Throughout the William Shakespeare play, Hamlet, he displays the main character as someone who thinks of himself inferior to others, yet he rationalizing with the choices he makes in his life. On these two separate occasions you either can contemplates whether or not he is even mad or is he just putting it off as an act to prove a point. Hamlet undergoes several tragedies that lead him to act more mad rather than feigned. His madness is revealed in his identity crisis as well as his inability to revenge his fathers murder due to his constant overthinking.
Hamlet is truly a self-loathing character in this play who thinks very low of himself and constantly compares himself to other individuals. With this it constantly affects his anger and how he reacts with it upon others in life. In his second soliloquy he releases a severe hate towards himself, he believes that he is the only one to blame for his father's death. He does not seem to comprehend why he of all people has to avenge his father's death, and expresses himself as someone who is nothing, he assumes his life has no meaning. He immediately states how, “oh, what a rogue and peasant slave I am!” . He compares himself to a slave, someone who has no identity, which goes to show that he thinks he does not deserve what he has in his life. Hamlet constantly wonders why he was faced with all of his priorities and constantly measures himself with others. He evaluates himself to the actor that tells a fake tale, but in his mind, he relates it to his own life and struggles with how his actions cannot match with the actor's emotions towards the story. He clashes when he says how “it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit that from her working visage wanted, tears in his eyes.” He cannot seem to recognize how an actor can bring out so much emotion when expressing a fake story, whereas his is a real-life version of the tale, and assumes that it is much more challenging to find any meaning to it. Hamlet speculates how the actor could easily make people feel guilty from his expressions, and he won't ever grasp how he is supposed to meet up to his levels of empathy. His anger is brought into perspective because he is angry at himself for not being able to do what others can do and he thinks he needs these traits in order to avenge his father.
Hamlet has absolutely no faith in himself and this is also shown through his melancholy. It is presented throughout the whole play, however when connecting it to his anger it truly affects his thought and his action towards others. This is mainly presented in his first silioquy when he is first dealing with his fathers death and the incest his mom committed instantly after. He repeatedly criticizing his mother and the acts she has done with his uncle Claudius, he looks at her with disgust because she is one of the reasons why he feels so helpless to this situation. He thought this out as if he and his mother would mourn together though, “Within a month, Let me not think on’t, Frailty, thy name is woman! A Little month; or ere those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father’s body.” He illustrates here that the shoes she wore to his beloved fathers funeral were not worn before the shameless marriage Gerturude and Claudius shared. Hamlet’s anger starts out here because it's as if his mother never loved Hamlet Sr, she showed no empathy towards his death and moved on as though he was never in her life. He constantly reminded his mother of what a loathssome marriage she was presenting to Denmark that was based off of incest. The new king and his mother have set out a poor representation of Denmark and have brought Hamlet into it, and he wants no part of it. This affects who he is and he shows how he feels through his anger, the one person to blame is his gruesome uncle who has turned the one place he used to call home, a peaceful and democartic place into a corrupt place he never could never have imagined that he would be forced to represent.
One of Hamlet's tragic flaws is most definitely his inability to act upon any given situation. He constantly overthinks his plans and talks himself out of what he is “destined” to do. He knows he should avenge his father's death, however, second-guesses himself every chance he receives. Even when he is faced with several opportunities of seeking revenge for his father's death he still continuously backs away from it, due to fear of rejection from his loved ones. His first cause of anger can be seen in his second soliloquy when he says “who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face? tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i’th’ throat as deep as to the lungs? Who does this to me this?”
He fears of being seen as the fool instead of Claudius and suspects that no one will believe him. This forces him to second guess himself because of him overthinking every possible out come of his plan to find out the truth about his uncle. Whether or not if Claudius did murder his father, although he is unaware of the truth, he fails to act upon his plan of decovering who killed his Hamlet Sr beacuse of this flaw.
Hamlet certainly has an idea of who he is, a melancholic and what he is obligated to do but is constantly hard on himself because he can’t let go of his thoughts of what if?
