Hamlet Tragic Hero Essay

Hamlet, a play by William Shakespeare, features a character named Hamlet, the play’s namesake. The play itself is a tragedy, as many of Shakespeare’s plays are. Hamlet, being the main, central character of the play, is regarded as the so-called hero of the story. Aristotle, a renowned Greek philosopher, invented the idea of a tragic hero in his Poetics, a work on literary, dramatic theory. Though the character Hamlet does not originate from Greek literature, he, by Aristotle’s criteria, encompasses the qualities of a tragic hero. Hamlet, too, is an Aristotelian tragic hero.
“Lord Hamlet is a prince out of thy star. / This must not be” (Shakespeare 2.2.132-3). Aristotle’s definition of a tragic hero is comprised of many qualities and facets of character and circumstance. One such quality of character is that of nobility. “He thinks it is most tragic that these people in …show more content…
He or she must be moral, but not of a perfect, holy status. “Because their virtue is not outstanding, we do not find their downfall morally repellent; because their downfall is undeserved, we can pity them” (Liang). “Aristotle sees tragedy as the mimesis of an action involving pity and fear. (Pity is a technical term which refers to the painful emotion we feel in the face of undeserved misfortune, and fear is a technical term that refers to the same emotion when it focuses on our own, personal vulnerability to such undeserved misfortune.) … As a mimesis concerned with pity and fear, tragedy must portray a hero who, in a moral sense, is worthy of respect (spoudaios) and who makes a significant intellectual (not moral) error which leads to his downfall from happiness to misery.” (Golden). Hamlet incorporates these characteristics as he remains loyal to his father’s ghost, but only after devising means of confirmation to its claims, by plotting the murder of King Claudius and relieving Denmark of Claudius’