Hamlet :

A Poet, Thinker, Madman was born…

“Let me be brief ”

Maulik Bhatt

Roll no.-3

M.A. Part-1

Year-2010-11

Having different aspects supplementing and contradicting with one another.

According to Goethe,

“ Hamlet is a lovely, pure and most moral nature, but hethinks that Hamlet is without the strength of nervewhich forms the hero.”

Is ill at ease in the world of practical reality.

Unable to think and act in unison

Ends his famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be…” in Act -III , Scene – I with,

“ The native hue of resolution

Is sicklied (sic.) o’ er with the pale cast of thought.”

His conscience makes a coward of him.

T. S. Eliot notes acerbically in his famous essay, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’,

“ Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangeroustype of critic : the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, butwhich through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticisminstead.”

Hamlet – a detective hero – driven to discover truth that he cannot fully comprehend

In his short essay ‘ The Simple Art of Murder’, Raymond Chandler describes the detective as,

“ Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himselfmean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective inthis kind of story must be such a man… The story is hisadventure in search of hidden truth and it would be noadventure, if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.He has range of awareness that startles you, but it belongsto him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.”

Our interest in the protagonist, says Harry Levin, is self involvement; that we are all Hamlet.

S. T . Coleridge also agrees,

“Indeed, that this character must have some connectionwith the common fundamental laws of our nature maybe assumed from the fact that Hamlet has been thedarling of every country in which the literature ofEngland has been fostered.”

“ The rest is silence.”