Is Hamlet an Intentionally Awful Character?

So I'm not sure where to put this so i finally just settled on literature as it's really about the writing behind him.

Was Prince Hamlet intended to be an incompetent, self-righteous asshole? Were we actually supposed to support him in his mad crusade that ruined the lives of several innocent people who had nothing to do with his father's death? Sending his "friends" to their death, driving Ophelia to madness and then death by randomly stabbing her father... Prince Hamlet left nothing but carnage and grief in his wake as he tried to kill one unsuspecting little old man.

Shakespeare is a good writer and I like Hamlet overall but I just can't tell if we're supposed to be backing this moron or if we're supposed to view him as the horrible villain that he is.

edited 30th Jul '14 8:15:45 AM by Nikkolas

I think that it's supposed to be a tragedy: Hamlet is flawed (although I doubt that he was intended to be viewed as a villain), everything goes pretty horibly, and while I suspect that we're intended to sympathise, I'm not sure that we're really intended to support anyone.

He's the hero, you're supposed to root for him.

edited 30th Jul '14 9:21:17 AM by LordGro

It's been a while since last I saw Hamlet: are those both from the end?

If so, then I'm inclined to suggest that we're expected to feel for him—to think that this is a loss—but not necessarily to support him—to want him to achieve all his ends.

It's a hard call. One thing that's important is that the play is within the Revenge Tragedy genre and the contemporary audience presumably knew that- it's a Foregone Conclusion that the protagonist's revenge plan will result in the deaths of pretty much everyone in the play, himself included. Part of this has to do with ambiguity/debate as to the moral rightness of revenge as well as theological uncertainty about ghosts (basically, the two went together in the question of whether a ghost telling someone to take revenge could be anything but an evil spirit pretending to be them).

So, the question going in the play wasn't whether things would go wrong, but how/when they would go wrong. One other thing, is that Hamlet has at its source a Norse revenge story where that revenge is presented positively, but the play and its characters have a (for the time) modern viewpoint. The result is that Hamlet does all this questionable revenge stuff from the source material, but his thought process matches up oddly with those actions- depending on how you look at it, it makes Hamlet a great character or a self-righteous asshole.

edited 30th Jul '14 9:52:46 AM by Hodor

@Ars Thaumaturgis: Yes, both quotes are from the end of Hamlet.

@Hodor:

Yes, that's the way I see it too. It is a traditional story to which Shakespeare adds Hamlet's self-doubts. The plot is still there, but because of Shakespeare's changes some of the happenings are poorly motivated, and Hamlet's "melancholia" is employed to fill the gaps.

The judgment on Hamlet's character obviously depends on the viewer. As for Shakespeare's intention, Hamlet is the story of a young prince who grows from a bookish and insecure nerd to a warlike and worthy son of his father.

Yes. Because Shakespeare.

The source material from which the so-called Bard Of Avon stole ideas behind "his" play from (a habit of his that's been well documented) was way more "yeah, this prince is a bad ass and will not flinch from putting down the killer of his relative" rather than "to be or", nah, can't be bothered typing the rest of that.

There's a pretty decent amount of evidence that the first version of Hamlet was written and performed at least a decade before the final version hit the stage, so whether or not the plot was a riff on someone else's work or not is a matter of speculation in this case. We don't have any records of the contents of the Ur-Hamlet, so who knows. We do know that he wrote this version of the role with Richard Burbage in mind, and that the story is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of a Danish legend—although the legend actually has some more interesting twists, but whatever.

As for the "to be or not to be" soliloquy... it's a guy straight up asking himself whether he wants to kill himself or not, which was a pretty big fucking deal in that era (and still is now, but for different reasons). Given the arc of the play, which is fairly typical of revenge tragedies (if more verbally deft), it's pretty clear that regardless of whether or not Hamlet is mad, he is certainly progressively more reckless, desperate and single-minded. He is meant to be sympathetic in his base goal, but likeable? Probably not.

This is sort of like when people act like Romeo and Juliet is supposed to be about "true love" or something. It's not. It's about how teenagers see being in love and how that can lead to some very bad places when it happens in the middle of an already messed up situation. It's like as soon as people see the word "fardel" or "swain" their ability to understand nuance evaporates, were it ever there in the first place.

edited 1st Aug '14 12:14:20 AM by JHM

No unambiguous heroes seemed to be a hallmark of Shakespeare's. Everyone was flawed and brought their doom upon themselves, although there were often clear villains (like Claudius or Iago)

It's part of why anybody cares about Shakespeare in the first place, really: He liked to put conventions under the knife while essentially inventing new ones.

That and the man put more new words into our formal vocabulary on a personal basis than any English writer since Chaucer, which is frankly astonishing.

Historically, the "totally ideal hero protagonist" has been more the exception than the rule. Especially in classical epics, the hero wasn't primarily good; he was primarily larger than life. Both his admirable deeds and his crimes, both his brilliancies and his follies, were on a bigger-than-human scale. Think of Achilles and Odysseus, just for starters.

This kind of "bigger than life, for good and bad" tradition was still kicking in Elizabethan times. Hamlet is a great hero/monster, someone to model yourself after unless he's being someone to run from fast, a paragon and a ticking bomb. He's intentionally awful on a heroic scale, just as he's intentionally good—and always intentionally fascinating. One rightly admires him, one rightly loves him, one rightly hates him ... but no, we're not supposed to just "like" him in the modern sense.

edited 11th Aug '14 7:50:47 AM by Jhimmibhob

Elizabethan times? It's still alive and well today.

Odysseus was supposed to be pretty on the up-and-up, from my memory of it. His only real mistake was hubris against Poseidon, but he wasn't a royal order dick like Achilles.

Though it's true that the noble and wise hero is really a very modern invention. I wonder, did it start with Superman?

My personal ad-hoc hypothesis is that it is St. George the Dragonslayer. He is a selfless saint, but also a heroic warrior. The ultimate Knight in Shining Armor. (So, not strictly modern.)

Elizabethan Britons, living in a society run by monarchs and aristocratic dynasties, did not see Hamlet's actions as "awful". That Hamlet sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their doom is not meant to reflect negatively on him. In fact, it is meant to reflect positively on him. It proves that he "has what it takes" to be a king. They were willing tools of Claudius, they ignored Hamlet's warning, it was necessary to get rid of them.

And maybe we are even expected to feel the same way about Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia. Would Hamlet have become king, Ophelia would not have been a suitable wife for him: her family is not noble or powerful enough. The original Amleth in Gesta Danorum kills his uncle, becomes king and marries a foreign queen, not the Ophelia character.

edited 15th Aug '14 1:07:32 PM by LordGro

@Jhimmi: Yup. The term in Renaissance Italy was virtuoso, which should be familiar if anyone has read The Prince...

But at the same time, his character development is impeded (or maybe helped) by some Sanity Slippage. How much is a good question. He says he's putting on an "Antic disposition," but that's a holdover from the original Danish legend, and it doesn't make that much sense in the original except that it buys Hamlet some time. Time that you think he could have bought some more of by continuing to act normal. But then there's stuff he does before he makes this resolution — like visiting Ophelia and, by the sounds of it, grabbing her and staring at her in a creepy and unhinged way — and how crazy do you have to be to stab someone through a curtain because you're just so sure it's the right guy?

Basically, there's plenty of evidence to argue that he is truly losing his mind, and becomes more dangerous not because he's losing his weaknesses of "patience" and "mercy" (remember, the quality of mercy is not strained), but because of mental illness. Which makes him a figure of pity and of fear.

Machiavellian mastermind coming into his own as a king-to-be, but also a depressed and suicidal college kid, deep in grief and wracked by the betrayals he perceives everywhere.

Although to be honest I think that Hamlet has some severe structural issues — the pacing is terrible and it's pretty hard to track Hamlet's thought processes.

edited 19th Aug '14 11:56:44 PM by vifetoile

Yup.You've described Hamlet perfectly there. And also the protagonists of every other one of Shakespeare's tragedies' protagonists. Especially Othello and Macbeth.

Complicating the picture even more, several critics make a persuasive case that not only is Hamlet sane, he's not even trying to pose as crazy. They argue that nothing he says and does is out of line for the fellow he is: an intelligent, sardonic, high-strung man, whose perceptiveness is so acute that it makes life almost intolerably painful, dropped into a uniquely dangerous and morally ambiguous situation with monstrous responsibilities that he didn't ask for; his beloved father is dead, and everyone left alive sees him as a problem to be eliminated, controlled, or co-opted. What's the "sane" way to conduct oneself?

In other words, an actor can play many of Hamlet's mid-play lines as crazed or fake-crazed, but doesn't have to under the dramatic circumstances.

edited 20th Aug '14 8:14:41 AM by Jhimmibhob

Unless you're these critics, in which case poor Hamlet was bewitched by his uncle into madness and the whole play was Claudius' Xanatos Gambit to get rid of Hamlet and Laertes.

Hamlet's not the hero, he's the protagonist. I don't think you're supposed to root for him so much as sympathize with his confusion, pain, and rage. It's a story about a man whose father was murdered who then descends into madness. There's no "rooting" to do.