Comparing Hamlet And Oedipus The King

Kartikeya Sharma
09/12/2014
COM 1102 – 04
Drama Paper
Character Comparison between Hamlet and Oedipus
Both the tragedies ‘Hamlet’ written by ‘William Shakespeare’ and ‘Oedipus the King’ by ‘The Sophocles’ contain the basic tragic elements, though the Shakespeare’s Hamlet took place way after the early Greek tragedy. Both of these plays are highly written in the poetic language. In these two tragedies, if we try to compare the two tragic heroes playing their roles, then we see quite a lot of similarities and differences between them. At the same time, it is a bit hard to compare these two men from the two different eras having different morals and religions, as Oedipus grew up in a time when the Greek gods were setting their examples of their
For example, in the Hamlet, he first truly sees his dead father’s ghost telling him that it is the current king and Hamlet’s uncle ‘Claudius’ who has murdered his father. This was still not a very strong evidence in order to prove his uncle’s guiltiness, but this was a hint for Hamlet to check if his uncle had left any traces or not related to this murder. He was afraid and hesitant to get his revenge quickly from ‘Claudius’ as Hamlet was the only one who heard his dead father speak about
For that purpose, they go to an oracle and ask to tell them the future of that baby. The oracle then replies that this child will kill the father and get married to his mother. The royal couple gets horrified of this and strictly take the child away to be killed, so they save themselves, but instead the child ends up in a new castle and is raised by another couple as their own child. This also shows that how much belief the people had at that time for the Oracle that even the royal couple were ready to kill their child. Though, they never tell Oedipus that he is not their own, because they were afraid that he would hold his father’s kingdom and marries his mother. Somehow, eventually, Oedipus hears that he has to kill his father and marry his mother, so he leaves his current parents, and searches for a new residence. Then he meets up with a random man on his way on the road and kills him for no reason. Then he discovers a castle that is being terrorized by a sphinx, and the riddle it asks was answered correctly by Oedipus. Due to that, he marries the Queen and rules over the kingdom, as told by the oracle. In the end, the oracle said that the city is being endangered by a plague and it will end only when the city gets rid of the person who murdered the king. When Oedipus hears this, he announces to the people that the murderer will be