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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1180998" data-attributes="member: 259">Here's my thinking:  he's a teenage boy who is visited by the ghost of his father -- an unassailable witness -- and finds out that his uncle and king has committed possibly the two worst crimes, fratricide and regicide.  Furthermore, his mother is betraying his father and his country in the most fundamental of ways, by wedding the murderer. It drives him stark raving nutters. He has proof either that he's insane (and hallucinating) or that he's sane (and has the highest moral duty to avenge his father and king).  Such vengeance would probably involve killing his mother, since she's giving comfort to the traitor/murderer. It drives him bonkers. His uncle persuades his best friends to conspire against him, to lead Hamlet to his death.  And Hamlet finds out. He goes over the bend. Given his situation -- he knows, without being able to prove it, that his mother is sleeping with the worst of all possible monstrous criminals, and he knows that that criminal is far more powerful and sophisticated than him -- yes, I say his situation is untenable.  Yes, he does some horrible things, including cruelly rejecting his fiancee, not caring about killing a man (a man that he suspects is spying on him for his uncle), and ultimately killing a lot of people.   I still find him tragically sympathetic, a hero in his desire to do right by his country and his family, a hero brought down by his inability to find a noble solution to his terrible predicament. Granted, I've not memorized the play -- I've seen three or four versions of it, on stage and on screen, however, and though the versions were all different from one another, I've always found him a basically sympathetic character, even as he committed atrocities. Daniel</blockquote>

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