1. CHARACTER OF HAMLET

2. INTRODUCTION Hamlet—Shakespeare's longest play
Shakespearean device, a play within play, a literary device or conceit in which one story is told during the action of another story.
Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus and a prose work by the French writer François de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques.
Shakespeare was able to take an unremarkable revenge story and make it resonate with the most
fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance.

3. Tragic hero
A tragic hero has the potential for greatness but is doomed to fail.
He makes some sort of tragic flaw, and this causes his fall from greatness.
Realizes he has made an irreversible mistake
Faces and accepts death with honor
Meets a tragic death

4. The Prince of Denmark, the title character, and the protagonist.
Hamlet is the son of Queen Gertrude and the late King Hamlet, and the nephew of the present king, Claudius.
Hamlet is melancholy, bitter, and cynical, full of hatred for his uncle’s scheming and disgust for his mother’s sexuality.
studied at the University of Wittenberg
The character of Hamlet is itself a pure effusion of genius

5. It is not acharacter marked by strength of will…..
He is a young and princely novice…
He seems incapable of delibrate action and is only hurried in extremities
At other times, when he is most bound to act,he remains puzzled
For this reason he refuses to kill the king
And now I’ll don’t,and so he goes to heaven
And so am I REVENGE’D:that would be scann’d.
He kill’d my father,and for that,
I,his sole son,send him to heaven.

6. Hamlet is a man of radical cotradictions……
Shows no compunction
He uses Ophelia as an outlet for his disgust
Hamlet’s tremendous grief is intesified by this lack of feeling by those around him.
So excellent a king, that was to this:
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly; Heaven and earth
Must I remember?.....

7. Hamlet: I mean,my lord head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing my lord?
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s
legs.

8. Hamlet’s Age
In Act V, scene i, the prince asks the First Gravedigger how long he has "been a gravemaker,“ .
"been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.“
"hath lain i‘ th' earth three and twenty years.“
"I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times”.
If Hamlet is thirty, and Yorick has been dead for twentythree years, the prince would have been no more than seven when he last rode on the jester's back.

9. Tragic flaw
A tragic flaw is the failing of a tragic hero, a character who suffers a downfall through the tragic flaw in mistaken choices or in personality.
Hamlet’s tragic flaw is his inability to decide
about the ghost
about vengeance
to act to take revenge for his father’s death
leads him and many others to their bloody
graves

10. Hamlet’s Tragic flaw
Procrastination means to postpone doing something. The person really doesn't want to do what they are putting off. Procrastination is when a person puts things off.

11. Soliloquies
Although Hamlet's soliloquies give expression to his inner conflict they also reflect the world and the people around him. Hamlet's father, his mother, Claudius, make their presence felt, and they come alive in the imagination....Thus the term "introspective" which is often used to describe the essence of the soliloquies is not entirely adequate. What Hamlet has just seen or experienced is shaped in the soliloquies into recollections, admonishments or mental confrontations with counterfigures against whom he tries to match himself.

12. FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION
SIGMUND FREUD held that Hamlet suffered from the Oedipus Complex
He said in his essay "The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive
“His moral fate is bound up with his uncle's for good or ill. The call of duty to slay his uncle cannot be obeyed because it links itself with the call of his nature to slay his mother's husband, whether this is the first or the second; the latter call is strongly "repressed," and therefore necessarily the former also”.

13. One authority compiles a list of the prince's
inconsistencies:
“Hamlet, as a character, was notorious as an example of the union of the most incompatible qualities: impetuous, tho' philosophical; sensible of injury, yet timid of resentment; shrewd, yet void of policy; full of filial piety, yet tame under oppression; boastful in expression, undetermined in action ...”
Wolfgang Clemen
In the soliloquies it becomes apparent that Hamlet is fighting not only against the world around him but also against the overpowering strength of his own emotions, against the antagonism of his own heart.

14. T.S.ELIOT states,
"We find Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone...".
GOETHE
“ A lovely pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which he bear and must not cast away…..”

15. THANK YOU