hamlet's downfall essay

William Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Actions and Inactions Essay (Critical Writing)

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“Hamlet” is a play for all times. Its protagonist is a contradictory and mysterious person. If he is guided by blind revenge or righteous feel of justice, why he hesitates and lingers to punish culprits if he is prudent or light-minded – these adages may be united under two maxims:” Look before you leap” and “He who hesitates is lost”. This paper is an attempt to analyze Hamlet’s actions and inactions to prove the authenticity of the application of these maxims to the protagonist.

Although the scene of the play is laid in the Danish Kingdom, the problems involve the whole of mankind to think over this play. In the first act, we get acquainted with Hamlet and it gives us some intellectual challenge. The protagonist is a noble hero, he has a philosophical set of minds, he judges everything from the height of moral virtues, but he has found himself in a complicated and even tragic predicament after having known about his mother and uncles betray. The old world is destructed, and the Ghost asks Hamlet to take responsibility and revenge for his father’s death and restore universal justice. Hamlet obeys the Ghost and is careless of consequences. Here we see the first “leap” of Hamlet because he takes too much upon himself. But this proves the Prince to be an ideal person of the Renaissance.

Hamlet disguises himself as a madman. He should convince everybody that he has gone insane. Being a jester gives an opportunity to tell everything he thinks about. The Prince gives praise to Human beings, calls him perfect, but here we hear the disappointment in life values. All Universal lacks any sense. Hamlet became animated when remembering an old play about the murder of Priam by Pyrrhus. This scene has a very emotional moment when the Prince remembers Priam’s wife Hecuba. For Hamlet it is very important: Hecuba is a faithful wife and Queen Gertrude – not. Anguish comes to the surface again, but reproaches about inaction mingle with this anguish. Why does he linger? Why not avenge his father’s death? He is angry with himself and calls himself pejorative names: “what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (Hamlet, Act II). This is an example of his hesitations.

The famous soliloquy “To be or not to be” is the culmination of Hamlet’s doubts. “To suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Hamlet, Act III) directly refers to the situation Hamlet is in: to fight against evil or avoid struggle. Desires controvert virtues. Hesitation is grounded on fear. The Prince is afraid to suffer a defeat. His views on life are destructed, and his goddess Justice is blind. Does he have enough powers to resist the temptation of inactivity and sleep peacefully? Once again, the Prince is prevented from action by his hesitancy. Hamlet does not moralize. He is lost in the world, lost in his hesitations. He cannot draw a demarcation line between reality and his feigned insanity. Hamlet chooses “to be”, but “to be” means to die. He claims that death is inevitable, but hesitates because it is unknown as well. The soliloquy expresses Hamlet’s torment of mind. He is determined to kill the King, but he is unsure if it will bring good or harm.

Now nothing can stop Hamlet and there is a right moment. Hamlet finds Claudius praying, but he cannot kill him. The prayer defends the King and Hamlet does not want him to die sinless. It leads to Heaven, but Claudius does not deserve it. And here Hamlet should think before he leaps. The Prince just excuses his hesitation by waiting for some other appropriate fatal occasion. He wants his revenge to be perfect and edifying. If not – he refuses it completely. He has no time to consider the circumstances and kills Polonius, once more “leaping” before thinking.

Laertes wants to compete in fencing with Hamlet and kill him during this duel. Laertes’ sword will be poisoned and the Prince will die from the wound. Hamlet is tortured by forebodings of evil. Horatio suggests declining the duel. But Hamlet’s response astonishes by its wisdom. Come what may, what must be will be, there exists some Divine power that rules the world – such thoughts occur in Hamlet’s mind for the first time.

Hamlet is uncertain whether he can believe the Ghost. He scruples to trust everybody: Ophelia, Horatio, Gertrude. He is even unsure of himself. When a troupe of actors comes, he gets inspired with his new intention. To re-act, the murder of his father means to punish the culprits. Hamlet mocks the evils of life, thus trying to delete them from reality. He is just satisfied when everybody sees that it is his uncle who has killed Hamlet’s father. His suspicions are confirmed, but he never tries to return for evil. And it happens but by an accident. Hamlet makes no attempt to punish the King. So Hamlet “leaps” into the struggle, but with much hesitation. On one hand, he is a loser, because he died, on the other – a winner, because culprits endured the punishment. He reflects upon his infirmity but does not try to put his intentions into practice. He is obsessed with thinking, not acting. This is his essence and escapes from reality. Only death can bring deliverance and oblivion from uncertainty.

Hamlet is not remarkable for willpower or determination, foresight and deep consideration. But we enjoy refined thoughts and genuine sentiments of his. The Prince lacks deliberateness in actions; he rushes to the whirl of life on the spur of the occasion. If Hamlet were a man of action, he might have killed Claudius at once together with the Queen. And everybody would think him to be a cruel murderer. If he were more prudent, he could have avoided his death and become a King himself. But could he be a good King for his people? A hesitating and indiscreet king can ruin his kingdom. He could save Ophelia, innocent victim of his indifference, Laertes, noble and loving brother. But Hamlet breaks the equilibrium of imaginative and authentic worlds, and reality turns out to be crueler than his fictional insanity. Skepticism, accompanying Hamlet, makes him vulnerable, as only strong beliefs can bring to actions. What if Hamlet has not believed the Ghost at all? Maybe it is conscience that came to him, and if he had not listened to it, his life would be full of scruples of remorse facing his father’s memory. Hamlet, the flesh and blood of his mother, wanted to sentence her to death, and if he had not been stopped by the Ghost, a fatal mistake could have been made.

It is controversial if Hamlet is a hero or a pure madman with judicious observations; his motives are mixed and vague. But we can find Hamlet in ourselves. Like him, we hesitate before an important decision and overestimate our powers. It is in human nature and when Hamlet speaks, he speaks on behalf of all people.

Works Cited

Shakespeare William. Hamlet. NY: Dover Publications, 2004.

Summary & Analysis
Genre & Literary Analysis
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Essay Samples
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Iago’s Character as Embodiment of the Darker Side Which All the People Have
Hamlet And Laertes: A Comparison
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The Trojan Women and Everyman
“Oedipus the King” Drama by Sophocles
“Journey’s End” by Robert Cedric Sherriff
Friar Lawrence in “Romeo and Juliet” by Shakespeare
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Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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Hamlet as a tragic hero

Of all the plays Shakespeare has written, “ Hamlet ” is his most celebrated play and the play’s main protagonist Hamlet is the most controversial and talked about character in the history of English literature.

Aristotle in his book “ Poetics ” outlines that a tragic hero is a noble-born with heroic attributes and whose destiny changes as a result of a tragic flaw (most of the time arising from the character’s own heroic attributes) that eventually causes the tragic hero’s awful downfall. The character, Hamlet, undoubtedly complies with the concept of a tragic hero based on these points and can be considered as a perfect tragic hero.

Table of Contents

Hamlet’s high status:

Hamlet is a high-born or a prince in the kingdom of Denmark. Hamlet has high philosophical thoughts as he was a student of philosophy and we witness his philosophical mind when Hamlet contemplates the principles of death and life. As a noble-born, Hamlet also knows sword skills which we can see in his duel against Laertes. Hamlet is also depicted as a diligent and clever person who is accepted among the public and will without a doubt make a potent monarch. Despite having all these heroic qualities, the ‘tragic flaw’ in his character eventually leads to his destruction and makes him a typical tragic hero.

Hamlet’s tragic flaw

According to Aristotle, a tragic hero must have a tragic flaw and Hamlet’s tragic flaw is his incapacity to take action or his indecisiveness. He is oftentimes upset by his own manners of ‘self-analysis’ . This tragic flaw leads him to many unwanted outcomes. For example, when Hamlet had the opportunity to kill, the murderer of his father Claudius, Hamlet halts because Claudius was praying at that time. According to Hamlet, if he had killed him while praying, he would have advanced to heaven. Likewise Act III Scene VI, in conversation with his mother, Hamlet had murdered Polonius, suspecting that it was his uncle Claudius. Extremely grieved by the demise of his father, Ophelia killed herself. If we look at all these incidents from a wiser point of view, then we can say that had Hamlet killed Claudius earlier, Hamlet would have already avenged his father’s death. Accordingly, Polonius, whom Hamlet killed would have lived and also his daughter Ophelia and besides all these Hamlet would also be able to spend the rest of his life well. So Hamlet’s own tragic flaw leads to his downfall and this also makes him a tragic hero.

Conflict as an essence of a tragic hero

Conflict is an important characteristic of a tragic hero. Tragic heroes like King Lear, Brutus, Othello, Hamlet also face internal and external conflicts . Hamlet’s inner conflict is between his ethical principles and his duty of taking revenge. His attachment to his father, the disgrace of his mother Gertrude, and the wickedness and double-dealing of his uncle Claudius stimulate him to take revenge while his integrity, moral principles, resists such inhuman action. The outcome is that Hamlet breaks within himself and endures psychological torment.

If we talk about Hamlet’s main external conflict, then it is with his uncle, Claudius. For Hamlet, Claudius is a murderer of his father, a seducer who seduced and married Hamlet’s mother, and a usurper of Denmark’s crowned head. So for all these reasons Hamlet wants to take revenge on Claudius.

We can also see Hamlet’s external conflict with Laertes. Laertes has a touch of dislike for Hamlet when he learns that his sister Ophelia had some connection with Hamlet. But Laertes’ dislike of him turns violent when he learns that his father has been killed by Hamlet. Such internal and external conflicts are the essence of a tragic hero.

The self-realization of a tragic hero:

Usually, in a tragedy, the hero comes to know about a truth about which he was previously unaware and uninformed. No doubt, Hamlet goes through a shift, a growth in perception and self-realization. But this transformation of Hamlet comes quite late to prevent his downfall. The self-realization of Hamlet starts with his brooding on the performer’s speech about Hecuba; it moves along with the bedroom scene and gets to its peak in the grave-diggers’ scene. It is in the gravedigger’s scene where Hamlet declares “the readiness is all” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet) . Aristotle called this self-realization of the hero “anagnorisis” . Most of all, in any case, Hamlet was manage to accomplish his essential aim – to kill the murderer of his father.

Role of fate and chance in Hamlet’s tragedy:

It might be argued that the personality of Hamlet’s character is not the only reason that is accountable for his downfall; external situations are also blameworthy for forming Hamlet a tragic hero. The arrival of the Ghost in the form of Hamlet’s father and its disclosure is an instance of fortune. There are many other incidents that happen in Hamlet’s life are by accident. The killing of Polonius, the attacking of pirates, and his returning to Denmark are nothing but an accident. So chance and fate affect not only the life of Hamlet but also the lives of the other characters. But this also does not mean that fate and chance are the only cause of Hamlet’s tragedy ; ultimately it is he himself who is answerable for his tragedy.

Conclusion:

In the end, we can say that the character of Hamlet as portrayed in the play and as advocated by the aforesaid qualities can be regarded as a tragic hero . Hamlet is not known for his bravery and goodness, he is such a hero who wanted to do something right but in the process, he keeps on making mistakes one after another. His ambitions and accomplishments are coordinated by defeats and misdeeds. Hamlet is a character in which virtue and evil coexist.

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1 thought on “Hamlet as a tragic hero”

Outstanding

Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications



is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach it Like One	?	: Divine Providence and Social Determinism

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Essay: Hamlet is responsible for his downfall

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When students do not do their homework, they are denying the benefits that the practice allows them to get. Sometimes they will complain about the volume of the homework or the difficulty and they would not attempt it. However, if the students choose not to do their homework, the student will most likely receive a lower mark than he or she would have received compared to when the student completes his or her homework. His or her inability to do the homework is ultimately the cause of their own downfall.

Everyone has flaws that lead to undesirable outcomes. This applies to literature, especially to Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Shakespeare’s protagonists in all of his works cause their own downfall in one way or another and Hamlet, in every sense, is no exception. Just as students choose to not do their homework, Hamlet avoids killing Claudius on many occasions. Hamlet is one of the most notable Shakespearian heroes whose flaws lead to his own downfall.

One of Hamlet’s most dominant flaws is that he over analyzes most situations that he is put in. Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s death but procrastinates murdering Claudius on multiple occasions. From act one to act three, Hamlet avoids killing Claudius based on traditional knowledge about ghosts in that time period. The ghost that appears to Hamlet could be there for one of two reasons: The apparition could either be a demon whose sole purpose is to wreak havoc or the ghost of someone who has died who has unfinished business. Prior to Hamlet discovering the true nature of the ghost, he has many opportunities to kill Claudius. However, due to the nature of his convoluted schemes, he fails to do so. Although he feels the need to confirm the true nature of the ghost, during the Elizibethan era that Hamlet took place, it would not have been out of the question if he immediately goes to kill Claudius after receiving the news that he had murdered Old Hamlet. It would have been tradition to exact revenge on someone who has killed a family member. However, Hamlet chooses to ensure that the ghost is not a demon. Hamlet uses the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a tactic to confirm whether the ghost is a demon or a ghost with unfinished business. He shows this when he states,

The spirit that I have seen/ T’assume a pleasing shape, … Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds/ More relative than this. The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. (2.2.585-592)

After the play concludes, Hamlet confirms that the ghost is truly his father who has come back for unfinished business. Hamlet tells Horatio,

“I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound. / Didst perceive” (3.2.275-276).

Then Horatio replies,

“I did very well note him” (3.2.279).

After this revelation, Hamlet continues to postpone the murder of Claudius. Hamlet has a chance to murder Claudius during his confession but Hamlet forgoes this opportunity because he believes that Claudius is confessing his sins, and in Catholosism, people who confess their sins, with the intention of forgiveness, go to Heaven. Hamlet knows that if he kills Claudius now, Claudius will go to Heaven. So he questions,

“To take him in the purging of his soul,/ When he is fit and season’d for passage?/ No” (3.3.85-87).

Hamlet is overthinking the consequences of killing Claudius instead of going through with his revenge. He does not want Claudius to go to Heaven so he plans to wait until Claudius is committing a sin so he could kill him then and cause Claudius to go to Hell. Hamlet explains,

“When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage,/ … that his soul may be as damn’d and black/ As Hell, whereto it goes” (3.3.89,94-95).

However, after Hamlet exits, the audience finds out that Claudius had not hoped to be forgiven because he does not want to give up his spoils. If Hamlet had chosen to kill Claudius at that point, he would not have gone through the motions that led to his own downfall and Claudius would have gone to Hell. Hamlet causes his own downfall by dwelling on every situation in depth rather than acting.

Another trait that led to Hamlet’s downfall is his impulsiveness. The first occurrence of this trait is when he kills Polonius thinking he is Claudius which, in turn, will be one of the driving forces for Laertes’ revenge. The second is how Hamlet causes Ophelia’s madness by treating her like a pawn in his plans. Hamlet putting on an “antic disposition” distresses Ophelia further. In addition, he causes Ophelia grief by murdering her father which then leads her to become crazy. Polonius’ death and Ophelia’s madness are ultimately what causes Laertes to exact revenge on Hamlet. Laertes swears against Hamlet by declaring,

“To hell, allegiance! Vows to the blackest devil!/ Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!/ I dare damnation. To this point I stand, That both the worlds I give to negligence,/ Let come what comes. (4.5.130-135)

When Hamlet impulsively causes the two most important people to Laertes to die, he is only sealing his eventual fate. Another instance in the play where Hamlet’s impulsiveness led to his downfall is when he interrupts the The Murder of Gonzago. While the players are acting out The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet impulsively gets out of his chair and joins the play. The audience believes that this is a part of the play: However, Claudius is aware to the fact that Hamlet knows that he killed Old Hamlet. Although Claudius was always wary of Hamlet, he is now certain that he should send Hamlet to England to have him killed. This is proven when Claudius proclaims,

I like him not, nor stands it safe with us/ To let his madness range. … your commission will forthwith dispatch, / And he to England along with you./ The terms of our estate may not endure/ Hazard so near us as doth hourly grow. (3.2.1-6)

Also, when the King of Denmark states,

“The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England;/ For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me” (4.3.65-68),

the audience becomes aware that he plans to have Hamlet killed. If Hamlet had not jumped in and joined the players during the part where Claudius poured poison in Old Hamlet’s ear, Hamlet would not have aroused suspicion and would have been able to methodically plan his next move. This shows that when Hamlet acts impulsively he is causing his downfall to be inevitable.

Through his own faults, Hamlet is responsible for his downfall. He overthinks most situations; this in turn causes him to continually postpone Claudius’ death: Nevertheless, Hamlet acts impulsively when the situation is least optimal for him to do so. This impulsive nature causes the people around him to become more wary of him. His spontaneous actions ultimately puts more attention to his schemes and his overthinking gives his enemies more time to plot against him. As students have to accept the consequences that come with not doing their homework, Hamlet must face the consequences of postponing Claudius’ eventual death.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Roma Gill. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

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To What Extent Is Hamlet, The Tragic Hero Of The Play, Responsible For His Own Downfall?

In Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, the eponymous character is the tragic hero, and therefore as this tragic hero in a revenge tragedy must have a tragic flaw. However within the context of the play, in its events and circumstances, many other external factors play a pivotal role in his downfall. Ultimately though as this tragic hero, he becomes a man torn between the these internal and external forces, however in relation to his downfall, it is his flaws in reaction to these external factors which becomes his downfall.

As a play moulded by the revenge tragedy genre, the tragic hero, Hamlet, must have a flaw that proves his downfall. Many have argued that Hamlet was responsible for his own downfall, and his fatal flaw was that he thinks too much. Hamlet’s character is that of a conscientious man with a high intellect. Because of this, the nature of his reasoning in a situation he finds himself in as the avenger of his fathers murder, which itself is an external factor, show how his extensive reasoning becomes his fatal flaw. For example, when discussing his mothers and Claudius’ relationship and his distaste for it, he explains that ‘ For I must hold my tongue’ . This phrase suggests a possible isolation in his thinking, and due to his over analysis and nature of his reasoning, it becomes evident how this over thinking will lead to his downfall in committing the vengeful acts he aims to carry out. Hamlet himself admits the role thinking plays in ones downfall in his suicidal ’ to be or not to be’ soliloquy. He explains that ‘ the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought…with this regard their currents turn awry’ . This highlights how the simple task of decision making is burdened with this necessity to think, and how this leads to our actions becoming erratic, as Hamlet’s do, so therefore many cite this internal flaw of over thinking as the reason for his downfall, and not any external factor. However to analyse his downfall as purely the result of this intrinsic flaw, is to overlook the manner of external factors which affect the way he over thinks, so here it starts to becomes evident the manner in which his internal flaws interact with these external factors to make his downfall.

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To assert that Hamlet is not at all to blame for his own downfall would be to disregard the characteristics of a revenge tragedy, which dictate that the tragic hero must have a fatal flaw that contributes to their downfall, however the extent to which Hamlet can be blamed is called into question when assessing the role external forces play. For example, many have called into question the role played by fate, instead of the sole role of Hamlet’s flaws. This argument resonates strongly as Hamlet is put into the events and circumstances by the actions of others and seems as though his fate as the tragic hero is sealed before he is even aware of it. For example, the actions of Claudius in murdering Hamlet’s father act as the catalyst and precursor to King Hamlet’s ghost visiting Hamlet to reveal the nature of his death and calling for the revenge of his death. Hamlet himself even acknowledges the role that fate and destiny play in the direction in his actions when he explains that ‘ there’s a divinity that shapes our end’. Here Hamlet shows although he has freedom in his actions as the tragic hero, as free will is a pivotal element of a revenge tragedy, there is some divine force such as God guiding the ends of his actions. A.C Bradley explains this role that fate plays as ’ the powerlessness of man and of the omnipotence --perhaps the caprice-- of, fortune or fate, which no tale of private life can possibly rival’ .Therefore this again emphasizes that although Hamlet’s internal flaws play a role in his downfall, there is an element which he cannot control, and this interaction between these two forces prove the source of his downfall.

In contrast to this role that external forces play, many persist in arguing that it is solely Hamlet to blame for his own downfall, and use one of his fatal flaws as the reasoning for this assertion. His tendency to procrastinate and not showing enough masculinity in his actions is to many an internal flaw that exacerbates the revenge and ultimately adds to his downfall. A hesitating avenger is a fundamental aspect of a revenge tragedy and is thus shown throughout the play in many instances. For example, Hamlet has the chance to kill Claudius but resists as he is praying and does not want him to go to heaven. Hamlet reasons that ‘ now I might do it pat. Now he is praying. And now he is a-praying. And now I’ll do it. And so I am revenged’. Although Hamlet here is seemingly showing his moral and religious character, he is in fact highlighting his intent to kill Claudius, as he merely wants to make sure he goes to hell and inflict as much pain upon him as possible. By procrastinating here it leads on to further bloodshed, such as the accidental murder of Polonius which leads to Laertes’ revengeful aims, and in turn leads to the eventual downfall of Hamlet. Here it is shown the role that the internal role that Hamlet’s flaws play in downfall, but it is worth noting the relationship this aspect has with the role an external factors such as fate plays, so yet again this combined interaction between internal and external forces is what proves to be the reason for Hamlet’s downfall.

Another element explored by those who believe that Hamlet’s internal flaws are not solely to blame for his downfall is the role that chance plays as an external force that adds to the downfall of Hamlet. When identifying events which arise as a result of pure chance, which also lead also to the downfall of Hamlet, it becomes inherently clear that this factor plays a role in Hamlet’s downfall as well. For example the accidental murder of Polonius in Act 3 Scene 4 is an example of this. Hamlet mutters ‘ Nay I know what. Is it the king?. Instead of killing Claudius he in fact kills Polonius, which in turn leads to Laertes aim to avenge his fathers death, and leads to them conspiring in the fixed fencing match which is the last stand for Hamlet.

Another striking example of this instance of a tragedy of chance is within Act 4 during the voyage to England after Hamlet discovers that he was on his way to be murdered, and joins a pirate ship to be shipped back to Denmark to await his fate. This example if any shows how an external factor lead to the downfall of Hamlet, as he came back to develop the plot between himself and Claudius even more, as he could of stayed in England which would have diffused the situation.

This interpretation of Hamlet as a tragedy of chance reiterates the idea that the internal flaws and external forces interact with one another and the manner in which Hamlet’s flaws react to these forces are what causes his downfall.

Within ‘Hamlet’, Shakespeare creates a character who has been torn between his internal flaws and external forces, both of which he has no control over, and because of these two forces which entwine to add to his downfall, it cannot be concluded that Hamlet was completely to blame for his own downfall. His downfall was however due to the tragic relationship between these two forces and his inability to deal with is situation in light of these forces, which ultimately culminated in a noble man thrown into the depths of revenge which finished with his own death.

To What Extent Is Hamlet, The Tragic Hero Of The Play, Responsible For His Own Downfall?

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Introduction

The ghost's call to action and hamlet's procrastination.

The Consequence of Hamlet's Inaction: The Slaying of Polonius

The final duel and hamlet's tragic end.

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A thesis statement is the cornerstone of any well-written essay or research paper. It serves as a roadmap, guiding the reader through the argument or analysis that follows. However, one common question among students is: how long should a thesis statement be? In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the ideal length, structure, and content of a thesis statement. We’ll also provide good thesis statement examples, discuss common pitfalls, and offer advice on crafting effective thesis statements that enhance your academic writing.

The Purpose of a Thesis Statement

Before we delve into the specifics of length, it’s crucial to understand the fundamental purpose of a thesis statement. A thesis statement succinctly summarises the main point or claim of your essay or paper. It should provide a clear, concise, and specific argument that sets the tone for the rest of your work.

The Importance of a Thesis Statement

A well-crafted thesis statement is essential because it:

Clarifies the Argument : It tells the reader what to expect from your essay and what position you will be arguing or discussing. Organises Your Writing : It helps you, the writer, stay focused on your main point and avoid straying from your topic. Engages the Reader : A strong thesis statement grabs the reader’s attention and makes them want to read further.

Thesis Statement Structure: What Should It Include?

The structure of a thesis statement typically includes two components: the topic of your essay and your specific stance or argument about that topic. In some cases, particularly in longer essays or research papers, a thesis statement may also include a brief overview of the supporting points that will be discussed.

The Basic Structure

Topic : What are you writing about? Claim : What is your position or argument about the topic? Supporting Points (optional) : What are the key points you will use to support your argument?

Let’s consider a basic thesis statement structure with an example:

Topic : The theme of revenge in Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Claim : Revenge leads to the downfall of several characters in Hamlet. Supporting Points : This is illustrated through Hamlet's obsession with avenging his father’s death, Laertes' pursuit of revenge for his father Polonius, and Fortinbras' desire to reclaim his father’s lost territories. Thesis Statement : "In Hamlet, Shakespeare demonstrates how the pursuit of revenge leads to the downfall of multiple characters, as seen through Hamlet's fixation on avenging his father, Laertes' retribution for Polonius, and Fortinbras' quest to restore his father's honour."

Thesis Statement: How Long Should It Be?

The length of a thesis statement can vary depending on the complexity of the topic and the length of the essay or paper. However, a general rule of thumb is that a thesis statement should be one to two sentences long.

General Guidelines for Length:

For Short Essays (1-3 pages) : A concise, single-sentence thesis statement is usually sufficient. For Medium-Length Essays (4-8 pages) : A thesis statement may be one to two sentences, briefly mentioning supporting points. For Longer Papers (10+ pages) : A longer thesis statement, possibly two sentences, may include a more detailed overview of the supporting points.

While brevity is important, clarity and comprehensiveness are equally essential. You want your thesis statement to be as concise as possible while still conveying your main argument and the direction of your paper.

Length of a Thesis Statement in Different Contexts:

Short Thesis Statement Example : "Climate change poses a serious threat to global biodiversity." Length: 1 sentence Medium-Length Thesis Statement Example : "Climate change poses a serious threat to global biodiversity, particularly in fragile ecosystems such as coral reefs and rainforests." Length: 1 sentence with added complexity Long Thesis Statement Example : "Climate change poses a serious threat to global biodiversity by accelerating habitat loss, altering species migration patterns, and increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, particularly in fragile ecosystems such as coral reefs and rainforests." Length: 2 sentences, offering a brief overview of the supporting points

Crafting a Strong Thesis Statement

A strong thesis statement is not just about getting the length right; it’s about making sure your statement is clear, specific, and arguable. Here’s how you can achieve that:

Be Specific Avoid vague language. Your thesis statement should clearly express your position on the topic.
Be Arguable Your thesis should present a claim that others could potentially dispute. It should invite discussion or debate.
Focus on One Main Idea A thesis statement should convey one main idea. If you find yourself trying to include multiple ideas, it might be worth narrowing your focus.
Tailor It to the Scope of Your Paper Ensure that your thesis statement aligns with the scope of your essay or paper. For example, a thesis for a 2-page essay will be much more straightforward than one for a 20-page research paper.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Crafting a Thesis Statement

Being Too Vague: Avoid broad terms that fail to convey a specific stance. Instead, make sure your thesis clearly articulates a precise argument or point of view.
Being Too Complex: Your thesis should be clear and easily understandable, avoiding overly complex language or ideas that might overwhelm the reader.
Making an Obvious Statement: Ensure your thesis offers a unique insight rather than stating a widely accepted or obvious fact.

Long Thesis Statement Examples

In some cases, especially in more complex or extensive essays, a longer thesis statement may be necessary. Here are a few long thesis statement examples to illustrate how to handle more detailed arguments:

"In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen explores the limitations placed on women in 19th-century England through the character of Elizabeth Bennet, whose defiance of traditional gender roles, independence, and refusal to marry for convenience challenge the societal norms of her time and ultimately redefine what it means to be a woman in her society."

"The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 21st century presents unprecedented ethical dilemmas, as AI's integration into various industries threatens to displace human labour, raises questions about data privacy, and challenges existing legal frameworks, all of which require urgent attention from policymakers." In these examples, the thesis statements are longer because they address more complex issues and lay out the specific points that will be explored in the paper.

Conclusion: Getting the Thesis Statement Just Right

A well-crafted thesis statement is the key to a successful essay or research paper. It should be concise yet comprehensive, specific yet arguable, and tailored to the scope of your paper. While the length of a thesis statement typically ranges from one to two sentences, the most important aspect is its ability to clearly and effectively communicate the main point of your writing.

Essay exams: how to answer ‘To what extent…’

How to write a master’s essay

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These forests below the Arctic Circle are designed to burn.

But not this often.

Parts of Canada’s Boreal Forest Are Burning Faster Than They Can Regrow

The delicate balance of one of the planet’s largest natural systems for storing carbon depends on the humble black spruce tree.

Manuela Andreoni , a climate reporter, and Bryan Denton , a photographer, traveled with researchers to Canada’s boreal forests in the Northwest Territories.

The dead black spruce looked like a collection of giant burned matchsticks standing tall above the gray landscape as far as Jennifer Baltzer could see. But here, at the edge of one of the largest areas of scorched forest that scientists have ever documented in Canada, what caught Dr. Baltzer’s attention was closer to the ground.

The spruce seedlings were gone.

Dr. Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, was a few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, where for over a decade she has studied the health of the black spruce and the boreal forests. It was a scorching late spring morning, and she and three of her students from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, were in the Northwest Territories to document what could grow from the ashes of the record-breaking fire season that had ravaged the forest almost a year earlier.

“Wow, it’s kind of crazy in here,” Dr. Baltzer said as she inspected the blackened landscape. She had never seen trees burn this soon after a previous fire.

The boreal forests are the largest forests in the world, and in Western Canada they evolved to burn once every century or so. But this patch of forest had just burned for the second time in a decade. As a result, many trees would struggle here, she explained. The slow-growing black spruce didn’t stand a chance.

Where Canada’s Monster Fires Burned — and Re-Burned

Area burned in 2023

Burned in 2023 and at least once in past 50 years

Territories

Yellowknife

Great Slave

Black spruce

dominant area

Source: Natural Resources Canada

By Veronica Penney

More frequent, bigger wildfires, fueled by climate change, are a formidable challenge to the black spruce, a species that has dominated these landscapes for thousands of years. Their gradual decline, now accelerated by last year’s fire season, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the new age of wildfires aren’t just overwhelming people with the smoke and destructive blazes now raging across North America — they are overwhelming nature, too.

The dwindling number of black spruce trees, scientists say, is deeply transforming an ecosystem that is one of Earth’s biggest storage systems for planet-warming carbon dioxide, a crucial tool to keep the atmosphere from warming even more than it already has.

Last year’s fires engulfed a stretch of forest the size of the Netherlands for at least the second time in 50 years, according to an analysis by Natural Resources Canada, a federal government department.

What was troubling, Dr. Baltzer noted, is that fire isn’t supposed to make life harder for the black spruce tree. Quite the opposite.

Dr. Jennifer Baltzer stands among dark, burned trees, wearing a backpack, a plaid shirt, brown pants and boots.

Jennifer Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, in a spruce stand that burned last year outside Behchoko, Northwest Territories.

A cluster of brown and gray black spruce cones hang on branches.

Black spruce cones, which open and release their seeds with the help of fire.

Black spruce forests didn’t just evolve alongside fire, they depend on it. The tree is a natural bonfire of sorts. Its branches are covered with flammable resin that fuels the flames of forest fires right up to the tree’s crown. Fires help melt the waxy coating of black spruce cones until the trees release seeds onto the soil where seedlings can grow.

But if they burn too often, there aren’t enough viable seeds to reproduce. Burn too hot, and the seeds are killed. Burn too deeply, and the organic layer of soil where black spruce trees thrive, and which takes decades to accumulate, is gone.

In recent years, the black spruce failed to regenerate after fire in a fifth of the hundreds of sites Dr. Baltzer and other researchers monitored in North America’s boreal forests. And that was before the fire season of 2023.

The black spruce’s struggles are a gradual break to an ancient natural cycle, one that releases planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere as old trees burn, and then gradually returns that carbon to the land, in the form of new trees and new soil. Any imbalance in this tug of war between life and death can threaten the boreal forests’ ability to store heat-trapping carbon.

Where Black Spruce Dominates Canada’s Boreal Forest

Atlantic Ocean

Black spruce dominant areas

Boreal forest extent

Source: Canada’s National Forest Information System leading tree species data

Last summer, temperatures in Canada were more than 2.2 degrees Celsius, or 4 degrees Fahrenheit, above the historical average of the past few decades. Around the Northwest Territories, it was even hotter. The heat is largely why fires as severe as last year’s happened many years before scientists anticipated. Most climate projections didn’t expect these kinds of fires until later in the century, a new preprint study found.

“The entire bloody country was hot and dry at the same time,” said Marc-André Parisien, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service and an author of the study. “If you would have told me that a few years ago, I’d be like no, that doesn’t really make sense.”

Forest fires are burning more than twice as much tree cover as they did 20 years ago . They have also become more intense and frequent, especially in the boreal forests, according to a recent study . Increasing temperatures, fueled by the burning of oil, gas and coal, are the biggest culprit.

Wildfire smoke rises from a hilly expanse of dark green trees.

A wildfire burning south of Enterprise, Northwest Territories, last August.

Jeff Mcintosh/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

In the Northwest Territories, as Dr. Baltzer drove through the burned forests on her way to visit another site, she recalled the moment the scope of the 2023 tragedy became clear. She was reading headlines about the immense blazes when it hit her that the planet had briefly reached the temperature at which countries had agreed in the Paris Agreement to cap warming: 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels.

Temperatures would need to be at that level for several years for the global target to be breached. But for a scientist who had spent much of her career tracking fire, the consequences of a planet that was warming this quickly were clear.

If the world continued on this trajectory, it didn’t matter how hard she or anyone worked to protect the boreal forests.

“Everything will burn,” she said.

‘The trees melted’

A burned, brown tree stands in the middle of an otherwise empty field with large white clouds seen on the horizon.

A single burned tree near Kakisa, Northwest Territories, an area that has burned twice in the last 10 years.

The scraggly, skinny black spruce trees may not be much to look at. But what lies in the soils below them is one of nature’s biggest gifts to living things, a vault of the forest’s past lives, in icy slow decomposition, that stores immense amounts of planet-warming carbon.

The researchers were on their way to document another area that had burned in 2023 when they walked into an ancient black spruce stand. As they stepped on the ground, it sank several inches below their feet. Then it bounced right back.

The cold temperatures of northern Canada slow down the microbes that eat the dead moss and leaves on the ground. Inches, or sometimes several feet, of organic matter remain on the soil even as new trees, moss and lichen, one of the caribou’s favorite foods, grow on top.

The black spruce is one of the few trees that can grow on such spongy soils. The acidic nature of the trees’ needles helps slow down decomposition and its bushy branches help catch snow, making soils colder during winter.

The black spruce is one of the few trees that can grow on such spongy soil.

As the researchers approached the burned patch, walking became harder. The ground was now full of enormous potholes covered by thin layers of singed plants. The black spruce trees, many more than a century old, had all fallen, their blackened roots sticking up to the sky, many of their seeds dead.

“It looks like the trees melted,” Dr. Baltzer said.

Austin McIntosh, a technician, and Kyle Fennig, a research assistant, grabbed a tool to measure how much of the soil had combusted. In some patches, more than half of the organic matter in the ground was gone.

Their measurements were perhaps a glimpse into the future of that ecosystem. The amount of carbon that soils hold after the spruce trees are gone can fall by up to 80 percent , a recent study showed. It then takes several decades for the forest to restore it.

Researchers examine burned trees. One of them uses an electronic device, visible in the foreground.

Kyle Fennig, left, and Maya Provenzano, students at Wilfrid Laurier University, gathered data in a stand of black spruce that burned during the 2023 fire season, near Behchoko.

A researcher’s hands hold dark green and brown soil.

The top of a soil core sample is dotted with organic material, including Geopyxis carbonaria, pixie cup lichen and green polytricha moss.

When fires kill off black spruce trees, they are often replaced by other native trees, such as birch or aspen. These species survive in part because they grow a lot faster. But because they drop their leaves every year, which stops mosses from growing, the soil around these trees doesn’t store as much carbon.

Some researchers have found these fast-growing, less flammable trees can help protect black spruce seedlings. But researchers fear that the era of more frequent fires has broken that balance because spruce trees are killed off too quickly.

When Dr. Baltzer pulled on one section of burned soil, as if it were a thick wool rug, there was ice below. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long, she told the team. Now that the organic layer protecting the frozen soil was gone, it would thaw quickly, completely changing this corner of the ecosystem. What would happen next would depend on how wet the soil would become.

“I would expect this to get wetter,” she said. Maybe other trees, like larch, could grow here then. “But possibly not black spruce.”

At scale, the implications of how well the black spruce fares in places like this could change how scientists expect global warming to play out in the future. Put together, the soils of the Arctic and the boreal forests, which stretch from North America to Asia and Europe, store almost twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere .

‘No more water’

Chief Sangris stands on a rocky shoreline and points to a nearby lake.

Chief Fred Sangris of the community of Ndilo.

For the Dene First Nations, which have lived in the boreal forests of the Northwest Territories for centuries, the menacing forces of the new age of wildfires are a consequence of the deep transformations they have watched unfold around them for years.

Chief Fred Sangris, of the community of Ndilo on the edge of Yellowknife, the territorial capital, has seen the permafrost melt into large ponds, and ancient trees sink as their roots lost their grip on the mushy soils. He noticed new islands emerging when the water levels at the Great Slave Lake sank to record lows. And he felt the peat soils, once as soft as mattresses, dry up and harden.

As Chief Sangris walked in the old-growth forests of Dettah, the hamlet where he grew up some 15 miles south of Yellowknife, he couldn’t find any of the black spruce gum that the Dene people use to make teas that help treat upset stomachs. The trees had all turned gray.

“These trees are dying because there’s no more water,” he said, as the soil crackled below his feet. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

The ecosystem that is a central part of much of Dene culture had changed before Chief Sangris’s eyes. He grew up collecting berries, fishing and hunting caribou in these lands. But caribou populations have long been declining and finding ripe berries in drier forests has become harder.

More than half the population in the Northwest Territories’ 42,000 people are Indigenous. First Nations officials are now pushing for a bigger role in shaping policy on topics like fire management and evacuation strategies.

They are worried about protecting communities that had never been under wildfire threat. The Dene hamlets of Dettah, Behchoko and Ndilo were evacuated for the first time last year . So was Yellowknife, a city of 20,000 that has historically been a safe harbor to communities deeper in the forest.

A faded roadside sign remains at an abandoned-looking lot littered with charred, rusty junk.

The burned remains of a gallery and gift shop in Enterprise.

Clouds cast shadows on a brown landscape of burned, twiggy trees seen from a drone’s vantage point high above the ground.

A section of forest that burned in last year’s fires is visible from the road between Kakisa and Enterprise.

Weeks after the trip to the Northwest Territories, Dr. Baltzer said, the images of the burned forests were still in her mind. She felt confident that the data her team collected would help manage wildlife and protect First Nations communities. Given how huge the boreal forests are, her research could help shed light on which parts of the ecosystem were most important to protect.

The research is also poised to help improve the global models that forecast how climate change will affect the planet. Estimates from a United Nations panel of experts project that, sometime in the next decade, global temperatures will rise to a sustained level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, from the current level of about 1.2 or 1.3 degrees. If temperatures rise above that, scientists say, the effects of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction will become significantly harder for humanity to handle.

Extreme fires like last year’s that ravage enormous tracts of forests are “completely absent from the current climate models,” said Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, near Paris, who tracks carbon dioxide emissions.

Because of that, he said, “the models are probably too optimistic.”

As he stood at the edge of the lake by Dettah, Chief Sangris watched small fishing boats cross the blue waters, glistening in the sun. He recounted his community’s efforts to adapt to the changes around them across several generations. They built fire breaks, found evacuation routes, fought mining interests and developed programs to grow more food locally so they wouldn’t need to rely on the forest as much as they have in the past. Their goal was to stay on their ancestral land.

“You put your canoe here, you’re in the wilderness,” he said. “We’re not moving. This is our home.”

A small green tree peeks out of the ground.

An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly the status of the Northwest Territories in Canada’s federal system. It is a territory, not a province.

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Tragic Flaw in Shakespeare's Hamlet: [Essay Example], 949 words
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William Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Actions and Inactions Essay (Critical Writing)

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