Hamlet as a tragic hero

M.K. Bhavnagar University Dept. Of English

NAME: Trivedi Disha Hiteshbhai

ROLL NO: 40

M.A SEM-1

BATCH OF YEAR: 2015-17

Paper No: 1     

Topic: Hamlet as a tragic hero   

Submitted to: Smt. S.b.gardi Dept. of English

Respected sir,

Here I give my opinion about Hamlet as a tragic hero.

                   Hamlet as a tragic hero              

# Brief introduction of writer.

·       ‘Hamlet’ play written by William Shakespeare he is one of the most famous writer and greatest dramatist of his age.

·       Ben Johnson called him:

“The soul of the age”      

                             And

“He was not of an age,

                     But for all time”.

Carlyle, too, rightly observed:

“The empire will go,

                   At any rate some day,

But this Shakespeare does not go,

He lasts forever with us,

We cannot give up our Shakespeare”.

Today we can find his many famous books. His hundreds of editions of play have been published and translations in all major languages.

# Character sketch of Hamlet:

Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, generally agreed to be William Shakespeare’s most fascinating hero. No brief sketch can satisfy his host of admirers or take into account more than a minute fraction of the commentary now in print. The character is a mysterious combination of a series of literary sources and the phenomenal genius of the playwright. Orestes in Greek tragedy is probably his ultimate progenitor, not Oedipus, as some critics have suggested. The Greek original has been altered and augmented by medieval saga and Renaissance romance. Perhaps an earlier Hamlet, written by Thomas Kyd, furnished important material; however, the existence of such a play has been disputed. Hamlet is a mixture of tenderness and violence, a scholar, lover, friend, athlete, philosopher, satirist, and deadly enemy; he is larger than life. Torn by grief for his dead father and disappointment in the conduct of his beloved mother, Hamlet desires a revenge so complete that it will reach the soul as well as the body of his villainous uncle. His attempt to usurp God’s prerogative of judgment leads to all the deaths in the play. Before his death, he reaches a state of resignation and acceptance of God’s will. He gains his revenge but loses his life.

 He is one of the most complex and challenging characters ever drawn on the pages of any drama. Hamlet is the greatest human composition. He has many sided personality like a prince, courter, philosopher, an intellectual, a worrier, scholar, etc,..Here we shall Endeavour to note the salient characteristics of his personality.

Over the centuries critics have explained for Hamlets behavior, but none of them has would been able to…

“Pluck out the heart of my mystery”.

As Hamlet puts it himself.  

Ophelia’s …..

“O what a Nobel mind”.

Speech is one of many suggesting that Shakespeare meant us to think of him this way. 

  While the earliest view was that Hamlet simply a victim of circumstances, later critics saw him as a beautiful but ineffectual soul who lacked the strength of will to avenge his father. Hamlet doesn’t want money, richness, kingdom or empire, etc….His kingdom is the kingdom of mind, and his thoughts are dearer to him than the common realities of everyday life.

Hamlet has been a student and scholar at the Wittenberg University Germany. Still he allows sufficient time to make sure of his grounds. He is skeptical about the ghost also.

“The spirit that i have seen;

May be the dived

‘he says ’Frailty, name is woman!”

If all his feelings translate themselves into thought, it is on less true that all his thought are impregnated with feelings. He loved Ophelia deeply but Ophelia is unable to offlgrstand his depth and does not act and response proper. Hamlet also loves his mother a lot but he hate her to as a wife of his uncle Claudius.

Dr. Bradley thinks that ‘Hamlet’ melancholy is the key to his character. He was not born melancholy. He was cheerful but the ciralmsthance have made him so. This father’s death has given him a great shock. He is tired of life and wishes to dies.

“o that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into dew”.

He suffers from depression and militates suicide. The problem of madness is perhaps the most important and the most bewildering and most maddening problem in Hamlet. There are certain who believe that Hamlet is really mad where as there are certain other critics who believe that Hamlet is only pretending to be mad. Hamlet is a disturbed soul and tortured man.

He says himself:

   “Sir in my heart these was a king of fighting/

that would not let me sleep”.

#Feminist approach in “hamlet”

  As we can see in the “hamlet’ we find two female character are main in the play.

1)    Gertrude       and        2) Ophelia 

Gertrude is a mother of hamlet and queen of Denmark. She is loved a lot hamlet and he also loved his mom but after his father death hamlet opinion changed for his mother because one day king hamlet ghost come and tell him everything what happen with him and who is doing every think and say his secret of his death. After knowing everything he decides to take revenge of his father death. All thinks are come in his mind and thinking how it this possible for any woman can do re marriage just after her husband’s death only passing 2 months. Because it it very short time to growing up. No doubt Gertrude give her all time best for Hamlet.

Ophelia is a beloved of Hamlet. Allover she is very beautiful and innocent girl in play. But Ophelia’s father used to her every time likes a puppet. He all time force to her doing this or this.

In Hamlet we find many approaches every character drawing very well.

Hamlet used most famous soliloquy.. “To be or not to be” that is the question:

Annotations: 

To be, or not to be: that is the question: 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them ? To die: to sleep; 
No more; and by a sleep to say we end 
the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation 
devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; 
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action.—soft you now!
 The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons  
Be all my sins remembered.

 In many senses, Hamlet is the quintessential tragic hero. Not only does he begin with the noblest motivations (to punish his father’s murderer) but by the end, his situation is do dire that the only plausible final act should be his death. Like the classical tragic hero, Hamlet does not survive to see the full outcome of his actions and more importantly, this is because he possesses a tragic flaw. While there are a number of flaws inherent to his character, it is Hamlet’s intense identification with and understanding of the power of words and language that ultimately bring about his requisite tragic ending. Hamlet’s deep connection with language and words causes him to base his perceptions of reality on his interpretation and understanding of words and he allows himself to become overwrought with creating meaning. As this thesis statement for Hamlet suggests, eventually, his own words and philosophical internal banter are his end since being a highly verbose and introspective man, this is both one of his greatest gifts as well as his tragic flaw.

# Conclusion

“Hamlet” is revenge play written by world famous writer William Shakespeare. In Hamlet we find hamlet as a critical study and analysis.  

Claudius was aware of power, clearly when he observed of Hamlet’s apparent madness that “madness in great ones must not unwatched go”. With equal truth Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have observed that power in great ones also must not unwatched go.

# Some of the Last lines of Hamlet#

          O, I die Horatio;

The patent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit;

I cannot live to hear the news from England,

But, I do prophesy the elections lights on Fortinbras:

He was my dying voice so tell him,

With the occur rents more and less which have solicited-

The rest is silence”.

Hear play was end and ending with Hamlets death..

Thank you…………

      

Assignment

Paper no 6 (Victorian age)

Topic: write note on major Victorian novelist.

§            

•                          Introduction:

In Victorian era we have many Novelists. They all are very famous for their creation. Here i’m select some of them for my topic like..

• ·        Charles Dickens
• ·        Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell
• ·        Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne)
• ·        George Eliot

Now i would like to give some detail about them.

v Charles dickens:

Charles dickens (1812-70) is an central to the Victorian novel as Tennyson is to Victorian poetry. Dickens's struggling, unhappy childhood, as the son of poor, debt-ridden dock clerk , brought him into contact with debtors prisons and forced him into work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve. By perseverance he became office boy, journalist and finally original contributor to periodicals. His satirical “sketches by Boz” proved popular and the Pickwick Papers, following hard offer, made his name. In the journey of a novelist it is said that he had to undergo two most traumatic events. The humiliation of the blacking factory and the disgrace of the marshalsea debtor’s prison. The sickening shame of both seeped to depths of his writing and haunting him for the rest of his days.

The Pickwick paper was a great success. Dickens fame was secure. He lived to enjoy a reputation that was unexampled, surpassing even that of scott. His popularity was exploited in journalism, for he edited ‘the daily news’ and founded ‘household words’ and ‘all the year round’. He also commenced his famous series of public readings that brought him much money. He died in his favourite house, god’s hill place.

After earning a lot name and fame dickens had been offered an opportunity to stand for parliament but although he cared desperately about social reform, he had no political axes to grind. His constituency was the whole world, his policy the dignity of human beings. He abhorred the impersonal machinery of a state fuelled by the evil power of wealth, and in his writing he championed the cause of its victims who were defenseless, dehumanized, degraded, demoralized and deflated-victims powerless to help themselves.

Dickens’s exceptional sensitivity expressed itself through his characters who were based on real people and much of his own vitality and experience flowed through their veins. In many powerful passages he exposed the exploiters and dyrants for the impostors they were ridiculing the pompous, deride the insensitive and creating caricatures of all those who had ceased to be human. He promoted the underprivileged whom society had cast aside, eliciting a sympathetic response from his readers and communicating warmth and kindness to those he supported.

Dickens has written wonderful novels and he has enriched the Victorian novel. Apart from his Pickwick papers, he has to his credit few works, they are:

• ·        Oliver twist,
• ·        Nicholas
• ·        master Humphrey’s clock
• ·        the old curiosity shop
• ·        A Christmas carol
• ·        David Copperfield
• ·        black house
• ·        hard times
• ·        a tale of two cities
• ·        Great expectations etc....

His style is neither polished nor scholarly, but it is clear, rapid and workman like the style of the working journalist. As W. J. Long states,,

“dickens is excellent reading, and his novels will continue to be popular just so long as men enjoy a wholesome and absorbing story”.

    George Eliot:

                              Introduction:

      

      George Eliot was one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian age. She stood at the gateway between the old novel the new, no unworthy heir of Thackeray and dickens and no unworthy forerunner of hardy and Henry James. She was essentially a novelist of intellectual life and her psychological insight into the motives of her characters was deep and profound. Like Meredith she intellectualised the novel and gave in a moral fore our and ethical bias, which it had not yet possessed in the hands of dickens and ohackeray. She made notable contribution to the English novel by giving it an air of sobriety, sternness and which it had not attained in the hands of the early Victorian novelists.

George Eliot as a modern novelist:

George Eliot is known as a modern novelist in spite of living in Victorian Age. She wrote in the fashion contrary to that of her contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. She is not completely divorced from the traditions. She draws her picture in the Victorian style, but she develops it in a new direction.
 

    The Victorians, on the whole, were instructive and they wrote what they wanted to write. Eliot, on the other hand, was an intellectual and she wrote what she should have written. She is known as the first intellectual novelist. Her novels are the embodiment of her ideas. The main charm of the Victorians lies in the individual expression, whereas, in Eliot, our interest is kept up in the way she analyses and diagnoses problems. Eliot rejects dogma and wants to analyze the causes of every problem she comes across.
    

Her scenes are more real than those of the Victorians because her realism is not only documentary but also psychological. To other novelists, realism is an intellectual necessity but in her case, it is a creed and emotion rather ambition which follows avidly. Her picture is more realistic owing to her clear perception of realities. She draws her characters inside out.
    

The Victorians were satisfied with the apparent realities whereas Eliot penetrated deep into the phenomenon and brought to light the hidden causes. 
     The Victorians, too, were satirist but they satirize just to create humor so they were ordinary humorist, whereas, Eliot satirized as a serious thinker. Her humor was of a distinct type i.e. intellectual and psychological humor soaked into deep pathos. She fused together comic irony and mild satire to create humor and her end was to moralize. Her humour had a serious message underlying it. This kind of humor is employed by the modern novelists. 
    

Other Victorians did have a moral touch but, in Eliot, we find moral earnestness. Like Fielding, she wrote to inculcate moral in the people. But her concept of morality was quite different from that of Fielding’s. She reshapes the consciousness of the individuals in order to remold the whole structure of the society. She believes in the presence of the moral code at the heart of the universe. She made novels the embodiment of her moral ideas. In “The Mil on the Floss”, she denounces the dominance of the self recklessness, loose-living etc and emphasizes on the absoluteness of duty, endurance, renunciation etc. her concept of morality is based on human values and the laws of human heart.
    

Her psychological approach also makes her modern. The clear sighted vision of the essential of character gives her a definite edge over the Victorians like Bronte, Dickens, Austen, etc. The grasp on the psychological essentials makes her draw complex characters better than the Victorians, because she draws them inside out.
   

  The insight into human nature makes Eliot’s picture of human nature more homogeneous than that of Dickens, etc. She shows that saints and sinners are made of the same clay; however, the latter lack the necessary strength of mind. She has ardent sincerity which compensates for many of the feelings of her aesthetic judgment.
    

 Eliot is reveler of the self. Characters like Maggie are the self-portraiture's of Eliot. She unveils herself through her female characters. Eliot broke away from the fundamental conventions of form and matter. She rejected the standardized formula. She conceived one idea and its logical development.

     She is modern in inspiration, too. Earlier, novel was meant only for the entertainment of the middle class reading public. Eliot’s intellectual approach made novel a ‘meeting place of problems’. She studied Man in relation to higher aspects of life. Eliot was the first novelist to discover this particular track on which the modern novelists are treading today. Though Eliot lived in the Victorian era yet she is modern novelist since she wrote in the modern fashion. But she cannot be called ‘Victo-modern’. Eliot, in contrast, is exclusively orthodox and Victorian in her ideas and modern in her approach. She can also be differentiated from Hardy in the sense that he is peculiarly Victoria in his style and approach and modern in his ideas. To be curt, Eliot is a modern novelist living among st the Victorians

v Three Bronte sisters:

• ·        Charlotte Bronte
• ·        Emily Bronte
• ·        Anne Bronte

§                Charlotte Bronte:

she broke a new ground in the history of the English novel. The novelist following the example of Jane Austen had chosen to portray the manners and ways of social life. Hitherto the novelists had undergone no revolution of mind or soul. They were still faithful to the 18^th century, still engrossed by the outward spectacle, fascinated by life’s multitudinous variety, exhilarated by its humors if not unendurable touched by its pathos, but as yet unaware to the call of the deeper imagination.

She replaced the literature and the novel of manners by the novel of spirit and the inner life of the soul.

“ A literature of manners was to give place to a literature of the spirit”, says baker, in the novels of Charlotte Bronte.

In her novels the soul was at last awake to its own existence and its relations to a complex and perhaps inscrutable universe. She looked into her heart and wrote of thing she had intimately known. “At any rate, her significance in the course of action is that she delineated the intense moods of her own heart and imagination, which have their rapport in the moods of the race.

v List of novels by Charlotte Bronte:

• §  Jane Eyre
• §  Shirley
• §  Vilette
• §  The professor

v List of novels by Emily Bronte:

• §  Wuthering Heights(1847)

v List of novels by Anne Bronte:

• §  Agnes Grey (1847)
• §  The tenant of wild fell hall (1848)

     this is something about theme i hope it will be helpful to batter understanding.

                                       

                                                                   Thank You....

paper 1 hamlet as a tragic hero assignment

M.K. Bhavnagar University Dept. Of English

NAME: Trivedi Disha Hiteshbhai

ROLL NO: 40

M.A SEM-1

BATCH OF YEAR: 2015-17

Paper No: 1

Topic: Hamlet as a tragic hero 

Submitted to: SMT.S.B.GARDI DEPT. OF ENGLISH

Respected sir,

Here I give my opinion about Hamlet as a tragic hero.

                   Hamlet as a tragic hero              

# Brief introduction of writer.

·       ‘Hamlet’ play written by William Shakespeare he is one of the most famous writer and greatest dramatist of his age.

·       Ben Johnson called him:

“The soul of the age”      

                             And

“He was not of an age,

                     But for all time”.

Carlyle, too, rightly observed:

“The empire will go,

                   At any rate some day,

But this Shakespeare does not go,

He lasts forever with us,

We cannot give up our Shakespeare”.

Today we can find his many famous books. His hundreds of editions of play have been published and translations in all major languages.

# Character sketch of Hamlet:

Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, generally agreed to be William Shakespeare’s most fascinating hero. No brief sketch can satisfy his host of admirers or take into account more than a minute fraction of the commentary now in print. The character is a mysterious combination of a series of literary sources and the phenomenal genius of the playwright. Orestes in Greek tragedy is probably his ultimate progenitor, not Oedipus, as some critics have suggested. The Greek original has been altered and augmented by medieval saga and Renaissance romance. Perhaps an earlier Hamlet, written by Thomas Kyd, furnished important material; however, the existence of such a play has been disputed. Hamlet is a mixture of tenderness and violence, a scholar, lover, friend, athlete, philosopher, satirist, and deadly enemy; he is larger than life. Torn by grief for his dead father and disappointment in the conduct of his beloved mother, Hamlet desires a revenge so complete that it will reach the soul as well as the body of his villainous uncle. His attempt to usurp God’s prerogative of judgment leads to all the deaths in the play. Before his death, he reaches a state of resignation and acceptance of God’s will. He gains his revenge but loses his life.

 He is one of the most complex and challenging characters ever drawn on the pages of any drama. Hamlet is the greatest human composition. He has many sided personality like a prince, courter, philosopher, an intellectual, a worrier, scholar, etc,..Here we shall Endeavour to note the salient characteristics of his personality.

Over the centuries critics have explained for Hamlets behavior, but none of them has would been able to…

“Pluck out the heart of my mystery”.

As Hamlet puts it himself.  

Ophelia’s …..

“O what a Nobel mind”.

Speech is one of many suggesting that Shakespeare meant us to think of him this way. 

  While the earliest view was that Hamlet simply a victim of circumstances, later critics saw him as a beautiful but ineffectual soul who lacked the strength of will to avenge his father. Hamlet doesn’t want money, richness, kingdom or empire, etc….His kingdom is the kingdom of mind, and his thoughts are dearer to him than the common realities of everyday life.

Hamlet has been a student and scholar at the Wittenberg University Germany. Still he allows sufficient time to make sure of his grounds. He is skeptical about the ghost also.

“The spirit that i have seen;

May be the dived

‘he says ’Frailty, name is woman!”

If all his feelings translate themselves into thought, it is on less true that all his thought are impregnated with feelings. He loved Ophelia deeply but Ophelia is unable to offlgrstand his depth and does not act and response proper. Hamlet also loves his mother a lot but he hate her to as a wife of his uncle Claudius.

Dr. Bradley thinks that ‘Hamlet’ melancholy is the key to his character. He was not born melancholy. He was cheerful but the ciralmsthance have made him so. This father’s death has given him a great shock. He is tired of life and wishes to dies.

“o that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into dew”.

He suffers from depression and militates suicide. The problem of madness is perhaps the most important and the most bewildering and most maddening problem in Hamlet. There are certain who believe that Hamlet is really mad where as there are certain other critics who believe that Hamlet is only pretending to be mad. Hamlet is a disturbed soul and tortured man.

He says himself:

   “Sir in my heart these was a king of fighting/

that would not let me sleep”.

#Feminist approach in “hamlet”

  As we can see in the “hamlet’ we find two female character are main in the play.

1)    Gertrude       and        2) Ophelia 

Gertrude is a mother of hamlet and queen of Denmark. She is loved a lot hamlet and he also loved his mom but after his father death hamlet opinion changed for his mother because one day king hamlet ghost come and tell him everything what happen with him and who is doing every think and say his secret of his death. After knowing everything he decides to take revenge of his father death. All thinks are come in his mind and thinking how it this possible for any woman can do re marriage just after her husband’s death only passing 2 months. Because it it very short time to growing up. No doubt Gertrude give her all time best for Hamlet.

Ophelia is a beloved of Hamlet. Allover she is very beautiful and innocent girl in play. But Ophelia’s father used to her every time likes a puppet. He all time force to her doing this or this.

In Hamlet we find many approaches every character drawing very well.

Hemlet used most famous soliloquy.. “to be or not to be” that is the question:

Annotations: 

To be, or not to be: that is the question: 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

and by opposing end them ? To die: to sleep; 
No more; and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks  
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; 
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action.—soft you now!
 The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons  
Be all my sins remembered.

 In many senses, Hamlet is the quintessential tragic hero. Not only does he begin with the noblest motivations (to punish his father’s murderer) but by the end, his situation is do dire that the only plausible final act should be his death. Like the classical tragic hero, Hamlet does not survive to see the full outcome of his actions and more importantly, this is because he possesses a tragic flaw. While there are a number of flaws inherent to his character, it is Hamlet’s intense identification with and understanding of the power of words and language that ultimately bring about his requisite tragic ending. Hamlet’s deep connection with language and words causes him to base his perceptions of reality on his interpretation and understanding of words and he allows himself to become overwrought with creating meaning. As this thesis statement for Hamlet suggests, eventually, his own words and philosophical internal banter are his end since being a highly verbose and introspective man, this is both one of his greatest gifts as well as his tragic flaw.

# Conclusion

“Hamlet” is revenge play written by world famous writer William Shakespeare. In Hamlet we find hamlet as a critical study and analysis.  

Claudius was aware of power, clearly when he observed of Hamlet’s apparent madness that “madness in great ones must not unwatched go”. With equal truth Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have observed that power in great ones also must not unwatched go.

# some of the Last lines of Hamlet#

          O, I die Horatio;

The patent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit;

I cannot live to hear the news from England,

But, I do prophesy the elections lights on Fortinbras:

He was my dying voice so tell him,

with the occur rents more and less which havesolicited-

the rest is silence”.

Hear play was end and ending with Hamlets death..

Thank you…………