Hamlet (Vol. 35) | Bernard Grebanier (essay date 1960)
Bernard Grebanier (essay date 1960)
SOURCE: "Dramatis Personae: Sounding Through Their Masks," in The Heart of Hamlet: The Play Shakespeare Wrote, 1960, pp. 249-300.
[In the excerpt below, Grebanier analyzes the natures of Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.]
PRINCE HAMLET
We have a rough idea of the hero's tragic flaw. Through a consideration of the plot and action we know what he is not, and more than a little of what he is. If we refuse to wander afield from the play, it shall not be difficult to describe Hamlet as Shakespeare created him.
We already know, for instance, that so far from being a shrinking violet or a creature of meditation who acts only in his imagination, he is an extraordinarily active man, a man who finds it easy to act—as witness: his following the Ghost despite his friends' admonitions, his immediately conceiving the plan for the...
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