A first reading - or viewing - of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet suggests that the title character is the hero of the play, the man whose actions and intelligence allows the guilty to be discovered. Hamlet the hero avenges his father and so brings back to his sorely troubled homeland both justice and order. But a more critical reading of the play suggests that while some of Hamlet's intentions and actions may be seen as heroic, many of them are not. By the end of the play, Hamlet has arguably caused far more harm than good. And the reason that he causes harm to so many is that he is compelled to seek revenge. This compulsion for vengeance amounts to a fatal flaw in the prince's character (Brosely 30-39).
Hamlet's character is actually a mixture of his burning desire for revenge mixed with a high level of indecisiveness; he wavers throughout the play between making rash statements and even rasher actions in his pursuit of revenge and an unwillingness to act in any way at all. His primary role as a prince of the nation is to protect his people, but he is doubly unable to do so, preventing from meeting the destiny that should be his both by the way in which his desired for revenge blinds him to the consequences of his actions on the innocent and - when he is not driven by revenge - by his indecisiveness. By the end of the play we see Hamlet as an essentially ineffective person who can only accomplish something when his need for revenge is burning within him (Garner and Sprendnether 88-89).
Hamlet (which was probably written in 1601) would have been easily recognizable to its first audiences as an example of a "revenge play", a favorite for Elizabethan audiences. But Shakespeare's play both shows us the ways in which revenge can be used to glorify a life as well as the ways in which a desire for revenge can make life sordid. Hamlet is the embodiment of both of these things at the same time: The glory and the degradation of the hu...