Hamlet as Shakespeare’s greatest villain | Hacker News Reader

Hamlet as Shakespeare’s greatest villain

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7 pointsfeltsense10 comments

Bah. It's Iago, by a long shot, in my opinion.

Iago's evil works by making everyone he has contact with think he is trustworthy and dependable. Iago even tells Roderigo he is neither, but Roderigo trusts Iago anyway. Iago undermines the very notion of duty and of a system of society which relies on everyone else telling the truth. The real danger of Iago is not to Othello or Cassio or Roderigo; the real danger of Iago is to society.

Iago was the original bullshitter. We confront his legacy and its practitioners every damned ruinous day.

A body count of 4 hardly puts him in the running for "greatest villain". But it's an important observation that he's rather a horrible person.

His treatment of Ophelia is dreadful. Laying her death at his feet is an overstatement, but "misogyny, gaslighting and open sexual harassment" isn't. The deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are undeserved: they don't know that they're bringing Hamlet to his death.

He could perhaps be forgiven (in the violent context of the setting) the death of Polonius, but he's being deliberately obtuse in his fake justification of "How now, a rat!" That's not madness or heat of the moment: he knew it was murder. He might not be lying that he thought it was Claudius, though he'd just seen Claudius and decided not to kill him.

That switch, at least, drives some interesting choices for the actor and director. Hamlet's nowhere near the greatest villain, but he's not a good person, either. The play gives performers a great opportunity to find a base for him and picking that through his many inconsistencies: being able to play that strong commitment at every moment can yield a great performance. But it's a challenge to find something you can commit to.

This kind of analysis sounds a lot like the moralizing lens Shakespeare's plays were put through in the 19th century, which led to a lot of balderization. Judging all these acts exclusively through a 21st-century lens is pretty reductive. Saying "Hamlet sexually harassed Opheilia" is fine, as far as it goes, which isn't very far.

It's a tragedy, and he's the protagonist of a tragedy, not a hero. His becoming obsessed with the unjust death of his father and fucking everything up is the whole point. Saying he's acting like an ass is both obvious and a distraction from the main event, which is to see a great man brought low by his flaws, and to contemplate fate, the human condition, or whatever else you can take away from the play.

I'm talking about it through the lens of an actor called on to play the character. As an actor I'm not here to judge the character, but I look at the moments that strike me as problematic and ask what brought him to that mind-set.

So I'm talking here about jumping-off point, the beginning of a process, not the end of it. The process would take weeks or months of rehearsal.

> His treatment of Ophelia is dreadful. Laying her death at his feet is an overstatement, but "misogyny, gaslighting and open sexual harassment" isn't.

Virtue signaling a fictional character created a couple of hundred years ago. Nice! You are the hero we desperately need.

> "How now, a rat!" That's not madness or heat of the moment:

That's open for debate. But we are talking about a character who sees his dead father's ghost. Also most would chalk it up to the "heat of the moment" as the scene led to the murder. If he saw polonius walking down a corridor, he wouldn't have killed him. So, "madness and heat of the moment"?

> Hamlet's nowhere near the greatest villain

He isn't a villain at all. He's a tragic figure.

> but he's not a good person, either.

He's not a bad person either, virtue signaling aside. That's what makes him one of the greatest characters in literature.

The interesting point underlying this rather silly discussion:

The genre of "tragedy" is nearly forgotten today, while having been extremely popular throughout history.

In most modern fiction we have a hero which is supposed to be virtuous and sympathetic ("likable"). If they have flaws they will either be insignificant and endearing, or the hero will overcome these flaws through the arc of the story. The villain is the antagonist in the story, and is a bad guy, but is eventually defeated by the hero through the strengths of the personal qualities of the hero. The hero is often a "nobody" in the beginning but achieves some respect and status at the end, while the bad guy gets justly punished for his evil deeds.

A tragedy is a completely different genre. In a tragedy we have a great person which is brought down by destiny and their own flaws. The protagonist of a tragedy is not supposed to an ideal of virtue. The author of the article seem surprised that Hamlet is not idealized but rather acts both stupidly and unfairly. But look at the other tragedy protagonists - Richard II, Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet. They are all severely flawed and make disastrous mistakes. We are supposed to empathize with these characters, not sympathize.

On the other hand the they are not getting "justly punished" either. Richard III is clearly an evil man, but Othello is the manipulated victim. Romeo and Juliet is not doomed through their own actions but through the destiny of their families which they are not able to escape. And poor Ofelia. A tragedy is not moralistic in the way that everyone get their just desert - destiny can be completely unfair.

So how could anyone designate Hamlet as the "worst villain" compared to someone like Macbeth or Richard III? Probably because the writer thinks Macbeth and Richard III are supposed to be "bad guys" but Hamlet is supposed to be a "good guy", and his flaws therefore are less acceptable. E.g if a bad guy is sexist, we consider it consistent with his badness, but if a good guy is sexist we consider it as if the author condones sexism, which is more problematic. But this is reading Hamlet if it was a Hollywood movie, not a tragedy.

So why have tragedy gone out of fashion to the extend that a person writing about Shakespeare does not understand the genre? Probably because in modern society we believe in meritocracy and the pursuit of happiness. We are supposed to take control over our own destiny, and so cannot believe that we have flaws which cannot be overcome, or in an unfair destiny which we have no say over.

What we get today is the anti-hero. The inheritors of the tragedy are movies like Fight Club, The Godfather, etc. Shakespeare used the anti-hero very well: Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth all resonate very strongly with modern audiences.

I'm not entirely sure I'd put Hamlet in that category, and really points up what you're saying. Hamlet is tragic in the Greek sense, a concept we rarely get today. Hamlet's more heroic than anti-heroic: he's got a body count but he's not vicious about it. He at least wants to be a good person -- not just by his own lights but by what he thinks others expect of him. (Unlike the more vicious anti-heroes, who don't see themselves as evil but aren't averse to having other people see them that way.)

No one seems to notice he’s also hilarious all the way through.

I assure you, the actors notice. Shakespeare is always funniest in his tragedies. The comedies have almost universally aged badly, but the kind of humor he puts in the tragedies holds up much better.

A piece of advice I was given very early on is to find the funny parts of the tragedies, and that has served me well. Hamlet in particular is very clever about wordplay -- far better than nearly all of Shakespeare's actual clowns (though the clown role in Hamlet, as the gravediggers, is among his very best comic writing).

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