Maybe Shakespeare’s Hamlet is rightfully named after the star of the play. After all, he is not only the key character, but the driving force behind most of the questions that are asked about human nature. Hamlet has many traits that contribute to the success of his chacter and the success of the play in general. The three most important characteristics are his indecisiveness throughout the play, his fatalistic views, and his over dramatic persona.
Hamlet’s indecisiveness is evident throughout the play, especially during his dilemma of whether the Ghost is real or has been sent by Satan to trick him into doing something he shouldn’t do. He spends too much time worrying about things that may be and not enough time worrying about the things that matter. In fact, even when it comes down to him trying to figure out why he hasn’t already done something to avenge his father’s death, he is confused.
Hamlet seems to be a very confused person all around, even before he “went crazy”, he was misleading to the fact that he hated his mother for marrying so soon after his father’s death. Near the beginning of the play Hamlet says to Gertrude that he “knows” how he feels, not just merely seems to know. However, by the end he has himself questioning that very same comment, just as his mother questioned him in the opening act.
Another of the traits that Hamlet is famous for, and perhaps his most famous trait, would be his fatalistic views, evident when he said, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends. at the beginning of Act 5, Scene II. Shakespeare writes Hamlet in as being very fatalistic because it adds to the intensity of the play. He is more willing to put his life on the line for other people, even if those people are already dead. It is this attitude though, that gets him killed in the end. He is too willing to fight Laertes, even though he knows the odds are against him, “there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. ”
Lastly, the one thing that makes Hamlet either an exciting or depressing story, is completely over dramatic persona. Granted, part of his drama is due to the fact that it was just Shakespeare’s writing style, and if it seemed dramatic it was probably due to the fact that the play was a dramatic-tragedy. Beyond that though, Hamlet threw almost every situation out of proportion. By the end of the play, the drama around him seems to finally catch up with his own drama, but throughout the rest of the play he is caught up in his own drama.
For instance, when he is yelling at his mom in the bedroom and “accidentally” stabs Polonius through the curtain, he is over dramatic, whereas he could have just opened the curtain to catch who he thought was Claudius and in doing so would have answered his own questions about if the king was really to blame or not. Additionally, he had just seen Claudius at the altar before he went to “talk” to his mom, so he should have known that Claudius couldn’t have been the one behind the curtain, but to make the whole scene more dramatic he just carelessly thrust his sword into the curtain killing an innocent bystander.
Although Shakespeare wrote many plays, he may have intertwined the play with some of his own life experiences. Hamlet was an almost human figure, by living and questioning the existence of everything including his own life. Which he lost in the end over making a simple mistake and killing the one person who might have been able the help him. Therefore Shakespeare may have been insecure about his life, and allowed his life to come out as Hamlet.
