Characters in Hamlet He is the courtier sent by Claudius to invite Hamlet to participate in the duel with Laertes. (This character is called "Ostricke" in the Second Quarto.) Osric, as well as Polonius, attempts to engage with Hamlet in the elaborate, witty discourse, fully consistent with Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 work, "The Courtier". This work outlines several courtly rules, specifically advising royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. The Players are a company of actors who arrive at Elsinore Castle. Friends of Hamlet, they had earlier performed in "the city" (presumably Copenhagen), but faced stiff competition from boy performers, so they
Critical approaches to Hamlet as confusing or inconsistent, with Hamlet falling from such high status. Goethe had one of his characters say, in his 1795 novel "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship", "Shakespeare meant...to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it...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." This change in the view of Hamlet's character is sometimes seen as a shift in the critical emphasis on plot (characteristic of the period before 1750) to