Reading Hamlet: Fatal Flaws

I finished reading Hamlet Friday night. I don’t think there is too much novel to say about this play that hasn’t been said countless times before (I could revolutionize your thinking of the Henriad, though). However, I still maintain my opinion of the past 20 years that the character of Hamlet does not have a fatal flaw. I argued this with my high school English teacher and then again with my university professors. Generally, the idea is that the play Hamlet conforms to the classical forms of Greek tragedy as expressed in Aristotle’s Poetics, including the necessity of the harmartia, the error or fatal flaw that, in the thinking of Dante, moves the hero to act in a way that moves the plot towards its tragic end, enabling the audience to experience Catharsis. Shakespeare employs this classical device with the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth, and the pleasure as a dynamic of power of Antony and Cleopatra. Nevertheless, I maintain that such classical forms begin to breakdown when it comes to Hamlet. Perhaps, the theoretical Ur-Hamlet contained a harmartia, but subsequent re-writes by Shakespeare (some of which is evident between the First Quarto and First Folio) may have been eliminated as he continued to reexamine his work. The most popular theory is that Hamlet suffers from indecisiveness which leads to a delay of justice. In this view, Hamlet waits to long to seek his revenge upon Claudius. Instead of immediately believing the Ghost’s accusations, Hamlet searches for proof. Having found proof, Hamlet doesn’t immediately attack Claudius when the latter is vulnerable at prayer. Accordingly, if Hamlet had killed Claudius outright – even during prayer – he would have avoided disaster. I’ve never bought this theory. Certainly Hamlet is unsure about the truthfulness of the ghost but he decisively decides to find proof in a specifically planned ruse that successfully verifies what the ghost told Hamlet. One could fault Hamlet for not wanting to kill Claudius at prayer … but this is one episode that is never again remarked upon and does not spring from a pattern of behavior. Hamlet specifically and decisively avoids killing Claudius at prayer so the latter will not go to heaven at death. In every move he makes, Hamlet thinks about what his options are, what his questions are, debates within himself, and then proceeds along a predetermined plan to solve his problems. And most of the time his decisions are correct. The one grave mistake he makes is the impulsive killing of Polonius who is hiding behind a curtain. Hamlet, in the midst of a heated exchange with his mother, angrily thinks the figure hiding in the room is Claudius and kills him. The mistaken killing of Polonius leads to Hamlet’s exile, the death of Ophelia, the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and almost every other major character. But even in this major error, Hamlet acts decisively. In fact, he acts impulsively, without thinking, completely out of his normal character, and kills the wrong man. What then can we say about Hamlet’s fatal flaw? That he once acted out of character? That sort of flies in the face of the whole idea of a character’s fatal flaw. I think the complexity of Hamlet’s character and that of the play itself goes far beyond the traditional constraints of classical forms of tragedy.