Hamlet Similar to and Different

¶ … Hamlet similar to and different from Robert Wringhim?

Both Hamlet and the Robert Wringhim of Confessions of a Justified Sinner are men with high moral standards regarding how they should behave and how others should behave. According to their points-of-view, people often fail to meet their own personal standards of excellence. In the case of Hamlet, Hamlet believes that the Danish court has switched too quickly from mourning his father's death to celebrating the marriage of his mother, and Wringhim tries to bodily restrain his brother George from playing tennis. Even before they are faced with the question of whether killing is justified, they are depressed about what they see as the sorrowful nature of human existence. Hamlet wishes that: "Everlasting had not fix'd/His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! (I.2). Wringhim states: "But, oh, what a wretched state this unregenerated state is, in which every effort after righteousness only aggravates our offences!" (Hogg 2)

These two characters are even similar in that Hamlet judges his mother more harshly than his natural father: "frailty, thy name is woman," he says, while Wringhim says: "As for my mother, she would harp on the subject of my faith for ever; yet, though I knew her to be a Christian, I confess that I always despised her motley instructions, nor had I any great regard for her person" (I.2; Hogg 11). These characters are intelligent, sensitive and vulnerable men, which is why they become even more psychologically unbalanced when they receive privileged information from supernatural forces that tell them about evil in their respective societies. Hamlet's suspicions about his uncle are confirmed when Old Hamlet tells his son that Claudius murdered him in his orchard, while he was sleeping, and begs Hamlet to take his revenge. Wringhim is told that he is one of the elect who are predestined for heaven thus he can murder with impunity.

However, unlike Hamlet, Wringhim accepts this challenge with little question, while Hamlet shows profound reluctance, despite his worship of his father: "The time is out of joint: O. cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" (I.5). Once Wringhim receives his supposedly inspired knowledge, Wringhim is quite confident, even arrogant about his elect status: "I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the groveling creatures below" (Hogg 12). However, Hamlet possesses far more awareness about his own weaknesses, and despite his early doubts, he also doubts the ghost: "The spirit that I have seen/May be the devil: and the devil hath power/to assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps/Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / as he is very potent with such spirits, / Abuses me to damn me" (II.5).

Hamlet constructs a test to make sure that he is not merely seeing what he wants to see, rather than the truth. Even after the "Mousetrap" seems to confirm his uncle's guilt, Hamlet still has trouble killing his uncle, for emotional and logical reasons. He rationalizes that he does not want to send his uncle to heaven and cannot kill Claudius when he is preying, and only kills Claudius in the heat of the moment, after Claudius has acted against him by secretly poisoning him with a pearl.