Shakespeare the Player

“To Be or Not To Be”: An Examination of Shakespeare’s Tragically Flawed Characters

Shakespeare's tragedies often follow characters who hold a position of high power, but have flaws that become the reason for their demise. Although each Character has a flaw, their flaws are not the same. Macbeth is obsessed with power, Hamlet has an inability to decide, and Othello suffers from severe jealousy. All three, however, die at the end of the play, hurt the people they currently or once loved, and suffer from mental illness or pain.

Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello all start out as characters who have done nothing wrong. Hamlet is a simple prince, Macbeth is a noble man fighting for his land, and Othello is a man who is in love with Desdemona, his wife. Throughout the play, these character sucumb to their enemies who are other people and/or themselves.

Hamlet’s enemy is king Claudius who killed Hamlet’s father with a drop of poison in the ear so he could become king, however, Claudius is not his only enemy. Hamlet’s obsession with getting revenge for his father becomes too much for the people around him and his decision to pretend to be insane becomes all too real He starts out saying: “How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself /As I perchance hereafter shall think meet/To put an antic disposition on” (Hamlet, I.iii.170-172). He admits at this point that he is pretending to be mad, but later in the play Hamlet’s madness seems to become real. Towards the end of the play, when Laertes is about to duel Hamlet, Hamlet says:

What I have done

That might your nature, honour and exception

Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.

Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet:

If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,

And when he's not himself does ...

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...ot true, he kills Desdemona because of how angry and upset he is. His lack of communication between himself and Desdemona can be seen as a big part in her death.

Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet have many similarities, but they also have many differences. Othello was lead to his certain death by a lie, Macbeth was lead to his death by a murder he committed, and Hamlet was lead to his death by his pursuit of revenge that he carried out over the death of his father. Even though they all died at the end, each character died for a different reason and a different purpose. In the eyes of some people Othello and Macbeth can be seen as the bad guys. Othello kills the woman he loves based on some evidence he is show by others, yet he never talks to Desdemona about the evidence. Macbeth murders his king to rise to power, however his evil side seems to be more of a dissolution.