What Is Hamlet S Hamartia
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What is Hamlet’s Hamartia?
Peter Donahue has brought out a most salient point about hamatia. It hasn't always meant 'tragic flaw.' Sophocles wasn't following any recipe when he wrote Oedipus, nor was Aristotole writing a recipe when he described the tragedies he saw in the theater. Neither was Shakespeare following Aristotle's 'recipe' when he wrote Hamlet. Sophocles wrote a play using an old story that his audiences knew well. Aristotle, being the originator of classification, classified what he saw in the great theater competitions of his time, and when he used the word hamartia, I've always read that it meant 'tragic error' or 'tragic mistake.' That fits with the times, for Sophocles in his time was the voice of the conservative: upholding the old religion against new ideas. His play was saying to the audiences, 'The gods ARE real; they ARE there, and if you do something contrary to their will, you. will. pay. Don't forget what happened to Oedipus.' And he proceeded to put the fear of the gods into his audiences and reassure the staunch believers that they were right. It's a classic for 'old time religion' vs religious 'new thought' and has been played out countless times.
But the idea that we have now; that hamartia means 'tragic flaw,' or something within the character of the person who meets a tragic fall, is a modern idea that even Shakespeare didn't know. He, like all great writers from Homer on down, simply wrote what his genius gave him to write. He said he had little Latin and no Greek, and so wouldn't likely have known Aristotle's Poetics with its description of Oedipus as the 'best of tragedies,' or the word hamartia. But if he did know it, he would have known it as 'tragic mistake' or error. His own genius gave rise later to the later meaning of hamartia as 'tragic flaw' when people, like Aristotle had done long before, began to describe what they saw in the theater and label its partc.
Hegel said that the most tragic of all "flaws" came when the tragic hero was undone by his own BEST quality, not a genuine 'flaw' or undesirable defect within him/her. That makes sense to me; it is far more tragic to be undone by one's best quality than to be undone by hubris or something that really IS a flaw, just as Othello is heart-breakingly undone by his best quality: his honesty --he is so honest (trusting) thathe thinks everyone else is, too -- which Iago, the Evil One, uses to destroy him. So Macbeth is undone by his own best quality, his ambition. So is Hamlet undone by his best quality: his introspective, reflective intelligence and thought, or as some say, 'self-awareness' or 'self consciousness.' Some read it as 'over- thinking,' making it a real defect, not Hegel's idea.
Hamlet's classical hamartia, or tragic error or mistake, is truly a mistake in two ways: a mistake in judgement (to kill Claudius to evenge his father) and a mistake in circumstance (it wasn't Claudius but Polonius). So from that moment on, his undoing is inevitable. But his modern idea of hamartia, or 'flaw,' is Hegel's idea of the most tragic sort: his own best quality -- introspective intelligence which makes 'cowards of us all'; that is, it makes him anxious about whether or not he is understanding it right, indecisive, and therefore leads to his tragic error which is his undoing. At least that's the way I read it.
Dixie Dellinger From: "Peter Donahue"
> For another perspective: > I remember one of my college professors making a distinction in his > definition of hamartia. Many will say it is either a flaw in character or > error in judgement, just lumping together these two different > interpretations of the Greek word. > > In my professor's view, hamartia was not conceived of as a flaw in > character in the abstract sense--rather, it is a particular error made in > the course of the action, an error that any of us in the same situation > could make (which is what makes it so harrowing). > > That emphasis jived (jove?) with me because, from what I remember in the > poetics, Aristotle is careful to define the character of the tragic hero > in terms of what he does, not in terms of some sense of who he is outside > of, or independently of, the text; a character is only what we have in the > text. > > So, according to this line of thinking, it might be easier to pinpoint > Hamlet's hamartia as the stabbing of Polonius through the arras. At that > moment he acts, and his action is a mistake that is his undoing. > > All that being said, I'm infatuated by the idea earlier suggested in this > thread that Hamlet's humanistic self-awareness is his flaw, and I'm > definitely going to browse through the archived posts on this topic Dixie > Dillinger has brought to attention!