Both Sophocles, in his play Oedipus, and William Shakespeare, in his play Hamlet, draw their audiences (and readers) in by presenting the action of the play as a mystery. However, neither playwright is attempting to craft a modern whodunit mystery, for there is never any real mystery involved in terms of the culpability of the original crime or wrongdoing: We know from the earliest scenes of the play that Hamlet suspects his uncle and his mother of his father's murder even as we know about the prophesy that has led Oedipus father to leave him to die and to be killed in turn.
Rather, the mystery in each play arises from questions over whether the main character will continue along the self-destructive path that fate seems to have laid down for him and - if he does - will he be able to redeem himself for such actions in the end.
Hamlet (probably written in 1601) goes far beyond other tragedies of revenge in depicting to the audience both the sordidness and the potential glory of the human condition. Hamlet feels throughout that he is living in a world defined by both past and present horrors. These horrors are not only the result of his confrontations with the dead - with his murdered father - but also with the sexuality of the living. Indeed, it is certainly arguable that Hamlet is more disturbed by the sexuality of his mother than by the ghost of his father. His inability to confront either the unseemly actions of the dead that do not stay properly buried or the widowed that do not stay properly chaste plunge him into a state of in which crippling indecision alternate with wild and precipitous action. Both his failures to act and the actions he takes bring about terrible consequences and a rising level of tension in the play.
Through all of the mounting horror of the play, Hamlet is strikingly aware of the fact that something is deeply wrong in the Danish court. And yet he does not ever seem to come to terms with the fact that...