ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Hamlet also belongs to the genre of revenge tragedy in that it features a main character seeking to avenge a wrong against himself, but Shakespeare satirizes and modifies the genre in several ways.

Detailed explanation-2: -Hamlet is tragedy because the want of poetic justice, for them and the hero, keeps it a painful mystery; and because the chain of cause and effect prevents it equally from being ‘Absurd’ drama, as does Hamlet’s final acceptance of Providence at work in it to ‘shape our ends’.

Detailed explanation-3: -This doesn’t mean that Hamlet is a tragicomedy, which is an entirely different genre with a different history. A tragicomedy is a tragedy with a happy ending or a comedy that successfully exploits tragic materials for a comic purpose. Hamlet is not that kind of play at all.

Detailed explanation-4: -Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s important revenge tragedy plays believing to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play points out flaming with revenge after the King has been murdered by his brother and claims the throne. The concept of revenge is the driving force throughout the play.

Detailed explanation-5: -He calls Hamlet a ‘tragedy of thought’ and says Hamlet’s downfall ‘is connected rather with [his] intellectual nature and reflective habit than with any yielding to passion’. ‘Hamlet is a great scenario, in which every character has a more or less tragic and cruel part to play, and has magnificent things to say.