Dramatic form: Hamlet as a Tragedy

Abstract

Hamlet has the most prominent features of a tragedy, as Shakespeare and many dramatists of his time evidently understood tragedy. It has a tragic hero (protagonist) of high rank, on whom for his predominantly high character our sympathies are principally centred, and who ends in a tragic catastrophe which he has a decisive share in bringing about. He is confronted by a situation which is more than he can cope with until by tragic errors in facing it he has helped to bring catastrophe on others as well as himself: innocent, like Ophelia, or if, like Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Polonius, and even Laertes, they are chief authors of their own disasters, not fully deserving what happens to them. Hamlet is tragedy because the want of poetic justice, for them and the hero, keeps it a painful mystery; and because the chain of cause and effect prevents it equally from being ‘Absurd’ drama, as does Hamlet’s final acceptance of Providence at work in it to ‘shape our ends’.

Shakespeare was not attempting to justify the ways of God to men … He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery.

(A. C. Bradley, 1904)