Hamlet: A Study of Idealism in Action

Authors:

Pages: 71-82
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/PYDI1727

Abstract:

As a true idealist, the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet is capable of admiration and exaltation as well as of scorn, intolerance and anger, but not of sympathy and pardon. As a believer in man’s potential for greatness, he feels that his mission is to cleanse the world of the inexcusable weakness that reduces human beings to unthinking and insensate instruments of evil masterminds. The striking irony of the play is that its hero, this passionate fighter against the reduction of human beings to mere tools, finds himself in a similar position pregnant with greater dangers for everybody around him and to his own person. While celebrating the heroic nature of idealism, this celebrated tragedy also reveals its destructive potential. A final section of the essay touches briefly on the question of Hamlet’s place among the other climactic works of Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist and in the history of English Renaissance drama in general as far as it is concerned with the themes of idealism and human instrumentalization.

Keywords:

Shakespeare, drama, Hamlet, humanism, idealism, instrumentalization

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