free Will.” NPR, 2014.

Nichols, Shaun. “Is Free Will an Illusion? ” Scientific American, 2011.

“Why Tragedies Are Alluring.” YouTube, uploaded by TedEd, 2015.

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IvyPanda. (2022, August 11). Oedipus and Hamlet Characters' Contrast and Comparison. https://ivypanda.com/essays/oedipus-and-hamlet-characters-contrast-and-comparison/

"Oedipus and Hamlet Characters' Contrast and Comparison." IvyPanda , 11 Aug. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/oedipus-and-hamlet-characters-contrast-and-comparison/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Oedipus and Hamlet Characters' Contrast and Comparison'. 11 August.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Oedipus and Hamlet Characters' Contrast and Comparison." August 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/oedipus-and-hamlet-characters-contrast-and-comparison/.

1. IvyPanda . "Oedipus and Hamlet Characters' Contrast and Comparison." August 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/oedipus-and-hamlet-characters-contrast-and-comparison/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Oedipus and Hamlet Characters' Contrast and Comparison." August 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/oedipus-and-hamlet-characters-contrast-and-comparison/.

• Resilience in Oedipus and Hamlet’s Characters Words: 1139
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• Oedipus and Hamlet: To Be Resilient, or Not to Be? Words: 1408
• Resilience: Oedipus and Hamlet Words: 554
• Finding Strength While Searching for the Truth: Hamlet and Oedipus Words: 840
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet vs. Sophocles’ Oedipus Words: 1130
• Oedipus and Hamlet – Resilience in Tragedy Words: 1139
• Oedipus Rex & Hamlet: Compare & Contrast Essay Words: 1504
• Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a Tragedy Words: 2752
• The Plays “Oedipus Tyrannus” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare Words: 1107

Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare

Both Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be viewed as illustrations of the resilience of human beings. Resilience means one’s capability to adapt and recover quickly from stressful events. Both Oedipus and Hamlet have difficulties accepting horrible truths about themselves and their families; however, Hamlet seems to be more resilient, behaving with more patience and countenance instead of making reckless choices.

In the course of the plays, both characters learn difficult truths about their past. Oedipus finds out that he killed his own father and married his mother, as was prophesized to him, and this revelation shocks him. Sophocles writes, “…is there a man more agonized? More wed to pain and frenzy? Not a man on earth…” (Sophocles 56). Hamlet is appalled to learn from the ghost of his father that he was killed by his uncle, the new king of Denmark: “O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!” (Shakespeare 47). The initial reaction of both characters is that of shock and anger, and they could not accept the truth.

Further actions of Oedipus and Hamlet show the difference in their characters. Oedipus enters into a fury, rushes to kill his wife and mother, and blinds himself in despair: “I stabbed out these eyes. Why should I have eyes? Why, when nothing I saw was worth seeing? Nothing” (Sophocles 68). He cannot bear the pain and guilt of his actions and the understanding that the discovery of the truth was not worth the death of his wife and the corruption of his family (Steiner 558). Hamlet, on the other hand, does not fly into a rage but swears revenge, as the ghost asks him: “So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word; It is ‘Adieu, adieu! Remember me.’ I have sworn’t” (Shakespeare 47). After the initial shock, he is filled with determination to avenge his father rather than the desire to destroy everything around him.

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex describes the character’s journey towards the truth, while Hamlet tells the story of revenge. Oedipus blinds himself after his horrible discovery and pledges to live the rest of his life in exile. He is devastated and cannot live with the consequences of his actions: “If only I had died, this weight of monstrous doom could not have dragged me and my darlings down” (Sophocles 69). Hamlet is more resilient, and throughout the course of the play pursues his goal of avenging his father. He is determined to kill his uncle, “He that hath killed my king, and whored my mother/ Popped in between the election and my hopes/ Thrown out his angle for my proper life” (Shakespeare 208). He loses all fear of death and believes that if his time has come, there is nothing he can do about it. At the end of the play, Hamlet succeeds in killing his uncle but has to give his own life to his purpose. He dies with the feeling that he has fulfilled his purpose, while Oedipus goes into exile devastated and not able to forgive himself.

Both in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, the characters are faced with horrible truths and try to cope with them. Both have difficulties accepting reality, but Hamlet is more resilient. He reacts calmer, sets a goal, and acts with determination to achieve it, while Oedipus flies into a rage and seeks to destroy himself and his family. Hamlet’s capability to adapt to reality leads him to the fulfillment of his purpose and the acceptance of the inevitability of death, while Oedipus goes into exile feeling guilty and devasted, unable to accept the consequences of his actions.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Yale University Press, 2003.

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Prestwick House Inc., 2005.

Steiner, John. “The Trauma and Disillusionment of Oedipus.” Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, vol. 99. no. 3, 2016, pp. 555–568.

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StudyCorgi. (2022, February 7). Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare. https://studycorgi.com/resilience-in-oedipus-rex-by-sophocles-and-hamlet-by-shakespeare/

"Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare." StudyCorgi , 7 Feb. 2022, studycorgi.com/resilience-in-oedipus-rex-by-sophocles-and-hamlet-by-shakespeare/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare'. 7 February.

1. StudyCorgi . "Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare." February 7, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/resilience-in-oedipus-rex-by-sophocles-and-hamlet-by-shakespeare/.

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StudyCorgi . "Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare." February 7, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/resilience-in-oedipus-rex-by-sophocles-and-hamlet-by-shakespeare/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "Resilience in “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare." February 7, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/resilience-in-oedipus-rex-by-sophocles-and-hamlet-by-shakespeare/.

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Fear Stalks Israel’s Communities on the Front Lines With Lebanon

As tensions again escalate with Hezbollah, Israelis face the prospect of another “lost year” in the evacuated north.

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By Isabel Kershner

To report this story, Isabel Kershner and the photographer Avishag Shaar-Yashuv visited communities inside, and just outside, the evacuated zone near Israel’s border with Lebanon.

For months, Erez Bergman had been working to encourage the evacuated residents of northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon, to return to their homes, with the hope that children could return to their schools this fall and residents could fix up the damage wrought by Hezbollah’s missiles and drones.

Like 80,000 other Israelis from the north, Mr. Bergman, 51, his wife, Maya, and their three school-age children left their house in Kibbutz Snir last October, after the Israeli government decided to distance residents from the northern border — the first such mass evacuation of the area in Israel’s history.

Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Hezbollah was firing rockets into northern Israel and the Israeli military was hitting back, leading to months of tit-for-tat attacks that hit villages and towns in both southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

In April, the Bergmans decided to return to Snir, a cooperative village in the picturesque Galilee Panhandle, a finger of Israeli territory that juts upward along the border. But in late July they had to leave again — for how long this time, they don’t know — as tensions between Israel and Hezbollah reached their highest level in months. Mr. Bergman and other northern residents now say they feel as if they may be looking at “another lost year.”

Before the latest escalation in violence, Mr. Bergman had been spearheading a “Coming Home” project on behalf of the local council with the aim of bringing as many of the evacuees as possible back for the start of the new school year on Sept. 1. He came back with his family “out of Zionism,” he said in mid-July, sitting at the family’s dining table with a panoramic view of southern Lebanon.

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