Do you agree or disagree that Hamlet suffers because he is ill-suited to be the protagonist for a revenge tragedy?

Answer 1

It's an old theory about Hamlet that he is "a man who couldn't make up his mind", (this simpleminded statement is made at the beginning of Laurence Olivier's 1948 Hamlet movie), and that his indecisiveness is what keeps him from revenging himself on Claudius at the beginning of Act II. Hamlet himself supports this in his soliloquy "How all occasions do inform against me."

It is an even older idea that Hamlet is a dilletante, for whom taking action is all too sordid. This is the Hamlet painted by Delacroix and loved by the Victorian romantics.

A newer idea is that Hamlet has developed a modern ethic in which revenge is wrong, and that he suffers conflict between his duty to his father and his belief that what he has been commanded to do is wrong.

In all of these cases there is a notion that Hamlet has some kind of genetic flaw which prevents him from executing the revenge with alacrity. But an example of any other revenge tragedy reveals that the revenger does not rush in in act two and consummate his revenge--he lays some devious and complicated plot which takes most of the play to work out. Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy or Kyd's Spanish Tragedy are good examples. So in this sense, Hamlet's cautiousness about completing the revenge is typical of all revenge tragedy heroes and makes him most suitable for the role. (They all suffer as well).

A further approach would jettison the notion that characters in plays never develop and have some permanent and incurable flaw which does them in. Basically, this means chucking Aristotle in the bin (where, in the opinion of Fintan O'Toole and your answerer, he belongs) and recognising that people change and that plays about people who change are more interesting than those about unchanging caricatures. In this view, Hamlet starts out as a self-absorbed and somewhat ineffectual man who, as the play goes on, goes through periods of self-doubt and control freakiness to become the kind of man who can turn the tables on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, leap aboard a pirate ship, confront Laertes at Ophelia's funeral and ultimately to "defy augury" and to accept his fate. And through this process he becomes the kind of man who can indeed be the protagonist in a revenge tragedy, which he of course is--the protagonist in the greatest revenge tragedy ever.