In the Shakespeare’s Big Four tragedies, the main character is dumb in three—Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. Hamlet alone is not dumb. Antony, Coriolanus, and Romeo are all pretty dumb as well.
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Street smarts aren’t everything
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There's also the Harold Bloom interpretation that Hamlet is so smart he realizes he's in a hackneyed play (ghosts, pirates) and works to destroy it.
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There's some truth to that. Like Iago, Hamlet is a thwarted playwrite/director.
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Do you think you’d have done a better job?
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What fuck-ups? Hamlet upbraids himself for being hesitant but we should be hesitant to take him at his own word. His hesitations, such as they are, separate him from Laertes who blunders into disaster and ends up achieving exactly the opposite of what he would wish.
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In the midst of abusing himself for his hesitation, in “what a rogue and peasant slave am I”, he discovers that he has good reasons to hesitate. The ghost may be a demon sent to deceive him. He must discover “grounds more relative” than the gobst’s word.
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