Hamlet Characters Analysis features noted Shakespeare scholar William

Hazlitt's famous critical essay about the characters of Hamlet.

THIS is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we may be
said almost to remember in our after-years; he who made that famous soliloquy on
life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought "this goodly frame, the earth, a
steril promontory, and this brave o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours"; whom "man
delighted not, nor woman neither"; he who talked with the grave-diggers, and
moralised on Yorick's skull; the school-fellow of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at
Wittenberg; the friend of Horatio; the lover of Ophelia; he that was mad and sent to
England; the slow avenger of his father's death; who lived at the court of
Horwendillus five hundred years before we were born, but all whose thoughts we
seem to know as well as we do our own, because we have read them in Shakespeare.

Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain.
What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in
the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is
above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his
own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow
of reflection, and thought himself "too much i' the sun"; whoever has seen the golden
lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the
world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has
known "the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which
patient merit of the unworthy takes"; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and
sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth
staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he
sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up
by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose
bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his
best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock
representation of them—this is the true Hamlet.

We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly know how to criticise it any more
than we should know how to describe our own faces.' But we must make such
observations as we can. It is the one of Shakespear's plays that we think of the
oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because
the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account
of humanity. Whatever happens to him we apply to ourselves, because he applies it so
himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moraliser; and what makes him
worth attending to is, that he moralises on his own feelings and experience. He is not
a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion,
HAMLET is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied
development of character. Shakespear had more magnanimity than any other poet,
and he has shewn more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force
an interest: everything is left for time and circumstances to unfold. The attention is
excited without effort, the incidents succeed each other as matters of course, the
characters think and speak and act just as they might do, if left entirely 'to themselves.
There is no set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested by the
passing scene—the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the
wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken
place at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of time fixed upon, before the
modern refinements in morals and manners were heard of. It would have been inter-
esting enough to have been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a time, to
have heard and witnessed something of what was going on. But here we are more than
spectators. We have not only "the outward pageants and the signs of grief"; but "we
have that within which passes shew." We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the
passions living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and
paraphrases of nature; but Shakespear, together with his own comments, gives us the
original text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a very great advantage.

The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength
of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as
little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of
high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with
fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his
disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate
action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has
no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters
the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to England,
purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains
puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost,
and finds out some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For
this reason he refuses to kill the King when he is at his players, and by a refinement in
malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his
revenge to a more fatal opportunity, when he shall be engaged in some act "that has
no relish of salvation in it."

"He kneels and prays,

And now I'll do't, and so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng'd: that would be scann'd.
He kill'd my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, send him to heaven.
Why this is reward, not revenge.
Up sword and know thou a more horrid time,
When he is drunk, asleep, or in a rage."

He is the prince of philosophical speculators; and because he cannot have his revenge
perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he declines it altogether.
So he scruples to trust the suggestions of the ghost, contrives the scene of the play to
have surer proof of his uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied with this confirmation of
his suspicions, and the success of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he is
sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of
it.

"How all occasions do inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To rust in us unus'd. Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event,—
A thought which quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward;—I do not know
Why yet I live to say, this thing's to do;
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do it. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. 'Tis not to be great
Never to stir without great argument;
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?—O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth."

Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only affords him
another occasion for indulging it. It is not from any want of attachment to his father or
of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to
indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on
his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into imme-diate practice. His ruling
passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretext that flatters this propensity
instantly diverts, him from his previous purposes.

The moral perfection of this character has been called in question, we think, by those
who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable,
though not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist" (as
Shakespear has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of
morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The
Academy of Compliments! We confess we are a little shocked at the want of
refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet. The neglect
of punctilious exactness in his behaviour either partakes of the "licence of the time,"
or else belongs to the very excess of intellectual refinement in the character, which
makes the common rules of life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose upon him. He
may be said to be amenable only to the tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too much
taken up with the airy world of contemplation to lay as much stress as he ought on the
practical consequences of things. His habitual principles of action are unhinged and
out of joint with the time. His conduct to Ophelia is quite natural in his circumstances.
It is that of assumed severity only. It is the effect of disappointed hope, of bitter
regrets, of affection suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around
him! Amidst the natural and preternatural horrors of his situation, he might be
excused in delicacy from carrying on a. regular courtship. When "his father's spirit
was in arms," it was not a time for the son to make love in. He could neither marry
Ophelia, nor wound her mind by explaining the cause of his alienation, which he durst
hardly trust himself to think of. It would have taken him years to have come to a
direct explanation on the point. In the harassed state of his mind, he could not have
done much otherwise than he did. His conduct does not con-tradict what he says when
he sees her funeral,

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers

Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum."

Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful than the Queen's apostrophe to Ophelia on
throwing the flowers into the grave.

—"Sweets to the sweet, farewell.

I hop'd thou should'st have been my Hamlet's wife:
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid,
And not have strew'd thy grave."

Shakespear was thoroughly a master of the mixed motives of human character, and he
here shews us the Queen, who was so criminal in some respects, not without
sensibility and affection in other relations of life.—Ophelia is a character almost too
exquisitely touching to be dwelt upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower too soon faded! Her
love, her madness, her death, are described with the truest touches of tenderness and
pathos. It is a character which nobody but Shakespear could have drawn in the way
that he has done, and to the conception of which there is not even the smallest
approach, except in some of the old romantic ballads.1 Her brother, Laertes, is a
character we do

1In the account of her death, a friend has pointed out an in-stance of the poet's exact
observation of nature:—

"There is a willow growing o'er a brook,

That shews its hoary leaves i' th' glassy stream."

The inside of the leaves of the willow, next the water, is of a

whitish colour, and the reflection would therefore be "hoary."

not like so well: he is too hot and choleric, and somewhat rhodomontade. Polonius is
a perfect character in its kind; nor is there any foundation for the objections which
have been made to the consistency of this part. It is said that he acts very foolishly and
talks very sensibly. There is no inconsistency in that. Again, that he talks wisely at
one time and foolishly at another; that his advice to Laertes is very excellent, and his
advice to the King and Queen on the subject of Hamlet's madness very ridiculous. But
he gives the one as a father, and is sincere in it; he gives the other as a mere courtier, a
busy-body, and is accordingly officious, garrulous, and impertinent. In short,
Shakespear has been accused of incon-sistency in this and other characters, only
because he has kept up the distinction which there is in nature, between the
understandings and the moral habits of men, between the absurdity of their ideas and
the absurdity of their motives. Polonius is not a fool, but he makes himself so. His
folly, whether in his actions or speeches, comes under the head of impropriety of
intention.

We do not like to see our author's plays acted, and least of all, HAMLET. There is no
play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage. Hamlet himself seems
hardly capable of being acted. Mr. Kemble unavoidably fails in this character from a
want of ease and variety.' The character of Hamlet is made up of undulating lines; it
has the yielding flexibility of "a wave o' th' sea." Mr. Kemble plays it like a man in
armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one undeviating straight line,
which is as remote from the natural grace and refined susceptibility of the character,
as the sharp angles and abrupt starts which Mr. Kean introduces into the part. Mr.
Kean's Hamlet is as much too splenetic and rash as Mr. Kemble's is too deliberate and
formal. His manner is too strong and pointed. He throws a severity, approaching to
virulence, into the common observations and answers. There is nothing of this in
Hamlet. He is, as it were, wrapped up in his reflections, and only thinks aloud. There
should therefore be no attempt to impress what he says upon others by a studied
exaggeration of emphasis or manner; no talking at his hearers. There should be as
much of the gentleman and scholar as possible infused into the part, and as little of the
actor. A pensive air of sadness should sit reluctantly upon his brow, but no appearance
of fixed and sullen gloom. He is full of weakness and melancholy, but there is no
harshness in his nature. He is the most amiable of misanthropes.

Hamlet: Son of the late King Hamlet of Denmark and nephew to the present
King. Famous for the graveyard scene where holding the skull of deceased jester
Yorick, Hamlet realizes man has little lasting control over his fate and also for
describing man as the "paragon of animals!" Educated in Wittenburg and introduced
to us in Act I, Scene II, Hamlet resents his mother Queen Gertrude marrying King
Claudius within two months of his father King Hamlet's death to which she was
previously married.

Distrustful of King Claudius, Hamlet is equally weary of the King's spies,

Guildenstern and Rosencrantz who attempt to know his true intentions. When Hamlet
meets King Hamlet's Ghost and learns that King Claudius murdered his father,
Hamlet changes from a distrustful, disillusioned young man to one driven to avenge
his father's death. To this end, Hamlet distrusts and rejects all those around him whom
he believes are spying on him for King Claudius.
Fearing that his intentions could be revealed, Hamlet invents a madness to distract and
hide his true intentions from King Claudius' many spies. This includes Ophelia, the
women he loves whom he bitterly rejects when he learns she has betrayed him.

Cunning and inventive, Hamlet changes the lines of a play performed before King
Claudius to divine whether King Hamlet's Ghost told him the truth about his father's
death. At the end of the play, Hamlet kills both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
(indirectly), Laertes and finally King Claudius before dying himself from a wound
inflicted by Laertes.

Analysis of Hamlet's Emotional Character

Disillusionment. Depression. Despair. These are the burning emotions churning in

young Hamlet's soul as he attempts to come to terms with his father's death and his
mother's incestuous, illicit marriage. While Hamlet tries to pick up the pieces of his
shattered idealism, he consciously embarks on a quest to seek the truth hidden in
Elsinore; this, in stark contrast to Claudius' fervent attempts to obscure the truth of
murder. Deception versus truth; illusion versus reality. In the play, Prince Hamlet is
constantly having to differentiate amongst them. However, there is always an
exception to the rule, and in this case, the exception lies in Act 2, Scene 2, where an
"honest" conversation (sans the gilded trappings of deceit) takes place between
Hamlet and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Via the use of prose and figurative
language, Shakespeare utilizes the passage to illustrate Hamlet's view of the cosmos
and mankind. Throughout the play, the themes of illusion and mendaciousness have
been carefully developed. The entire royal Danish court is ensnared in a web of
espionage, betrayal, and lies. Not a single man speaks his mind, nor addresses his
purpose clearly. As Polonius puts it so perfectly: "And thus do we of wisdom and of
reach / By indirections find directions out" Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 71-3 The many
falsehoods and deceptions uttered in Hamlet are expressed through eloquent, formal,
poetic language (iambic pentameter), tantamount to an art form. If deceit is a painted,
ornate subject then, its foil of truth is simple and unvarnished. Accordingly, when the
pretenses of illusion are discarded in Act 2, Scene 2, the language is written in direct
prose. Addressing Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet pleads with them to deliver
up honest speech about the intent of their arrival: "[offer up] Anything but to th'
purpose." Act 2, Scene 2, Line 300 In a gesture of extreme significance, in a quote
complementary to Polonius' aforementioned one, Hamlet demands: "Be even and
direct with me whether you were sent for or no." Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 310-11 Being
the bumbling fools they are, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern disclose their intentions
and purposes to Hamlet, revealing the King and Queen's instructions. Thus does truth
prevail in this passage. For this reason, the whole passage is devoid of the "artful"
poetic devices that are used in the better portion of the play.

The recurring motif of corruption also appears in the passage. Due to the wicked
internal proceedings in the state of Denmark (e.g. murder, incest), Shakespeare
implies that the whole state is "soiled", which in turn has a direct negative
consequence in the grand universal scheme of things. Imagery of warped and
distasteful plants, in place of the traditional "aesthetically correct" beautiful flowers in
 a garden, serves to further reinforce the degeneration theme: "'Tis an unweeded
garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely." Act 1,
Scene 2 Essentially, all of life, and all that was good and beautiful in life (e.g. the
garden) is sullied. Hamlet, the disillusioned idealist, continues with the motif when he
disheartenedly declares: "the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory" -Act 2, Scene
2, Lines 321-2 [the air] "why, it appeareth nothing to me but a fouled and pestilent
congregation of vapors." -Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 325-6 The above lines represent
Hamlet's cosmic view on the planet. He finds the world to be empty and lifeless, dirty
and diseased, and his particular place in it to be desolate and lonely. Indeed, he feels
so isolated and entrapped in his native land that he says: [the world is a prison] "A
goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being
one o' th' worst." -Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 264 -6 This view of the world exemplifies the
micro/macro concept, where Denmark is the "micro" manifestation of a prison for our
hero. The taint of "micro" Denmark leads to repercussions that in turn affect the
whole universal order, leading to the consequence of the world itself becoming the
"macro" manifestation of a prison in Hamlet's eyes. Further along in the same
paragraph, Hamlet offers up his opinion on man, extolling his virtues and excellent
qualities ("what a piece of work is man^+"). Yet, it is tremendously ironic, that the
ideal type of man Hamlet is describing is nowhere to be found in the play. Hamlet
himself is indecisive, unable to take action, Claudius is a slave to his lusts and
passions, Polonius is a simpering, servile old fool, and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern
are mindless ninnies. Quite simply, no "true man" as Hamlet describes him exists in
the play. As a result of this dismal realization, and because of his inability to adapt to
the "unnatural state of things in Denmark", Hamlet has lost the love for life he once
had. This loss of enthusiasm also stems from the fact that he intrinsically knows there
is more wickedness brewing under the superficial illusionary surface of calm that
Claudius is trying to promote.
As a culmination of all these factors, Hamlet loses all faith in man: "And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?" Scene 2, Act 2, Lines 332-3 Drawing on Biblical
allusions, Hamlet redefines the position of man as simply "that which came from
dust". From this stance, it is inferred that solely God is Truth. Man, coming from the
lowly earth, cannot be depended upon to deliver pure and true thoughts, as his source
of origin itself is impure and unclean. If one establishes this rationality for mankind's
nature, then all the characters in the play can be accounted for.

Analysis

In the tragic play Hamlet, William Shakespeare explorers the psychological afflictions
of man whose mother, marries his father murderer who also happens to be his uncle.
The ghost of the Hamlet's father, who was the King of Hamlet, appears before
Hamlet, tells him who the murderer is, and makes him swear revenge against his
murderer.

Thus I was, sleeping, by a brother's hand

Of life, of crown, of Queen, at once dispatched;

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhous'led, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck'ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head. . .

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest. (Hamlet 81-86, 87-90 Act I, scene V) Prince
Hamlet irrational, and delusional, already, thus swears revenge against his father's
murderer, who now wears the crown of the King of Denmark.

So, Uncle, there you are. Now to my word:

It is "adieu, adieu! Remember me."

I have sworn't. (117-120 Act I, scene V)

However, Hamlet does not immediately seek revenge. He says he delays his revenge
to seek the opportune moment to strike. However, Hamlet's procrastination drives him
virtually insane. For Centuries Scholars have pondered the reason for Hamlet's delay
in punishing his father. The Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Characters
of Shakespeare's Plays(1817), believes that: "Shakespeare's mode of conceiving
characters out of his own intellectual and moral faculties, by conceiving any on the
intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess and then placing himself, thus mutilated
and diseased, under given circumstances..." (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Characters of
Shaekespeare's Plays, 1817). Thus, Hamlet's propensity to reflect arrests his ability to
act, he simply thinks too much and the action in the play proves this to be true.

Hamlet spends most of his time thinking. A good deal of his narrative, sounds more
like speeches as if he is speaking to himself, or his own mind. A good deal of
Hamlet's speeches are soliloquy's, however, even when he is speaking to someone, it
sounds as if he is contemplating matters in his own mind.

. . .I have of late--but wherefore I

Know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exer-

cises; and indeed,, it goes so heavily with my disposition

that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile

promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you . . . what a piece of work is
a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! In form and moving how like
an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of . . .
(311-315, 319-322 Act II. Scene II) By now, the reader or viewer of the play is
screaming kill him already, stop thinking about, just do it, but Hamlet does not. He
continues to analyze every detail to the point of a psychotic breakdown. He seems to
be analyzing whether he should obey the ghost of his father, his thoughts, and his
imagination, which seem so clear and evident to him, or the real world. Coleridge
agrees with this assessment. He says: In Hamlet I conceive him to have wished to
exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between the real and the imaginary
world. In Hamlet this balance does not exist-his thoughts, images, and fancy[being]
far more vivid than is perceptions, and his very perceptions instantly passing thro' the
medium his contemplations, and acquiring as they pass a form and color not naturally
their own. (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Characters of Shaekespeare's Plays, 1817)
However, as a Romantic writer, and one of the founders of the Romantic movement,
it is not unusual for Coleridge to view Hamlet in this way. The Romantics believed in
"The authoritative weight of classical precedents in literature, like the authority of
church and state in society, was rejected in favor of poetic forms that seemed to
reflect a more fundamental aspects of the human spirit " (Anderson, Buckler, and
Veeder, The Literature of England, Vol. 2, P. 615). For these writers, "man was
imaginative, more than rational--that is, capable of creation, invention, and
inspiration" (P. 617). Hamlet, therefore, is the classical Romantic figure. He uses his
mind to try to solve the problems of man. It could be argued that Hamlet is trying to
rationalize his situation, but he is more than just rational, he imaginative, and allows
the images he conjures in his mind to influence his thinking. Rather than turn to God,
Hamlet turns to his inner self, and the supernatural to try to solve his dilemma.
"Hence great, enormous, intellectual activity, and a consequent proportionate aversion
to the real action, with all it's symptoms and accompanying qualities" (Coleridge,
Samuel Taylor, Characters of Shaekespeare's Plays, 1817).

Hamlet's inability to act, and his vivid imagination drive more insane as the play
moves on. He becomes less and less rational, and moves further away from reality. He
woos Ophelia, leads her to believe he will take her as his wife, but then tells her he
feels he is not worthy and she should: Get thou to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a
Breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such
things that it were better my Mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful,
Ambitious; with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, Or time to act them in. (151-137 Act II Scene I)

Hamlet, of course, has done no wrong, other than woo Ophelia, but this is not for
what he is judging himself. Hamlet is judging himself for his inability to act. He is
agreeing with Coleridge's thesis that his imagination and mind prevent him from
acting. His thoughts consume to much of his time for him to act upon his ambitions,
or "to give them shape." He is a prisoner of his own mind, a man stuck in the
imaginary world, an irrational thinker, in a rational society. The most famous speech
in Hamlet, proves Coleridge's theory beyond doubt. It is the ultimate speech of
indecision and mental contemplation:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms and arrows against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them. To die to--sleep--

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is air to. 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die--to sleep.

To sleep--perchance to dream, ay there's the rub! (66-73 Act II Scene I)

Hamlet and Othello bare many similarities in their characterizations. “Othello, a great
success in Shakespeare's time, was one of the first plays to be acted after the
reopening of the theatres in 1660, and since that time has remained one of the most
popular plays on the English stage”. Othello suffers from similar psychological
problems. The web site titled “Othello” notes: In Shakespeare's poetic tragedy
Othello, passionate desire unravels into all-consuming madness. The celebrated
Moorish general Othello cherishes the high-born Venetian lady Desdemona with a
love so great that it should transcend cultural and social differences, but instead it
leaves them defenseless before the deadly intrigues of the vengeful Iago.

Othello is about Iago, who has been passed over for promotion, plots to get even with
his superior the Moor Othello, and the more favored Cassio. He does so by sowing the
seeds of jealousy in Othello, convincing him that his wife, Desdemona, had been
cuckolding him with Cassio.

Iago Nay, but he prated,

And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms

Against your honour,

That, with the little godliness I have,

I did full hard forbear him. But, I pray you, sir,

Are you fast married: Be assured of this,

That the magnifico is much beloved,

And hath, in his effect, a voice potential

As double as the duke’s: he will divorce you. (Act I Sc. II, lines 6-15)

It is not the exact same story we get with Hamlet, but it again deals with the psyche of
man. Hamlet’s mind drives him to the point where he is unable to act. Othello is
driven by to insanity by his jealousy just as Hamlet is driven to insanity by his
inability to act.

Othello a former black slave (a Moor) is embraced by the system that would have
otherwise enslaved him, but for his strategic and military prowess. He becomes
celebrated and, at the height of his influence, takes a white wife, the daughter of a
secure member of the establishment he now belongs to. He does not cultivate his past
but looks forward and hopes to be accepted on his merits. Nevertheless, he remains
isolated, insecure and suspicious, partly because he has no power base. He is a
creation of other people and deep down he has an inferiority complex despite his
bluster and pride. He truly cannot believe that his wife, that paragon of virtue and
purity, could have settled for him. His insecurities, are played on by Iago and
eventually trigger off an engulfing suspicion and jealousy of his wife's supposed
infidelity, which culminates in him murdering her. Othello says, My wife! My wife!
Wehat wife. I have no wife.

O, insupportable! O heavy hour.

Methinks it should now be a big eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe

Should yawn at alteration. (Act V. Sc. II lines 97-101)

When he discovers that he has been tricked by his friend, he is overcome by remorse
and kills himself. Othello asks before dying that they remember him

Of one who loved not wisely, but too well

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplext in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued

Albeit unused to the melting mood. . .

I took by th’throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him—thus. {He stabs himself. (Act V. Sc II, lines 345-356)

The play concentrates on more than just the character of Othello, but as the director
Oliver Parks notes

Iago is totally fascinating--a Machiavellian mind manipulating everyone around him--

and he's riveting to watch. But for me, at the centre of the play is the all-consuming
love between Othello and Desdemona, which flies in the face of the conventions of
the time. I wanted to reinvest the tragedy with passion and romance, because without
romance there is no real tragedy. I saw the play as an erotic thriller, and that is what I
wanted to translate onto the big screen. Passion is the driving force of the story. Every
character is motored by desire. There's an extraordinary fusion of people boiling with
different passions.
Just like Hamlet, Othello is based upon the passions that drive the main character over
the brink of insanity. Othello’s love for Desdemonia was so deep he could not bear
the thought of another being with her. He felt insecure in his own position and this
added to his insanity. Unlike Hamlet, who constantly has ghosts whsipering in his ear,
Othello must deal with the lies and accusations of Iago. Iago tells these lies with the
intention of driving Othello insane. The characters bare similar personality traits.
Hamlet is jealous of his mother’s relationship with his uncle the King, and Othello is
jealous of Desdemonia. Hamlet seeks revenge, but his insanity prevents him from
acting. Othello seeks revenge, but his insanity does not allow him to see who that
vengeance should be directed towards, and he in his insanity he is driven to murder
his own wife, and then kill himself. In both plays Shakespeare is dealing with man’s
psychological imperfections when faced with jealousy and obsession. Hamlet like
Othello, but not directly, end his life tragically. He knows he will not win the final
battle, and that his life will end. He also, indirectly, is responsible for the death of the
woman he loves. It is Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia that drives her to suicide.