William Shakespeare | Who is Shakespeare's greatest hero?

All of the title figures of the great tragedies are remarkable characters, but none of them fits our modern sense of what a "hero" is. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Othello all have deep character flaws. Although the comedies are often resolved when a character discloses a certain piece of information or undergoes a sudden conversion into Christian values, the cavalry does not come over the hill in Shakespeare's plays or arrives too late to make more than a comment about their outcome. In several of the comedies and the problem plays, the active force for good is a female character, Portia...

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