The Fictional 100: Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend

The Fictional 100

Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend

Copyright © 2009 Lucy Pollard-Gott, PhD

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4401-5439-3 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-5440-9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009934909

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date:1/11/2010

To Richard and Liz,

and to my parents

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Hamlet

2 Odysseus (Ulysses)

3 Don Quixote

4 Eve

5 Genji

6 Oedipus

7 Don Juan

8 Chia Pao-yü

9 Sherlock Holmes

10 Arjuna

11 Adam

12 King Lear

13 Shahrazad (Scheherazade)

14 Achilles

15 Job

16 Heracles (Hercules)

17 Aeneas

18 Othello

19 Beowulf

20 Sita

21 Christian (Bunyan’s Pilgrim)

22 Perceval (Parzival)

23, 24 Romeo and Juliet

25 Alice

26 Medea

27 Electra

28, 29 Troilus and Criseyde

30 Noah

31 Huckleberry Finn

32 Lin Tai-yü (Black Jade)

33 Frankenstein

34 Jean Valjean

35 Werther

36 Aladdin

37 Madame Bovary

38 Siegfried (Sigurd)

39 Hlakanyana

40 Cinderella

41 Gulliver

42 Carmen

43 Agamemnon

44, 45 Tokubei and Ohatsu

46 Wakdjunkaga

47 Beauty (Belle)

48 Candide

49 Draupadi

50, 51 Tristan and Isolde

52 Golem

53 Anna Karenina

54 Okonkwo

55 Sancho Panza

56 P’an Chin-lien

57 Hsi-men Ch’ing

58 Ukifune

59 Pinocchio

60 The Wife of Bath

61 Jane Eyre

62 Captain Ahab

63 Shakuntala

64, 65, 66 Ivan, Alyosha, and Dmitry Karamazov

67 Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde

68 Antigone

69 Hunchback of Notre-Dame

70 Emma

71 Pulcinella (Punch)

72 David Copperfield

73 Scrooge

74 Panurge

75 Natasha Rostova

76 Peter Pan

77 Hester Prynne

78 Bigger Thomas

79 Efraín

80 Superman

81 Sir John Falstaff

82 Uncle Tom

83 Dorothy Gale

84 Bhima

85 Joseph K./K.

86 Willy Loman

87 Dorian Gray

88 Ivan Denisovich

89 Invisible Man (Ellison’s)

90 Tarzan

91 Rip Van Winkle

92 Scarlett O’Hara

93 Long John Silver

94 Natty Bumppo

95 Botchan

96 Marili, the Doctor-Man

97 Colonel Aureliano Buendía

98 Palm-Wine Drinkard

99 Holden Caulfield

100 Beloved

Notes

Suggested Readings

Illustrations

Hamlet. Edwin Booth, 1870. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-53046)

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. French lithograph by Tony Johannot, 1845. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-33717)

Genji. Detail of Scenes from the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari). Japanese, Momoyama period, 1568–1600, Edo period, 1600–1868; six-fold screen; ink, colors, and gold on paper; painting: 103.7 x 325 cm (40 13/16 x 127 15/16 in.); screen: 118.8 x 339.2 cm (46 13/16 x 133 9/16 in.). (Princeton University Art Museum. Museum Purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. y1993-7. Photo: Bruce M. White)

Sherlock Holmes. Lithograph of William Gillette, 1900. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ6-497)

Arjuna. Photo from Mahabharat television serial (actor: Arjun). (B.R. TV, Mumbai)

Scheherazade. Illustration by Guydo for Les Mille et Une Nuits (Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1912), p. 80. (Collections of the Library of Congress)

Achilles. Achilles Contending with the Rivers, illustration by Flaxman for the Iliad of Homer (London: George Bell, 1909), facing p. 379. (Princeton University Library)

Othello. Paul Robeson as Othello. Photo: Vandamm Studio. (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Romeo and Juliet. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, New York, 1940. Photo: Vandamm Studio. (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Alice. Illustration by John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1914), p. 126. (Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

Huckleberry Finn. Illustration by E. W. Kemble, 1884, for first U.S. edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-58191)

Jean Valjean. Illustration for Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1887). (Princeton University Library)

Madame Bovary. Illustration by Albert Fourié for Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: A. Quantin, 1885). (Princeton University Library)

Cinderella. Illustrations by George Cruikshank for Cinderella, Cruikshank’s Fairy Library (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1854), facing p. 12. (Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

Gulliver. Illustration by Hablot K. Browne for Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1869). (Princeton University Library)

Tristan and Isolde. Detail of 15th cent. council chair, Marburg, Tallinn, Estonia. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-59394)

Ukifune. Kitagawa Utamaro, Ukifune, from Ehon Kotoba no Hana, Flowers of Words, 1787, illustrated book, 2 vols., woodblock print with ink on paper, E33733, The Art Institute of Chicago. (Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago)

Wife of Bath. Illustration from a facsimile reproduction of The Ellesmere Chaucer (Manchester: The University Press, 1911). (Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

Captain Ahab. Illustration by I. W. Taber for Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Scribner’s, 1899), frontispiece. (Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)

Scrooge. Illustration by John Leech, 1843, for Charles Dickens, Christmas Books, rpt. ed. 1874. (Princeton University Library)

Peter Pan. Mary Martin as Peter Pan, with his shadow, in the musical Peter Pan, 1954. (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Efraín. Illustration by Maud and Miska Petersham, El Ave Negra [The Black Bird], for Jorge Isaacs, María, novela americana (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 121. (Collections of the Library of Congress)

Sir John Falstaff. Ben de Bor as Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Gebbie & Co. Engraving. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-19505)

Dorothy Gale. Illustration by W. W. Denslow for L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1900), p. 51.

Acknowledgments

My first and deepest thanks must go to Dr. J. Richard Gott, III, my husband and soul mate, who has been a steadfast reader and advisor, providing unfailing insight throughout this project, from the smallest detail to the big picture. Even while working on his own book (and enlisting me as his reader), he never forgot to urge me to finish mine. Although he is a scientist, and professor of astrophysics, his interests range over every human endeavor, so this list of fictional characters shows the beneficial stamp of his perspective. I thank my beloved daughter, Elizabeth Marjorie Gott, for contributing her excellent judgment and knowledge about literature. Her suggestions and probing questions prompted me to improve many chapters that would have been the poorer without her thoughtful advice. No acknowledgment I could write can convey how much their generosity, love, and support have meant to me.

I was blessed with wonderful parents. My mother, Virginia C. Pollard, a newspaper columnist and an admirably cogent writer herself, saw the start of this project but sadly is no longer here to enjoy its completion. I thank her for her wise and loving counsel and offers of help of every kind whenever I would ask. My father, Frank T. Pollard, to whom I owe so much, believed in my efforts, listened to me with quiet patience, and responded with his own Socratic wisdom. I am also fortunate to have had warmly supportive parents-in-law, Dr. J. Richard Gott, Jr. and Marjorie C. Gott, who provided a beautiful place for me to write during two summer visits to Louisville, Kentucky. I am grateful for all their kindness through the years.

I thank Dr. Catherine Claxton Dong for her unceasing encouragement and her example, tenaciously urging me to seize the reins and make the book I envisioned a reality. I thank Dr. Pamela Claxton-Moffatt, likewise, for her supportive advice and for reading a chapter and making crucial suggestions and corrections. I also thank Rafael Ferrer, Kevin McDonough, and Carrie Cantor for their helpful feedback. I appreciate the assistance I received from Jennifer Berthovde, Peggy Coughlan, and Yoshiko Yoshimura at the Library of Congress; Charles E. Greene, Jennifer Bowden, and the staff of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Karen E. Richter of the Princeton University Art Museum; Jackie Maman of the Art Institute of Chicago; the staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Ella Wells of DC Comics; Sandra Galfas of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; and Rajesh Mehra, Ravi Chopra, and B.R. TV in Mumbai.

I want to thank Prof. Philip H. Ashby, who first introduced me to the great epics of India during a course at Princeton. His deep appreciation for varied cultural perspectives has long influenced my own thinking, especially as I sought to portray the exciting careers of fictional characters from diverse times and places. Finally, I am grateful to Julia Schechtman Pabst, Mary Hynes, Sylvia Kuzmak, Margaret Richins, Suzin Green, and Claude Winn, whose friendship has been a continual inspiration.

Introduction

I knew from that moment on, till my dying day, I would be in love with Emma Bovary.1 Thus, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist and presidential candidate, paid tribute to his lifelong passion for Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Vargas Llosa conveys well the thrill of first acquaintance and the growth of a complex personal relationship with a favorite character, saying in the end, she cannot give anyone more than she has given me.2 Oscar Wilde once quipped that one of the great tragedies of his life was the death of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré. I think he meant it. Characters mean a lot to people. Sherlock Holmes’s fans were so distraught over the great detective’s death at the Reichenbach Falls that they succeeded in making Arthur Conan Doyle bring him back! At one time or another, we have all felt the tug of fictional characters on our lives. From Hamlet to Holden Caulfield, Scrooge to Superman, Romeo and Juliet to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, they are as much a part of our lives as our family, friends, and next-door neighbors. Befriending us as children and inspiring us as adults, they can even be the object of our first love. As we imagine relating to them in their worlds, we can expand our vision of ourselves and of the possibilities that life offers.

Fictional characters exert their influence on a personal level, but they can also change history. Consider, for example, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich. One day in his life helped to expose the cruelty of the Gulag prison camps, contributing to the fall of the Soviet communism that created those camps. Or, consider Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. His story in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often credited with starting the Civil War.

This book, inspired by Michael H. Hart’s The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, ranks the hundred most influential fictional characters from all over the world and through all of history, in order of their influence. Each chapter tells the story of a character who has been recognized as one of the wonders of the human imagination. They run the gamut of heroes, heroines, and villains, saints and sinners, young and old. Their lives enact some of the most romantic and scandalous love stories ever told, as well as the most dramatic deaths (including fourteen suicides and seven who were murdered).

These characters are drawn from the world canon of literature and legends of six continents. Besides European and North American characters that readers from these continents will instantly recognize, the list encompasses equally compelling fictional figures from Asia, among them Genji from Japan’s Tale of Genji; Chia Pao-Yü, from China’s masterpiece The Dream of the Red Chamber; and Arjuna, from India’s national epic, the Mahabharata. From Africa, readers will meet Hlakanyana, a Xhosa trickster figure; Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo; and Amos Tutuola’s mythic Palm-Wine Drinkard. South America gives the list Efraín, from its all-time romantic bestseller María, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía, from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. From Australia, we find Marili, a legendary Aboriginal rock-painter.

Although not of flesh and blood, the fictional characters ranked here have a life and a history of their own. They may have begun on the printed page or in the remembered oral traditions of a culture, but the greatest characters seem to move beyond the works in which they originated. They are known and spoken of by people who have never read the novel, play or poem that gave them birth. Of the quintessential detective Sherlock Holmes, Vincent Starrett once remarked that he exists in history more surely than the warriors and statesmen in whose time he lived and had his being.3 Many characters lead a life so distinctive that they enter the language directly, as in quixotic (for Don Quixote), the Oedipal complex, an Achilles’ heel, a Don Juan, the patience of Job, an Uncle Tom, or raising Cain.

Great characters often enjoy a continuing history onstage (Don Juan or the Shakespearean characters), in movies (Aladdin, Emma, Frankenstein, and Tarzan), or on television (Hercules and Superman). New works about them can expand their adventures or speculate about other parts of their lives (as happened to Sherlock Holmes in the film Young Sherlock Holmes, Scarlett O’Hara in the sequel Scarlett, or the Indian character, Bhima, in Bali’s Bhima Swarga). Characters can also be transplanted to a new place and time: Jane Austen’s Emma to twentieth-century Beverly Hills (in the film Clueless); Homer’s Odysseus to Ireland (in James Joyce’s Ulysses) or the Caribbean (in Derek Walcott’s Omeros); or Shakespeare’s King Lear to Russia (in Ivan Turgenev’s A Lear of the Steppes) or Japan (in Akira Kurosawa’s film Ran).

This list is restricted to fictional persons. Thus, I exclude historical figures whose lives have been portrayed in literary works (Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Richard III, Faust, Cyrano de Bergerac, Napoleon, and King Sundiata of Mali), as well as authorial characters directly participating in the action of the story (Dante in The Divine Comedy, Marcel in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past). Deciding who is fictional and who is historical is not always a straightforward task, but some line must be drawn to separate the fictional from the nonfictional. Although most fictional characters are inspired, to a greater or lesser degree, by one or more living individuals the author is acquainted with, I wish to exclude both those characters whom some scholars believe may be historical themselves (Gilgamesh, a king of ancient Uruk; Roland, a heroic knight under Charlemagne; King Arthur; Robin Hood, nickname for the Yorkshire outlaw Robin Hod) and those who were directly based on historical figures (found in Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary), including El Cid (Roderigo Diaz de Vivar), Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas), Dracula (Vlad the Impaler of Walachia), Robinson Crusoe (Alexander Selkirk), and Tripitika (the Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan Tsang). Historical characters are eligible for a biographical list, whereas fictional individuals deserve a chance to shine on a list of their own.

This list also includes a number of legendary figures, such as the biblical characters Adam, Eve, and Noah. I hope to do justice to their importance in the biblical narrative and in the vast literature inspired by it, while in no way denying the potential reality of these figures. Unlike Abraham, whom I exclude because he appears in Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary (born in Ur around the second millenium B.C.), Eve, Adam, and Noah do not appear there because they cannot be pinpointed historically by date; they represent people for whom we have no historical record outside the work (the Bible) that tells their story. A specific Eve may have existed; in fact, recent genetic archaeology suggests that a mitochondrial Eve—a latest common female ancestor to whom we all can trace our mitochondrial DNA—must have existed. But as part of the proto-history of the human species, she has become legend. Similarly, Achilles of the Iliad and Arjuna of the Mahabharata probably stand for real heroes of ancient battles in Asia Minor and India, respectively, but their biographical specifics have been lost and they, too, have passed into legend. (The rock painter Marili is another such case.) Such characters become candidates for my list.

My criteria also require that the characters be persons. This leaves out animal characters (such as Moby Dick, Aesop’s Fox, Mickey Mouse, Peter Rabbit, and Winnie-the-Pooh) or inanimate characters (such as HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey), however much they are endowed with human characteristics.

Deities are also excluded. A figure such as the Australian Aboriginal Creator, Rainbow Snake, is excluded on both counts, being both animal and divine. Greek Gods (such as Aphrodite, Apollo, and Dionysus) take part in Homer’s epics and the classical dramas, but they are clearly divine beings with their own cycles of Olympian myth, so I focus instead on the human players in these stories.

Like the rule excluding historical persons, this criterion presents its own gray areas, for example, when a character is endowed with superhuman strength (Hercules or Superman) or a semidivine nature (Arjuna, Sita, Draupadi, and again, Hercules). As with the legendary biblical characters, I have tried to decide these cases with a view to including the best that world literature has to offer.

Making characters rather than authors the units of analysis has some interesting consequences for the makeup of the list. Many distinguished authors either did not create characters or are not chiefly known for their characterizations (Montaigne, Walt Whitman). Conversely, some of the most memorable characters, such as Sherlock Holmes, originated in works by authors not considered of the first rank. Others derive from folklore (Cinderella, Hlakanyana) with multiple, often anonymous, creators, or from genres not deemed strictly literary (Superman).

A survey of the fictional persons in world literature and legend yields an impressive list. Shakespeare’s Hamlet ranks first. Writers since Shakespeare—and not just those in the West—have had to come to terms with his unsurpassed genius for creating character and dramatizing events. He is the author who has the most characters (eight) on this list, and his greatest creation remains the most written-about character in literature. The 1997 Modern Language Association International Bibliography recorded 2,310 sources on Hamlet, the most for any of the one hundred characters. That figure is still going up: in 2009, a search of the MLA International Bibliography Online yielded 4,492 sources on Hamlet.

The list includes some of the oldest surviving characters (Marili, Eve, Odysseus) along with some influential newcomers, such as Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo, J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Since influence accumulates over time, more recent characters have not had as much time as older ones to influence later generations, so they tend to rank lower than older characters. A character such as Genji, who is still as familiar in Japan, after a thousand years, as Huck Finn is in America, after little more than a hundred, deserves to rank higher. The recent characters I have chosen, for their excellence and promising track record, represent my best guess as to which characters will survive and remain influential in the future. I am not including characters on this list who have made their appearance more recently than twenty years ago, however promising they may be. I am judging that it takes at least a generation to pass before we begin to gain perspective on a character’s long-term influence.

Besides persistence over time, other factors that contribute to a character being ranked high include versatility (dispersion of the character in a variety of works in different media), complexity (sustaining interest because of interpretive debate about the character), and international appeal. A given character need not rate high in all these categories, but all the characters on this list have something that makes them distinctive: an emotional truth they embody, a cultural moment they represent, a perfect marriage of form and language that expresses them.

Characters are dynamic ideas engaged, as Richard Dawkins, Gary Taylor, and others have pointed out, in an ongoing Darwinian-style competition for survival.4 To sustain our attention and survive, the information that they constitute must be copied in books, movies, performances, and so on—ensuring that it will be carried in individual memory and in the collective memory of one or more cultures. Characters’ ranks on this list reflect their success so far and serve as a prediction of their survivability in the future.

Readers should bear in mind that there is some uncertainty built into any ranking process. Because of the multiple avenues through which a character’s influence can be expressed, no single measure can provide an automatic standard for assessing his or her rank, but rather multiple sources of influence must be coordinated and weighed. Equally well-informed people may disagree on the exact position a character should occupy on this list. A good rule of thumb is that a character’s rank could move up or down by a factor of three and still fall fairly close to my assessment of his or her influence. For instance, many people would rank Hamlet first, but few would leave him out of the top three. Don Quixote, at third, could rank as high as first or as low as ninth, but it would be surprising if he dropped out of the top ten. This reasoning applies to the rest of the list, making the entire roster of characters a subset of the larger pool of distinguished fictional persons who might plausibly find a place on someone else’s list of one hundred. Imagine a baseball team with a deep bench of three times as many talented players who could take the field if needed. Still, there must be a starting lineup. My list is the team of one hundred characters that I think have proven their staying power on the world stage. They are the heavy hitters.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph in the character’s own words. This allows the characters to speak for themselves and reveal something of their unique style and personality. For example, To be or not to be, perhaps the most famous words ever spoken by a character, immediately brings to mind the brooding Hamlet. These epigraphs will be an integral part of the critical analysis of each character. I will follow the character’s fictional career, which may span numerous works in literature, music, and film, and offer evidence for his or her influence, along with relevant comparisons to others on the list (cross-references appear in bold type with the rank in brackets). At the end of the book, a list of Suggested Readings for each chapter enables the reader to pursue his or her own face-to-face encounter with the character.

Now meet these diverse and fascinating people from around the world. Ponder them, fall in love with them, learn from their stories the varieties of human experience—let them live in you.

1 Hamlet

To be, or not to be.1

These are the most famous words spoken by any literary character, as familiar to those who have never read Shakespeare or seen his plays performed as to the millions who have. As Marjorie Garber put it, "No one ever really reads Hamlet for the first time now; we’ve heard it all before in bits and pieces."2

Indeed, the experience of reading Hamlet’s words is a bit like browsing through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, so packed are they with well-known phrases: a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance, nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape, to give but a few examples. This phenomenon is true in part because Hamlet has so much to say. The solitary Dane is one of literature’s most prodigious talkers, both to himself in his famous soliloquies and, of course, to the other denizens of Shakespeare’s play. The Guinness Book of Records reports that of Shakespeare’s 1,277 speaking parts, the longest is Hamlet with 11,610 words.3 He speaks more than a third of the play, which is itself Shakespeare’s longest, and his brooding presence dominates most of the rest.

Despite these verbal riches—or perhaps because of them—both Hamlet’s words and his actions have provoked more interpretive disagreement than those of any other fictional figure. He has been both inspiration and sparring partner for the keenest minds of the last four centuries, who have written more about him than any other character in world literature.4 It would be hard to overestimate the quantity of praises laid at Hamlet’s—and, of course, Shakespeare’s—feet since the play’s first performance in 1602, although there have been a handful of famous dissenters: notably, Voltaire, who found the play vulgar and barbarous, and T. S. Eliot, who called it an artistic failure!5

Before considering the conflicting interpretations, what do we know, or seem to know, about Hamlet? It is believed that Shakespeare reworked an existing story, in this case more legend than history.6 His treatment of the story fits roughly into the tradition of the revenge play, but he deepened its psychology immeasurably by making the revenge seem irretrievably problematic to Hamlet. As C. S. Lewis astutely observed, Hamlet is not ‘a man who has to avenge his father’ but ‘a man who has been given a task by a ghost.’7

Even before the ghost of his father appears, Hamlet is deeply troubled, and with good reason. He alone at the Danish court seems to mourn the dead king, his father. His mother, Gertrude, has married her husband’s brother, Claudius, with most wicked speed.8 Hamlet is gripped by the classic symptoms of depression: How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!9 But when his father’s ghost appears to him, telling him that he was poisoned by Claudius and charging him to kill the murderer now seated on the throne, Hamlet’s depression verges on becoming suicidal and is compounded with rage. He resolves to feign madness, to put an antic disposition on, in order to conceal his inner turmoil and divert attention from the revenge he is contemplating.10

Critics and actors alike have disagreed over whether this madness remains a pretense or becomes real. In any case, his distracted behavior arouses more suspicion than it averts. Polonius attributes it to lovesickness for his daughter Ophelia, but this notion is later dispelled by Hamlet’s rejection of her, and by implication all her sex, in the admonition, Get thee to a nunnery!11 King Claudius has other suspicions and enlists Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as spies.

Meanwhile, instead of immediately carrying out his revenge, Hamlet hesitates and decides to test the king’s guilt by means of a play that will catch the conscience of the king.12 For the newly arrived troupe of players, he rewrites The Murder of Gonzago so that the drama reenacts the poisoning of old King Hamlet by Claudius and his marriage to the widowed queen. This new play, The Mousetrap, does no less than its name suggests, causing the enraged king to bolt from the audience at the crucial moment. Even with this confirmation, however, Hamlet fails to take the opportunity to kill the king when he catches him kneeling at his prayers. Instead, he goes to confront his mother with his loathing of her sexual guilt and mistakenly kills the eavesdropping Polonius, whom he believed to be Claudius hiding behind a tapestry.

The king’s resolve is not so confused or hesitant. He sends Hamlet to England on a pretext, but really intends his murder (Hamlet turns the plot against the plotters, arranging for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to receive the death meant for him). Hamlet returns to find Ophelia dead and himself challenged to a fateful duel with her brother Laertes. The king has poisoned not only Laertes’s mind against Hamlet but also the young man’s sword tip and a cup of wine. By switching swords and exchanging wounds, both men die, but not before Hamlet stabs the king, and Queen Gertrude drinks the poison intended for Hamlet. Only Horatio survives to tell Hamlet’s story.

The enigma of Hamlet centers on the reasons for his hesitation. One class of explanations locates the cause in Hamlet’s character. Goethe found in Hamlet a romantic figure like his own young Werther [35]: A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.13 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Friedrich Schlegel independently proposed that Hamlet’s ability to act was crippled by his habit of excessive deliberation; as Hamlet himself famously described it, the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.14 Others, including Ivan Turgenev, in his 1860 essay comparing Hamlet with Don Quixote [3], have questioned Hamlet’s supposed oversensitivity, pointing to his unfeeling treatment of Ophelia, and his reputed inactivity, noting his cold dispatch of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius.

Ernest Jones, expanding on a suggestion Sigmund Freud had made in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), took an entirely different tack. He interpreted Hamlet’s hesitation as showing the disturbing effects of the return of a repressed Oedipal wish. In Hamlet’s stead, Claudius has enacted the putative desire of the son to murder his father and sleep with his mother. Hamlet’s revenge is then blocked by guilt over the vicarious fulfillment of that wish. His fixation on his mother’s sexual behavior is seen as further evidence of his Oedipal preoccupation. This ingenious Freudian interpretation, with its Aha! quality, has raised as much ire as any other in the history of Hamlet responses,15 but its influence is undeniable. It has colored most twentieth-century readings of the role, for example actor-director Laurence Olivier’s, whose Hamlet gives Gertrude a prolonged good-night kiss.

Not all accounts locate Hamlet’s problem in his own traits or deep-seated motivations; some try to see his predicament from his perspective. He has received his charge to take revenge from a ghost whose reality and truthfulness he must evaluate. Moreover, the ghost sets for him what may be an impossible task: to murder his uncle and yet taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught.16 His mind and heart are tainted almost from the moment of discovery, and his mother cannot but be punished along the way. When we scrutinize Hamlet’s psyche, we function as outside observers and look for traits or defects of his to explain his behavior; but, to the extent that we identify with him and see through his eyes, we begin to appreciate the situation as it could appear to him and seek our reasons there to account for his behavior.17

Often interpretations of Hamlet were worked out not in dry critical essays but in other works of art. After tracing the modern offshoots of Shakepearean drama, Ruby Cohn concludes that "more than any other work, Hamlet has infiltrated imaginative writing."18 Goethe’s reaction to Hamlet is embodied in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96), where the hero finds his own identity in part through the process of staging a production of Hamlet. In James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel Ulysses (1922), Stephen Dedalus expounds his biographical theory of Hamlet to his cronies in the library scene, one of the stops on Joyce’s one-day odyssey through Dublin. Ulysses, a major landmark of twentieth-century fiction, is as much about Hamlet and Shakespeare as it is about Odysseus [2] and Homer. In Russia, Boris Pasternak composed his own free translation of Hamlet, and his Dr. Zhivago (the protagonist of Pasternak’s Nobel-prize-winning novel) includes a Hamlet as the first of his own poems.19 Numerous other literary offshoots of Hamlet could be cited, among them ones by Hauptmann, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Beckett (Endgame, through Hamm), and Tom Stoppard (Dogg’s Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead).20 The Hamlet type can be seen in a work such as Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred. Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet (1991) and Lynn Redgrave’s Shakespeare for My Father (1993) show the continuing influence of the character on new theatrical works.

Hamlet does not live only on the page, but above all on the stage. The tradition of the role’s performance is so long, and only briefly broken by the English Civil War, that some of Hamlet’s stage business can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time.21 As the great theater historian Arthur Colby Sprague pointed out, through their actions on the stage, actors become interpreters of Hamlet’s character, and no Shakespearean part has had more varied interpretations.22 Hamlet has beckoned the leading actors of every era, and few actors could be called great without attempting him.

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, 1870.

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The roster is impressive, including Richard Burbage (the first Hamlet), William Davenant, David Garrick, John Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, Sarah Bernhardt (who played the role in male costume), John Barrymore, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Kenneth Branagh.23 In 1995, Ralph Fiennes won the Tony Award for best actor for his tortured, frenetic prince. In 2009, Hamlet is back on Broadway, played by Jude Law.

Besides being tested on the boards, the premiere actors of the role nowadays bring their performances before the camera. The celebrated Sarah Bernhardt is credited with the first appearance of Hamlet on film in Le Duel d’Hamlet (1900), a French short film (with synchronized sound recording) that dramatized just one scene, Hamlet’s fatal duel with Laertes.24 Laurence Olivier (in 1948) and Kenneth Branagh (in 1996) each directed superlative film versions of their own distinctive portrayals. Olivier’s Hamlet is a seductive mix of introspective coldness and masculine vigor, perfectly inhabiting his Danish-medieval cinematic ambiance in this unsurpassed black-and-white film. Its chief rival is Branagh’s Hamlet, which marked the fourth century of the play’s existence by presenting the entire work uncut. Running to four hours, it never seems long, but rather moves forward relentlessly, propelled by the vitality and fresh intelligence of its star. The uncut version brings to the fore some of this character’s best moments: for example, the Yorick scene in the graveyard, with the full text restored, has never been played better or more poignantly than in Branagh’s film. When Hamlet learns that the skull he holds is that of his childhood playmate, the jester Yorick, he reacts this way:

Alas poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come: make her laugh at that.25

Most productions stop the speech there and proceed immediately to Laertes’ entrance with the corpse of Ophelia. But Shakespeare doesn’t stop there. He enlarges the point to consider the irony of mortality for even those who seemed most invincible in life:

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:

O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,

Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!26

Branagh does not miss this opportunity to deliver Shakespeare’s one-two punch.

These giants of film notwithstanding, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is well worth watching too, with Mel Gibson surprisingly effective as a brash, rough-and-ready prince. Actors as different as Nicol Williamson and Ethan Hawke have also turned in interesting film performances of the role.

So profound a dramatic role is bound to attract parody to relieve the gloom with a lighter touch. The proliferation and success of Hamlet parodies, especially in the nineteenth century, depended on people’s ready familiarity with all the nuances of his character, story, and words. His greatest soliloquy, introduced by the famous life-or-death question, To be, or not to be, has been a favorite comic target. One farcical version, called Hamlet Revamped (1874), set it to the tune of Three Blind Mice; another, emphatically titled Hamlet! The Ravin’ Prince of Denmark!! (1866), began the speech:

‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’

Oh dear! I’m suffering from the indigestion!27

The propensity to soliloquize was itself parodied in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1874), by W. S. Gilbert (of operetta fame), in which the other characters protest and try (in vain) to stop Hamlet when they detect the signs of a soliloquy coming on.28 Mark Twain’s Duke in Huckleberry Finn [31] suffers from the same tendency, but makes of Hamlet’s famous speech a hilarious patchwork of Shakespearean and pseudo-Shakespearean phrases.29

Hamlet travels well. His determination to reflect on his deepest motives, even when this only increases his anguish, holds a fascination unbounded by time, language, or culture. His dilemmas and his reflections upon them probe the fundamental aspects of human experience: death and bereavement, love and duty to those we love, justice and mercy, sin and guilt, friendship and loyalty, to name only some of them. As the noted critic Harold Bloom has argued, Hamlet lies at the center not only of the Western canon but of a multicultural world canon.30

Adapting the role of Hamlet is a worldwide phenomenon, certainly not limited to parody. In Japan, for example, there is a long tradition (more than a century) of serious Shakespeare performance, often ingeniously adapted into Japanese Kabuki and Noh forms, but also produced in modern translations. In 1990, an amazing seventeen productions of Hamlet in one form or another appeared on the Tokyo stage.31

Facilitating his longevity, Hamlet’s style has continued to change, along with the manner of staging the dramatic world he moves through. The grandiloquent declamation and formal staging of earlier centuries have given way to more conversational tones and avant-garde art direction. The turning point was probably the Moscow Art Theater Hamlet of 1912 jointly produced by Konstantin Stanislavsky (originator of method acting) and Gordon Craig (who also designed its spare, cubist sets).32 Their Hamlet, V. I. Kachalov, began the tradition of emphasizing Hamlet’s aloofness from the other characters—being present among them but maintaining both physical and psychological distance.

This insight into his predicament epitomizes twentieth-century portrayals of Hamlet on the stage and in film, with their heightened sense of the man’s isolation in his own torment. This is fitting because, among fictional characters, Hamlet still stands alone.

2 Odysseus (Ulysses)

Come, I will tell you of my voyage home with its many troubles.1

After Hamlet [1], the most individualized character in world literature, we have Odysseus, the most versatile. The perilous voyage home of Odysseus, the man of many ways, from conquered Troy to his native Ithaka, took ten years, but the voyages of Odysseus through literature span a multitude of works and at least twenty-eight centuries.2

His voyages begin, of course, with Homer: first in the Iliad and later in the Odyssey, both probably composed around 750 to 700 B.C. but drawing on legends from four centuries earlier. These two epic poems are so fundamental to understanding ancient Greek civilization, and its place at the nucleus of Western culture, that losing them would have been an irreparable tragedy. The ancient Greeks thought so too. M. I. Finley notes a remarkable statistic: Of 1,596 ancient Greek books which archaeologists have found preserved on Egyptian papyri, half were copies of the Iliad or the Odyssey or related commentaries—in the struggle for literary survival, Homer was without rival.3

While most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have been lost, Homer’s epic accounts of the Achaean heroes at Troy, and of the homecoming of one hero in particular, have made the journey safely to libraries and bookstores throughout the modern world. All later refashionings of his character, however varied, have Homer’s Odysseus as an ancestor.

What sort of man is he? When the grace of his protectress, the goddess Athena, is upon him, Odysseus is tall, dark-haired, and swarthy-skinned. She enhanced his muscular build, and on his head she arranged the curling locks that hung down like hyacinthine petals.4 He must be irresistibly attractive because, once met, most women, both human (Nausikaa) and divine (Circe, Kalypso) want him to remain as their lover or husband. (Goddesses do not take no for an answer, but Odysseus always sought his escape and never forgot his steadfast wife, Penelope.) Of practical skills, he lacks none. As classicist H. D. F. Kitto put it, he is an excellent all-rounder who fights well, speaks well, and thinks well.5 He can plough a field, build his own boat, outrun and outbox younger men, and shoot an arrow through twelve axes! At the same time, he is the best orator among the Greeks and their best strategist.

In both epics, Odysseus is renowned for his crafty intelligence. Other characters address him with the recurring epithet Son of Laertes, seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus—or just resourceful Odysseus for short.6 In the Iliad, Odysseus appears, though infrequently, as the brains of the operation, the close adviser to Agamemnon [43], who is King of Mycenae and commander of the Achaean forces fighting Troy. In its sequel, the Odyssey, it is revealed that Odysseus was the mastermind behind the famous ruse of the Trojan horse. By accepting this deceptive gift, the Trojans unknowingly invited their enemies inside the gates of Priam’s fortified city. Hiding inside the belly of the large, wooden horse, the Greeks almost cried out in answer to the duplicitous Helen of Troy. She circled the horse three times, calling out to them and mimicking the voice of each man’s wife to lure them to respond. Her siren-like skill and divinely inspired suspicions could not thwart wily Odysseus, who kept his comrades quiet, restraining them by force so they would not reveal themselves till nightfall. Then they could emerge, open the city gates to the waiting Greek troops, and launch the attack leading to the final sack of Troy. Looking back after the war, Menelaos, Helen’s rightful husband, said:

…I have been over much of the world, yet

nowhere have I seen with my own eyes anyone like him,

nor known an inward heart like the heart of enduring Odysseus.7

After ten years of war, he would need all his resourcefulness to get home, and his heart would be fully tested. He also needed his unflagging will to survive. Odysseus was a great warrior, but not archetypally heroic in the same sense as Achilles [14], who would rush into a furious battle for the sake of personal honor, however great the risk. Odysseus had been known to run away when his aged compatriot Nestor called for help, because coming to his rescue would have meant almost certain death.8 Ever practical, he displayed heroic qualities of a different kind, embodied in another frequent epithet, much-enduring. When he encountered the shade of fallen Achilles in Hades, this contrast was brought out: Achilles had died young in battle, but Odysseus was able to do the really difficult and great thing—stay alive and win his homecoming.9

Only Odysseus’s unshakable longing for home sustained him through his many trials. Homer does not present them in chronological order, instead showing us Odysseus after he is already on the island of the goddess-nymph, Kalypso, who is holding him as a captive lover. Among his shipmates he is the sole survivor of a series of brutal, yet colorful adventures. When the gods finally persuade Kalypso to release him, angry Poseidon shipwrecks him again on Scheria, the land of the Phaiakians, to whom he recounts his struggles up to that point.

With his wit goes a temptation to be curious, and Odysseus’s decisions to explore strange lands and risk angering their inhabitants led to evil consequences for his crew.10 They were variously killed in battle by the Kikonians, enchanted by the Lotus-Eaters, eaten by Polyphemos (the Cyclops), murdered by the giant Laestrygonians, or turned into swine by Circe. Odysseus could afford to take these chances because of his iron resistance and cunning. For example, he outsmarted the Cyclops by announcing his name as Nobody; when Odysseus and his remaining men blinded this giant by twisting a great pointed beam into his only eye, his desperate shouts that Nobody is killing me brought no fellow giant to his aid, so the men were able to escape.11 Poseidon, the Cyclops’ father, punished Odysseus for this injury by continually blocking his homecoming with more trials. Before being rescued by Kalypso, Odysseus descended to Hades to hear the sad stories of the fallen Achaean heroes and to view the torments of the famous dead; he resisted the alluring calls of the sirens, and navigated the treacherous strait between Skylla and Charybdis.

Satisfied with these magnificent tales of wandering, the Phaiakians performed their duty as generous hosts and delivered Odysseus to Ithaka, albeit naked and battered by further demonstrations of Poseidon’s grudge against him. With Athena’s help, he was disguised as a tramp in