Character analysis

Question 1

Laurel Amtower

Failing to enact revenge

Answer 1

Hamlet responds to the call for revenge by attempting to “justify the task within the theological and political framework that structures not only his ethical sensibilities, but his very sensibilities regarding who and what he is”. By “believing he acts for a higher agency” (e.g., the Ghost/father) and thus “dismissing the claims of his own integrity,” Hamlet “begins to reinscribe the entities and relationships around him into narratives and texts, to be negotiated and interpreted according to his own absolute gloss”.

Question 2

David B. Arnett

Failing to enact revenge

Answer 2

To ask why Hamlet does not avenge his father’s murder sooner “is not only to deny the very human process of growth but also to deny the validity of a liberal education—the ultimate in revolutionary reconstructions”

Question 3

James S. Baumlin

Failing to enact revenge

Answer 3

Shakespeare’s Prince “presents a study in the failure of prudential, and, thus, stands as a critical test of Humanist educational, ethical, political, rhetorical theory. The fact that Hamlet [. . .] fails the test reveals a crisis lying at the play’s thematic center, a crisis concerning the age’s optimism toward the powers of human reason (and action) and the Humanist aspiration to master worldly fortune”

Question 4

Joanna Byles

Hamlet’s ego

Answer 4

Hamlet’s “ego yields to his superego and takes the suffering the self-abusive superego produces,” leading the tragic hero to exact “revenge upon himself”: Hamlet returns from sea “resigned to his own death” (130). This “conflict between ego and superego constitutes the dynamic action of Hamlet”

Question 5

William Hazlitt

Hamlet as a Hero

Answer 5

Hamlet is as little of the hero as man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility… forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation.