In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the inability of Hamlet to play out the vengeance cycle before him stands as both, a sign of his characters’ spiritual and intellectual superiority to the other characters in the play, and as his moral weakness. By not producing within the play a worthy challenger to Hamlet, Shakespeare turns Hamlet’s conflict inward, enabling the playwright to explore the duality of the noble and profane within a single character. In doing this, Shakespeare captures the enigma of moral clarity and purpose in the human experience.

In the play, unlike for example in Othello, Hamlet stands without a rival such as Iago to challenge him. Superficially Claudius stands as rival and antagonist to Hamlet; in fact, Hamlet himself refers to this rivalry while commenting on his own trickery of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes

Between the pass and fell incensed points

But as Harold Bloom in his Book Hamlet: Poems Unlimited(61-65); points out, Claudius i

HAMLET A was a man, take him for all in all:

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

This unresolved question in the mind of Hamlet contributes to his inability to act consistently. Hamlet at times initiates action, as when he challenges his mother, and puts on a play to shame Claudius; he than loses it however, when he stops short of killing his uncle and then seems to drop specific plans to take vengeance upon his uncle all together. Hamlet’s torment and erratic behavior lead to consequences Hamlet did not anticipate( The mistaken killing of Polonius for example leads to Ophelia’s suicide) thus forcing others to act in an attempt to rein him in. The other characters are less actors than reactors to Hamlet’s internal conflict, and their inability to understand him dooms most of them. They cannot see what Hamlet sees and are very much bound to the life before them, hence to most of the characters Hamlet is an enigma: as Ophelia states, “/O! what a noble mind is here o’thrown:…/”[III.i.153] and at various points in the play other characters refer to Hamlet’s madness, ([Queen, IV.i.7], [King, IV.i .16-23] [Polonius, II.ii.96-97]). Of course by the end of the play all these characters are dead.

In the end Hamlet dies along with most of the principle characters whether they were duplicities against Hamlet or not. This I think stands as Shakespeare’s point; Hamlet’s lack of commitment in the play leads to a kind of nihilism which destroys indiscriminately: Claudius is dead but so is Ophelia; Laertes is killed but so is the Queen. In the end Hamlet, directly or indirectly has killed them all.

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