As defined by Aristotle, a tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy who should possess certain

characteristics. In order to analyse Hamlet as a tragic hero these characteristics will be taken

into account.

To start with, the tragic hero should be noble in social order and also in character, although

not perfect, so the audience can sympathise and feel pity, which is crucial in a tragedy. Hamlet

is popular among his people, as recognised by Claudius: “He’s loved of the distracted

multitude,” (4.2.4). He also shows his loyalty to his father and Denmark when he says “Haste

me to know ’t, that I, with wings as swift/As meditation or the thoughts of love/May sweep to

my revenge.” (1.5.29-31)

Secondly, the typical Aristotelian hero “falls from high state or fame, not through vice or

depravity, but by some great hamartia” (Aristotle 5). Being hamartia understood as an error of

judgement that will change the hero’s destiny, Aristotle calls this turn of events a “reversal of

fortune” or peripeteia. Hamlet’s hamartia would be his constant thinking and consideration of

his actions and his inability to perform. In The Invention of the Human, the scholar Harold

Bloom quotes Nietzsche’s description of Hamlet’s thinking, “seeing him not as the man who

thinks too much but rather as the man who thinks too well” (Bloom 393). In the quoted

passage Nietzsche compares Hamlet with the Dionysian man and claims that “as soon as this

everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-

negating mood is the fruit of these states… In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet:

both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and

nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of

things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world

that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the

doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as

it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no true

knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet

and in the Dionysian man.” (Bloom 393). Bradley considers that this flaw in the tragic hero is

also “his greatness” and that, in Shakespeare, “the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed

simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero

as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw.” (Bradley 12).

In Hamlet the peripeteia is a slow process of deterioration in the hero over time, being the

most significant moment when Hamlet fails in killing Claudius when he is praying in Act 3 Scene

3. Hamlet’s condition will get worse when the ghost encounters him and compelles him to

avenge his father.

After the peripeteia generated by the hero’s hamartia, a moment of recognition or discovery

should follow, in which the hero experiences what Aristotle calls anagnorisis. Shakespeare

depicts Hamlet’s anagnorisis in his soliloquy in Act 4 Scene 4:

“ Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour’s at the stake. ” (4.4.32-66)

After this moment, Hamlet swears vengeance and is determined to take action: “My thoughts

be bloody, or be nothing worth."(4, 4, 66)

Finally, the tragic hero, according to Aristotle should die tragically and accept this fact with

courage and honour. In Act 5 Scene 2, Hamlet knows that the end has come and he is about to

die: “ O! I die, Horatio;

The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit:I cannot live to hear the news from England,But I do prophesy th’election lightsOn Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,Which have solicited — the rest is silence. [Dies]” (5.2.332-337)

To conclude an interesting feature may added to this tragic hero, the humour. According to

Bradley, Hamlet could be called a humourist, “…his humour being first cousin to that

speculative tendency which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement.” (Bradley 62)