Hamlets Tragic Flaws Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Hamlets Tragic Flaws - Research Paper Example The act ends with Hamlets assumption of an "antic disposition." He has realized that one may "smile and smile and be a villain." He has also corrected his friends skepticism: "There are more things, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (174-75). Claudius is a villain but a hypocrite; to seek his vengeance, Hamlet himself will have to pretend to be what he is not: mad. What does the act break here signify? Most obviously it marks the passage of time: "Laertes has time to settle in Paris, Hamlet to show in full his antic disposition, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be recalled to Elsinore and the ambassadors to go and return from Norway" (Brown, 2001). We certainly see the shape of the first act: the Ghost appears in the first and last scenes to make his demand. He has risen up from the earth to confirm his sons worst suspicions and to demand of him action. It is not unlike the plague in Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannos: the murderer of Laios has gone unpunished all these years, but the plague now demands that he be found. The irony that Oedipus, as king, takes on the responsibility of punishing the murderer, who is he himself, is not without parallel in Hamlet. In pursuing -- and not pursuing --vengeance for his fathers murder, Hamlet "finds himself." His last thought in Act I is characterizing: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right" (196-97). Circumstances beyond his control will force him to act in an uncharacteristic manner. Nothing could be more dramatic, more tragic. The conflict is not between two individuals but within one, or between what he knows of himself in the private world of his own meditation and the public role he must now assume. The assumption of the role of a madman is metaphorical as well as an aspect of the plot: it suggests Shakespeares primary philosophical concern, which is the nature of individual identity and how it is and is not