Hamlet's tragic flaw was not his inability to act

That's more like it. Despite the fact that we wasted an entire round is okay with me. I will state my opening/counter argument. For tragedy to be successful, according to Aristotle, a person who exhibits greatness must have a reversal of fortune from good to bad. Greatness in terms of Aristotle is human virtue. Hamlet undoubtedly shows great virtue in the beginning of the play; he is smart (he attends Wittenburg University) and can run rings intellectually around numerous court officials such as Polonius and Osric. He shows an incredible amount of reflection, contemplating his actions (as can be seen in the To Be or Not To Be soliloquy). It can be speculated that he understands philosophical perspective and the limits one has concerning his own, as he asks Horatio to confirm Claudius's guilt. Most importantly Hamlet will not commit certain actions in the beginning of the play. He refuses to spy on everybody else, despite the fact that everybody else (except for Horatio) is spying on him. Spying is a moral vice as it breaks the loyalty in relationships. Before stating what Hamlet's tragic flaw is I will refute my opponent's position that Hamlet's tragic flaw is inaction. If we look at his actions throughout the story we see that he has every reason to wait to commit his act upon Claudius. Let's use some common sense here: if a ghost came up to you and told you to kill your uncle if your in the current situation of Hamlet, would you do it? Of course not, as Hamlet says he needs evidence of this in his soliloquy in act 2, scene 2 because "the spirit I have seen may be a devil, and the devil hath power T'assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps out of me weakness and my melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me to damn me. I'll have ground more relative that this. The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Right there we see Hamlet stating why he waited between acts to finally act. Nobody as smart as Hamlet is going to make a rash decision to kill his uncle without evidence. Hamlet does eventually decide to kill Claudius after the play within a play, where Claudius's guilt is exposed to Hamlet and Horatio giving him evidence that the Ghost never provides. After that Claudius goes off to to try and repent his sins and pray. Unbeknown to Claudius, Hamlet is hiding and waiting there in the prayer room to kill him. At this moment we see Hamlet's fatal flaw: moral pride or hubris. The inability to put anybody's moral law about your own, therefore you are always right. You become God in a sense. Hamlet does just this in the scene. He decides to play God and send Claudius to hell, he will give the real God no choice but to send Claudius to hell. This continues when Hamlet goes to visit his mother. If you remember the Ghost of Hamlet's dad told him to leave his mother to heaven, to leave her alone. While Gertrude has made mistakes, such as marrying her dead husband's brother, she has not abandoned Hamlet. She has not run off with Claudius or anything of that nature. If she had, it would have been acceptable for him to scold her. She has tried to help Hamlet, urging him to stay in the beginning of the play. Hamlet, having moral pride, ignores this and his father's ghost's advice and punishes his mother. He then kills Polonius, who had been hiding, who he mistook for Claudius. This shows that Hamlet has no problem with acting quickly and rashly. His problem is not that he can't make decisions, it is that he has moral pride. This is what led him to his mother's room. If he hadn't had gone to his mother to scold her, he wouldn't have accidentally killed Polonius. After this point in the play, Hamlet is much different. He lies to Claudius in act 5, he allows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be killed so that way he can make his way back to Denmark. This is vastly different from the character in the 1st 3 acts who waited for a lot of evidence before he finally killed his murdering uncle. Hamlet's virtue is destroyed after he kills Claudius. He is not the same after that event. With the definition of an Aristotelian tragedy, Hamlet's tragic flaw is hubris. -http://en.wikipedia.org... -http://en.wikipedia.org...(Aristotle) -http://en.wikipedia.org... -William Shakespeare, Hamlet -http://en.wikipedia.org...