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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1180853" data-attributes="member: 812">Okay, not much support, I'll go along with that. I don't trust the guy and can well imagine why he wouldn't tell Horatio -- his upright and stuffy friend would probably disapprove. But I'll agree there's not much support.I say both. I'm not saying he's dumb. I'm saying he's a sneaky, untrustworthy eel.Of course not -- since what Claudius wants is for Laertes to agree to swordfight Hamlet. With a poisoned sword.Or perhaps he would have coated his sword in poison...And note that they aren't setting up a duel to the death. They're setting up a little gamble on who's the better swordsman -- Laertes or Hamlet. In theory, neither of them is in much danger since it's not meant to be a "real" duel. Laertes poisons the sword to make what ought to be a harmless contest into a deadly one.So really, Laertes' skill with the sword is immaterial. It seems reasonable to think that they are of roughly equivalent skill, but you could easily stage the play with Laertes as a bumbling oaf who gets one hit on Hamlet and then loses control of his own sword.And we would do this because... Claudius has turned out to be such an upstanding fellow so far? We don't NEED to do anything.Indeed with a play like Hamlet, it's dangerous to think ANYTHING is clearly spelled out, or that any assumptions are beyond consideration. This is a play that admits to a million interpretations, and always manages to exceed any person's grasp.What I've been getting at is that a big part of Shakespeare's mastery is how he takes a largely unlikable character like Hamlet and makes him compelling -- so compelling that we come to even like or admire him. Much like what Milton achieves with Satan in Paradise Lost, Shakespeare creates a character whose identity has exceeded the work that contains him.My original comment was (or at least was meant to be) that it takes more skill and talent to create a compelling story out of unlikeable characters than it does to create an equally compelling story out of likeable characters. The notion being that one of the ways to make a story compelling is to people it with likeable characters, so if you take that away from the story, you have to work even harder to make it compelling.Not that we are incapable of liking and admiring Hamlet. I do, certainly. And while I definitely think that the most common readings of Hamlet tend to gloss over his undeniably fouler qualities, I DON'T think he's just an unredeemable loser.Now Macbeth, HE'S a whole other story....<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />edit: just fixed up a typo in "not much"</blockquote>

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