Name: Vadher Ankita

Paper: 1 the Renaissance Literature.

Topic: Hamlet as a Tragic Hero.

Sem - 1 M.A.: 2,

Roll no: 17

Year: 2012-13.

Submitted To,

Dr. Dilip Barad.

Dept. of .English

M.K. Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar.

™³¢ Hamlet as a Tragic Hero ¢³˜

™ A New Tragic Pattern:-

The end of the 16^th century, when Shakespeare was developing his art of tragedy in the tragedies written before the time of Shakespeare, there was little subtlety or complexity in the solution presented, and little depth of character portrayal. Shakespeare produced a new tragic pattern began to emerge very much riches and deeper the old one, sounding intimately the depth of the human mind and spirit and the moral possibilities of human behavior and displaying the extent to which men’s destinies are interrelated one with another’s.

™ Hamlet as a Tragic Hero:-

A Tragedy by Shakespeare is concerned chiefly with one man, and is a tale of suffering and misfortunes leading to that man’s death and of the death of a few others also. In this play Hamlet became a tragic hero. We can see tragedy of hamlet. He was the prince of the Denmark. He was a well known, honored, and well beloved figure in the political life of Denmark of the time. The play depicts the mental suffering which Hamlet endures his mother’s shameless conduct of getting remarried with Uncle Claudius after the death of his father. Hamlet’s distress over the conduct of his mother is clearly reflected in his very first soliloquy. After his mother remarried, He generalization: “Frailty, thy name is woman.”  Hamlet’s mental suffering is intensified by the disclosure with which the ghost makes to him aware about his murder. Hamlet subsequently undergoes even greater mental suffering because he finds himself unable to avenge the murder of his father. Ultimately before dying he stabs the murderer of his father and thus at last takes his revenge.

™ A Reason for Hamlet’s Mental Suffering:-

The mental suffering of hamlet is that at times he seems to have gone mad. We know that hamlet merely pretends to be mad and that he is not to be regarded as actually mad. In the play Hamlet makes him bitter and cynical in his conversation with the various characters in the play. The conduct of his mother in having got remarried hastily, and apart from the Ghost’s shocking disclosure, what gives Hamlet is his belief that Ophelia has betrayed his love for her and his trust in her although here Hamlet is made mistakes and his mistake too is part of Hamlet’s tragedy.

™ A Defect in Hamlet’s Character:-

The suffering and calamities lead to the final disaster in a Shakespeare tragedy are not merely sent from above the tragedy of Hamlet is due mainly to a defect in his own character. This defect is his incapacity for quick decisions and for action. The result is that he goes on delaying his revenge. He arranges a play he has made sure that the king is guilty who the murder of his father is. When he gets an excellent opportunity to kill Claudius at that time the king is at prayer and that if killed now he would go to heaven. Hamlet believes in Christianity. So he was postponement of his revenge. It’s also responsible for his tragedy.

™ Conflict in the Mind of Hamlet:-

Conflict is essential to every drama. This conflict is of two kinds: the outward conflict between the characters, and then the inner conflict which takes place in the mind of hero. In hamlet the outward conflict takes place between Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet seeks to avenge the murder of his father by killing Claudius, while Claudius seek to get rid of hamlet in order to ensure his own security and stability. Towards the end of the play an outward conflict also takes place between hamlets murdered of largess’s father. The inner conflict is revealed to us in hamlet’s successive soliloquies. The most famous soliloquies are: “To be or not to be that is the question.” An inner conflict appears in these soliloquies: “How all occasions do inform against me.”

In this soliloquies Hamlet asks himself. He feels greatly distressed by the thought that he has not lived up to his own notion of honor which demanded that he should put an end to the life of his father’s murderer. 

™ The Development in the Character of the Tragic Hero:-

Hamlet is a man of intellectual genius. He has high sense of honour; his heart is full of devotion to his dead father. These qualities win him our admiration and sympathy in spite of his lack of a capacity for quick action and his tendency to procrastination. When we first meet Hamlet he is in a state of deep depression. The world seems to him an ‘unwedded garden’. His state of depression continuous and However, by the final scene his composure has returned. He kills Claudius.

™ Growth in Stature & Wisdom:-

          In the beginning of the final scene Hamlet is still beset by doubt from without & within speaking to Horatio he says: “thought would not think how ill all’s here about my heart; but it is no matter.” Through this Hamlet wanted to say Horatio that after his friends reveled his truth about madness that actually he was not mad. But he merely pretends to be mad. A tragedy of the highest kind moves in to the return of the human spirit and at the close we contemplate the basic nature of man.

™ Hamlet as a Melancholy Man:-                  

                                       

          Hamlet was the delay in avenging his father’s murder. Hamlet is a man with a melancholic temperament an explicit moral sensibility or idealism and an intellectual genius. His mother’s hasty remarriage, his natural melancholy has been depended. Hamlet receives a violent shock. The shock comes with a sudden disclosure from the ghost of his mother’s true nature and of the fact that his father had been murdered by his uncle. As a result of this shock he begins to sink further in to melancholy. His futile mental analysis of the deed of revenge which is further weakens him because of his delay. He enslaves him to his melancholy still more.   

™ The Transformation in the Tragic Hero:-

         

Hamlet the hero is transformed into something which he had not been at the beginning of the play. At the end of hamlet, the hero is very different from the man who had longed for death and contemplated suicide. The grave digger scene is essentially a meditation on the inevitably of death. This scene begins light heartedly but it becomes more serious and more general. Hamlet reflection on the skulls thrown up by the grave digger in the course of his digging contains very interesting and very philosophical ideas. Hamlet has commented on a skull which could be the skull of a Politician or of a courtier or of a lawyer. Hamlet is remarks on the skulls and the bones are his last comment on the different between appearance and reality. He has come to accept reality for what it is. It is after the graveyard scene that the man who had continually brooded on death is able to face it.

™ Conclusion:-                                                

          Shakespeare’s tragic heroes do not revenge the world. The dying Hamlet is concerned about the welfare of the sate and his own worldly reputation. Such values are never denied. But at the end of the tragedies they are no longer primary values. The central thing is the spirit of man achieving grandeur.