William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a remarkable, well constructed, dramatic play that communes many flaws and challenges of humans today. Despite contextual differences between Elizabethan times and that of the 21st century, Shakespeare has maintained the textual integrity of the play through his effective characterization of Hamlet’s paradoxical nature – this inconsistency of character makes it possible for the audience to connect and even relate to Hamlet. With consideration of critical responses, use of language and structure, and through a close analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquies, the role of Shakespeare’s characterization of Hamlet in shaping the enduring power of the text is appreciated to a further extent. Hamlet’s personality is many-sided and his character is greatly complicated by outside factors. He can be regarded as one of the most complicated characters which Shakespeare has ever created. It is not easy to explore this character and “it is very difficult to generalize about Hamlet, because every observation will have to admit its opposite” (Bloom, p. 409). His personality is full of inconsistency; he is cautious yet reckless, courteous yet uncivil, tender yet ferocious. Hamlet can sometimes be “gentle and thoughtful, but on numerous occasions throughout the play, he is cruel and bitter – especially with his mother and Ophelia” (Mulherin, Frost, and Payne, p. 28). In addition to this, Hamlet’s personality is constantly changed by different factors. It is the sudden death of his much-loved father and the hasty remarriage of this mother to his uncle (Hamlet considers Claudius vastly inferior to his father) that traumatizes Hamlet, and transforms him from a once life affirming, friendly extrovert into a withdrawn, unhappy and introspective man. All this diversifies Hamlet’s character and results in his producing a number of universal themes. The brightest of the themes which Hamlet produces are love, family values, confusion, grief, and revenge; at this, the last three are closely intertwined. His pure and passionate love for Ophelia is hard to look through. His love letter to Ophelia suggests a man given to idealizing those he loves: “To the celestial, and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia” (Act 2, Sc. 2). This scene shows Hamlet’s commitment to relations and his giving himself up to love and passion. We see the same tendency to idealize in his descriptions of his dead father, throughout the play, as godlike. Hamlet’s desire to take revenge for his father’s death emphasizes his devotion to family values. It is namely this devotion that “enmesh(es) Hamlet in a web of anxiety, deceit, and death: tragedy stems from the commitment the family elicits” (Barroll, Pitcher, Lindsey, and Cerasano, p. 252). Quite remarkable is Hamlet’s expression of confusion, grief, and revenge. The famous soliloquy “To be or not to be” (Act 3, Sc. 1) illustrates this mixture of themes and inconstancy of Hamlet’s character. These words express Hamlet’s confusion and his hesitation to kill Claudius. He struggles between taking revenge and acting against his conscience for “his conscience cannot convince him that the act is good” (Wells, p. 47). These features make Hamle