Hamlet Essay, Research Paper

People like to put things into categories. Movie critics do so with films:

slasher,buddy,western, war, and more. You can do the same with books: science

fiction, gothic romance and so on. Shakespeare’s plays also have categories:

tragedies, comedies, and histories. But these terms don’t mean exactly what you

may think they mean. Shakespeare’s most famous plays are his tragedies, such as

Hamlet. These plays follow the standard rules for tragedies: The hero has a

basic human failure that brings about his downfall and death, but before he

dies, he learns an important lesson about his failure and how it destroyed his

life (and usually the lives of those he loved). Shakespeare didn’t write these

plays to deliver a moral message, butthat doesn’t stop us from learning from his

plays. He fills his plays with ordinary people, and we can see ourselves in

their situations. When the heroes face their tragic ends, we can learn from

their mistakes and ordinary problems, and we can see ourselves with the same

problems. At the same time, we can watch a play that is fun and entertaining,

full of action, intrigue, and excitement. Hamlet, for example, is clearly an

honest, decent person who is wrongly cheated out of the throne of Denmark by his

conniving uncle, Claudius. We root for Hamlet, cheer his triumphs, and pity his

failures. The protagonist is not always a hero, though. Sometimes he is his own

worst enemy. Coriolanus, for example, is too proud. He is a great Roman general

the best, and he knows it. His arrogance and conceit affect all around him and

drive away those who would be his friends. In the end, you almost cheer when

they conspire against him and he gets his due. In other words, Shakespeare felt

free to break the rules whenever he felt like it. After all, his audience didn’t

care whether the plays followed the rules, and Shakespeare wrote to make his

audience happy, not writers and authors.