Hamlet

Hamlet: A Tragedy
William Shakespeare is mostly known for his tragedies, one of them being Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In Hamlet, Shakespeare creates a full tragic effect by portraying Hamlet as a tragic hero who the audience can sympathize with. The audience can relate to Hamlet’s problems because of how realistic Shakespeare has portrayed them. Shakespeare has achieved the tragic effect inHamlet by making Hamlet experience the several tragedies of life, the death and murder of a father, the betrayal of a mother and friends, and the pain of love.
Through Hamlet’s father’s death and murder at the hands of Claudius, his uncle, Shakespeare establishes Hamlet as the tragic hero and persuades the audience to sympathize with him. Hamlet’s reaction to his father’s death enables the audienceto understand his feelings and aids them in the process of being able to imagine themselves in Hamlet’s situation and how they would react in such circumstances. The process of relating themselves to the Danish Prince enables the audience to empathize with him by reflecting upon how they would behave if their father was betrayed and murdered at the hands of their uncle, or another close relative.Hamlet expresses his feeling towards his father’s death in his first soliloquy:
HAMLET: Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitableSeem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on ’t, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this.

But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two.

So excellent a king, that was to thisHyperion to a satyr. So loving to my mother (1.2.129-140).
In this part of the soliloquy, Hamlet mentions how he wishes he was not alive to see the dawn of the day when his mother, Queen Gertrude, married Claudius, his uncle, without even mourning his father in the appropriate manner. He compares his father to his uncle and states how superior his father was and how he held such affectiontowards the queen, more than his Uncle Claudius ever could. The audience can sympathize with the fact that Hamlet has to witness his mother's incestuous relationship with his uncle and that he has no say in the situation.
Not only does the death of Hamlet’s father makes the audience sympathize with him, but so does his mother Gertrude’s betrayal of his King Hamlet and in a way, of Hamlet himself.Having already lost his father, Hamlet does not take Gertrude’s betrayal well. He hates his mother for betraying his father and marrying Claudius before the period of mourning has ended. The audience can certainly sympathize with Hamlet and hold a sense of pity for the prince as he is unable to take any strong action against his mother. While he hates Gertrude, his father’s wife, he also lovesher, as his mother. The following excerpt from Hamlet’s soliloquy shows him pouring out his feelings towards Gertrude’s actions:
HAMLET: Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet, within a month—
Let me not think on ’t. Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month, or ere those shoes were oldWith which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears. Why she, even she—
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,...