The Characterization of Hamlet This essay will inform the reader regarding the characterization found in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet: whether the dramatis personae are three-dimensional or two-dimensional, dynamic or static, and other aspects of Hamlet the representation of the character. John Dover Wilson in What Happens in Hamlet tells how the Bard is capable of giving realism even to a ghost: Shakespeare's ghost is both a ghost of revenge and a ghost of the prologue, that is to say from a technical point of view it corresponds to his Senecan prototype. But here the similarity ends; for it is one of Shakespeare's glories that he took the conventional puppet, humanized, Christianized, and made a figure that his spectators would recognize as real, as something that might be met with in any lonely graveyard at midnight. . .] Hamlet's ghost comes not from a mythical Tartarus, but from the place of dead spirits that post-medieval England, despite a veneer of Protestantism, still believed in at the end of the 16th century. And in doing so, by making the horror more terrifying by giving it a contemporary spiritual backdrop, Shakespeare managed at the same time to elevate the whole ghost thing to a higher level, to turn a raving, rambunctious abstraction into a thing at the same time tender and tender. majestic. (56-57)The Bard's genius is revealed in his characterization. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt in Literature of the Western World examine Shakespeare's universal appeal resulting from his "sharply etched characters": Every age, from Shakespeare's time to the present, has found in him something different to admire. All ages, however, have recognized his supreme skill in inv...... middle of paper ......tts ​​​​Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.htmlWest, Rebecca. “A Court and a world infected by the disease of corruption”. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardò. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. Wilkie, Brian, and James Hurt. “Shakespeare”. Literature of the Western world. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992.Wilson, John Dover. What happens in Hamlet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Wright, Louis B., and Virginia A. LaMar. "Hamlet: a man who thinks before he acts." Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardò. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. Np: Paperback books, 1958.