Hamlet Hamlet

The three critical excerpts in this section explore the character of Hamlet. George Detmold addresses the question of why Hamlet delays taking revenge on Claudius by assessing his status as a tragic hero. From his definition of a tragic hero, Detmold especially focuses on Hamlet's unorthodox demonstration of will-power in the play, arguing that the protagonist's preoccupation with moral integrity is what ultimately delays him from killing Claudius. In the second well-known excerpt, Ernest Jones applies Sigmund Freud's techniques of psychoanalysis to Hamlet's character, asserting that the prince is afflicted with an Oedipus Complex. Finally, in the last excerpt Edgar Johnson details his own interpretation of the protagonist as a hero whose complex "dilemma is to disentangle himself from the temptation to wreak justice for the wrong reasons and in an evil passion, and to do what he must do at last for the pure sake of justice, for the welfare of the State, to weed the unweeded garden of Denmark and set right the time that is out of joint."