Hamlet & Evil

The Poetics of Aristotle is generally viewed as the definitive definition of tragedy. Of all the defining elements Aristotle lists as encompassed by a true tragedy, the most significant is hamartia which translates to an equivalent of error or frailty. In Romeo and Juliet error is Romeo believing Juliet is dead and then hastily killing himself. In Macbeth, the frailty is vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself. In Hamlet, Claudius is greedy and unscrupulous and Polonius is meddling and self-serving. However, the hamartia, or tragic flaw, must be within an otherwise good character for a drama or individual to be truly tragic. Yet, many argue about the definition of Aristotle’s hamartia. The term has been interpreted in many ways. Does error mean an error of judgment, a selection of the wrong alternative, or simply a mistake, a deed committed in ignorance of the facts? Either interpretation of frailty is implied by the term tragic flaw: a character defect or moral failing in an otherwise good man, which causes his downfall” (O’Brien and Dukore 2).

Analyzing Hamlet as the tragic character is like determining whether Mona Lisa is happy or sad in DaVinci’s painting. His tragic flaw may be his obsessive analysis of everyone and everything around him, including himself, i.e., a high level of consciousness which creates indecision and melancholy in him because he is compelled to take action

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ow, “Tentativeness is the peculiar mark of his endlessly burgeoning consciousness; if he cannot know himself, wholly, that is because he is a breaking wave of sensibility, of thought and feeling pulsating onward...Self-consciousness in Hamlet augments melancholy at the expense of all other affects” (Bloom 405). Hamlet is a reflecting pool of thought and of Denmark, and something in the state is rotten. Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia demonstrates this because he is aware that words are meaningless, and, at best, only a verbalization of what is already dead or a futile attempt at meaning in a meaningless world can be had by words, “Nietzsche’s most Shakespearean realization is pure Hamlet: we can find words only for what is dead in our hearts, so that necessarily there is a kind of contempt in every act of speaking. The rest is silence; speech is agitation, betrayal, restlessness, torment of self and others” (Bloom 400). This is why Hamlet says in his “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, “That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,/Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,/Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,/And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion!” (Shakespeare II.ii. 568-572). He detests having to refl
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Approximate Word count = 2098
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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