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Shakespeare's tragic hero dies with no hope of reward. As he meets his fate, the audience feels: "There, but for the grace of God, goes a better man than I." What links the audience movingly with the tragic hero is the quality that essentially separates them: nobility.
World to Self. That nobility often rests on the splendor of the language, but beautiful lines alone may reach no farther than the ear. Shakespeare speaks to the soul. He speaks in metaphor, which relates world to self, thing to thing, in the endless chain of being. Shakespeare could do anything he wanted with language; the way he talks of a thing conjures up the thing itself. The lines, "Not poppy nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday," hypnotize with their own heavy-lidded evocation of sleep. He packed worlds into monosyllables. "To be or not to be" is man's largest question put in man's smallest and simplest words. Once uttered, they expand to fill all the space in the human mind.
Shakespeare's breathtaking change of pace carries a man to the brink of eternity and then restores him to common humanity. On seeing Cordelia's body, the grief-stricken Lear cries: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?" In the extremity of human despair ("Thou'lt come no more") he utters his towering, fivefold "Never, never, never, never, never!" Then the dam of his unbearable anguish breaks with the homely request, "Pray you undo this button." No one but Shakespeare would have dared put those two lines together; no one but Shakespeare could.
The Hamlet Puzzle. Shakespeare survives because the next to the last word can be said about him—but not the last word. His creations are as opaque as life's; his characters remain inexhaustibly baffling. Next to Jesus, Napoleon, and Shakespeare himself, more may have been written about Hamlet than any other subject. The problem seems simple: Why does Hamlet take so long to kill the King? Goethe's answer was that Hamlet was an intellectual whose habit of "thinking too precisely on the event" sapped his will. Subsequently, Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones fashioned a Hamlet with an Oedipus complex whose dilemma was amusingly compounded because he somehow knew he had an Oedipus complex. Recently Rebecca West produced the dissenting or beatnik Hamlet who has the strength to kill the King but refuses to enter the corrupting cycles of social depravity and power politics. There has even been Olivier's so-active, thought-free prince, who proved to one critic's ironic satisfaction that Hamlet "was too busy to kill the King."
On grounds as relative as these, there has been and will be a spate of other Hamlets. For Hamlet and Shakespeare's other great characters are so rich in possible meanings because they are fashioned on the essentially human principle of both/and rather than either/or. Hamlet is more than the sum of his paradoxes; he is the paradox of man seen whole. All one knows for certain is that being Hamlet is Hamlet's tragedy—as being himself is everyman's.
Paraphrasing Keats, it might be said that Shakespeare's plays lead a life of allegory,