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Essay on The Ideal Hero in Shakespeare's Hamlet

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Hamlet is not like the other tragic heroes of his period. He stands apart from other Shakespeare's heroes because of his innocence. Perhaps this supposed tragic hero is an ideal hero - one without the tragic flaw. The tragic flaw has been a part of the formula for the tragedy since the Golden age of Greece. The main, and, most often, the only flaw that has been attributed to Hamlet is his delay. This seems to constitute the central part in Hamlet. Critics seem to cling to this detail, as if trying to save the status of Hamlet as a typical Elizabethan tragedy of revenge. By the definition of tragedy, there should exist a flaw in the character of the main hero, who is a great personality that is engaged in a struggle that ends …show more content…

Being a loyal prince and son, and one whom entire kingdom respected, he should seek revenge and bring justice back in the royal court. The whole play would be very simple if this murdered was an open assassination. But no, Shakespeare made sure that this assassination was secret, that no one, except maybe Claudius, knew about it. This puts in a completely different context the play that was written by Thomas Kyd, a play titled Ur-Hamlet, which Shakespeare used as a basis for his Hamlet (Grebanier, 111).This way, Shakespeare accomplished very different development of action, and ultimately one of the best plays in the history. Along with that, Shakespeare created disagreement concerning reasons why Hamlet waited so long before killing Claudius.

A careful reader can notice that more than two months pass between Hamlet being told by the Ghost about the evil deed, and Hamlet following through his plan. One can argue that from this follows that Hamlet procrastinated, having that one flaw - being passive, not daring to act. But Shakespeare never payed attention to this time interval. An audience wasn't aware of it, because Shakespeare didn't want it to be - the rather large time interval was of no consequence, and truly one cannot notice this without a conscious calculation (Grebanier, 179). More critics, especially during popularity of Freud, have tried to explain Hamlet's delay exclusively from

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