Comparative Study Between Hamlet & Death of a Salesman

University Degree Education and Teaching

A Definition of Tragedy

Aristotle defined Tragedy as “a representation of an action, which is serious; complete in itself, and of a certain length; it is expressed in speech made beautiful in different ways in different parts of the play; it is acted, not narrated; and by exciting pity and fear it gives a healthy relief to such emotions. Tragedy is an imitation of an action.” And ‘action’ again gives rise to a lot of troubles. A novel or an Epic is narrated, while a drama, be it a Tragedy or a Comedy, is acted. Can there be action without narration? The answer is obvious. The Greek Dramaturgy did not allowed any act of violence on the stage. Even a romantic playwright like Shakespeare had some of the murders reported by messengers. Lucas rightly points out, “Not everything permits itself to be acted. ‘Let not Medea slays her sons before the audience’: things like that, at least, on the Greek stage were relegated to a Messenger’s speech. The term ‘Tragedy’ is used in a common parlance, and yet it cannot be reduced to a formula, for it has so many shades that it actually defies a logical analysis. An American critic has admirable summed up Tragedy in a few words: “Courage and inevitable defeat.” Now-a-days we can never think of a Tragedy without an unhappy ending. But the Greeks did. Philoctetes by Sophocles, for example, has no unhappy ending. There is a similarity between the ancient Greek Tragedy and a modern Tragedy. The hero and certain other characters are caught in a difficult situation.

What is a Shakespearean tragedy?

An eminent Shakespearean scholar famously remarked that there is no such thing as Shakespearean Tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies. Attempts (he added) to find a formula which fits every one of Shakespeare's tragedies and distinguishes them collectively from those of other dramatists invariably meet with little success. Yet when challenging one such attempt he noted its failure to observe what he termed 'an essential part of the [Shakespearean] tragic pattern'; which would seem to imply that these plays do have some shared characteristics peculiar to them.

The characteristics of a shakespearean tragedy are:

Must depict the downfall of a good person trough a fatal error or mis judgement.
Evoke's pity and fear in the audience.
Always talks about fate.
Always ends with one or several deaths.
usually leaves audience a tiny bit of hope as it comes to an end.

Supernatural Elements of Hamlet

The plot and action of Shakespeare’s is, on the surface, very much of the real world. It is a tale of court intrigue, revenge, and murder. Of course, there is no mistaking one supernatural element to the play, and that is the prominent role played by the ghost of Hamlet’s father. This ghost appears in the very first scene and can be seen to have a considerable impact on the development of the drama. At the very least, he is crucial to understanding the actions and motivations of the protagonist. Yet, it is also possible to see the device of this supernatural element as relatively unimportant: the ghost figures in only a few scenes, can be seen only by a few characters, and communicates only with Hamlet. In this respect, Hamlet would not count as one of the in which supernatural elements play a significant role. It would be, however, a mistake to minimize the importance of the supernatural in this play. Although the ghost is not a full player in the main drama he is absolutely crucial to the establishment and development of some of the main themes of the play: madness, revenge, and murder. Were Hamlet’s father to urge him on to revenge in some more mundane manner – were he still alive, or if it were merely the memory of his father that moved him to do what he does – Shakespeare would not have achieved the same effects. Nor is it necessarily the case that the ghost represents the only use of the supernatural in the play. This character is, of course, the only one that is not of the natural, realistic world. But there is at least one other event in the play which may be read as supernatural in much the same way that Hamlet’s interaction with the ghost of his father must be.

Supernatural Elements in death of a sales man

In Arrthur Milla’s Death of a sales man there is no use of Supernatural Elements. In American drama Supernatural Elements dose not exist.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Famous Quotes / Quotations from Hamlet
The quotes from Hamlet are amongst Shakespeare's most famous including 'to be or not to be' and
'to thine own self be true'. Details of these famous quotes follow, complete with information regarding the Act and the Scene, allowing a quick reference to the section of the play that these quotations can be found in. Please click here for the full text of the script of the play.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question" Hamlet Act III, Scene I).

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be" (Act I, Scene III).

"This above all: to thine own self be true". - (Hamlet Act I, Scene III).

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.". - (Act II, Scene II).

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks". - (Hamlet Act III, Scene II).

"In my mind's eye". - (Act I, Scene II).

"The play’s the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king". - (Hamlet Act II, Scene II).

Famous Quotes from death of a sales man

“Work a lifetime to pay of a house. You finally own it and there’s nobody to live in it.” Willy tells this to his wife after hearing that his sons left together for the evening and that they only needed one more payment on the house.

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can’t I say that, Willy?” Biff says this to Willy while arguing about his revelation and found self.

“I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! I’m one dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I’m not bringing home any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!” Biff says this to Willy while arguing with him. Willy is shocked that Biff thinks so lowly of himself not realizing that what Biff says is true.

“Isn’t that -- isn’t that remarkable? Biff -- he likes me!” Willy says this to his wife and to himself after the argument with Biff. He had believed that Biff was out to ruin his life out of spite.

Settings of Hamlet
The settings for the play are Elsinore in eastern Denmark (the castle, a plain and a churchyard)
Setting of death of a sales man

Willy’s house- Small house in New York surrounded by apartments.

Restaurant - Restaurant where Stanley works where the Lomans were supposed to have dinner at the end of the play.

The hotel- The hotel where Willy stays while in New England for his business trips. This is where Biff catches his father in the affair.

Death of a Salesman:

A Tragedy of a Common Man

Oedipus, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Othello or Willy Loman. Must classic tragedy embrace just the Aristotelian "fall of princes," or may it also include the modern common man? Playwright Arthur Miller believes that the common man can be a center of dramatic interest, and he demonstrated this belief in Death of a Salesman, a tragedy about a very common common-man: a salesman from Brooklyn.

Winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for 1949, Death of a Salesman combines realism and surrealism in the story of a small man swallowed up in a world of sham and shoddy values. Willy Loman is bewildered, well-intentioned, and unsuccessful: "Suddenly I realize I'm going sixty miles an hour, and I don't remember the last five minutes."

His sons are upset by his peculiar behavior and his hallucinatory conversations with the figures from a happier past, and they worry about the effect on their compassionate mother, who loves her husband and recognizes that his actions stem from the brutal difference between fact and fancy.

This story of a common man, victimized by his own fake values and those of modern America, caught the imagination of theatre audiences immediately. Months prior to its premier Feb. 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway, the word was out and the public was storming the box office. This time the public was right. Critics acclaimed Death of a Salesman as "a great play of our day," and lavished upon it such accolades as "superb," "rich," and "memorable." John Chapman's review called it "a very fine work in the American Theatre, with script, staging, setting, and acting all in perfect combination." John Glassner proclaimed the play "one of the most powerful and moving plays of our time, representing a culmination of American playwrights' efforts to create a significant American drama." (Arthur Miller, incidentally, was barred from an after-opening-night supper held on the set. The waiters didn't recognize him.)

Death of a Salesman was forceful enough to warrant superlatives and the honors it received, but what a year on Broadway! The 1949 competition was fierce. Opening that season were The Madwoman of Challiot, Anne of a Thousand Days, Summer and Smoke, South Pacific, a revival of Private Lives, Light Up the Sky, and Kiss Me Kate. Lee J. Cobb was the original Willy Loman. Dustin Hoffman, long an admirer of the play, played the leading role in a greatly acclaimed production in 1984.

So, we must ask what is behind the honors. If this modern story is destined to challenge classic tragedy, or perhaps to take its place alongside, we must look behind the glitz and glitter to find a message.

If for instance, as Miller suggests in his autobiography, Timebends, the struggle in Death of a Salesman was simply between father and son for recognition and forgiveness, it would diminish in importance. However, he continues, when the struggle extends itself out of the particular family circle and into the lives of each of us, it broaches the questions that trouble all of us: social status, social honor and recognition, success. When we are brought to feel what Willy Loman feels, the play expands its vision and moves from the specific toward the fate of man. We become Willy Loman, and his struggle becomes our struggle.

In an essay titled "The Family in Modern Drama," Miller expands this concept: "We are all part of one another, all responsible to one another. The responsibility originates on the simplest level, our immediate kin. But this vital attachment is germinal and with the maturing of the person extends beyond its initial source."

The family is pivotal, he suggests, but beyond the immediate family is the family of mankind. Connection with others, the need to feel others as a part of ourselves and ourselves as a part of them is an impulse native to all of us. We call people without this connectedness "sick." Yet we see this prime impulse constantly being impeded and crippled. Miller's work dramatizes and depicts the forces that induce these impediments.

"All plays we call great," he continues, "let alone all those we call serious, are ultimately involved with some aspect of a single problem: how may a man make of the outside world a home? How and in what ways must he struggle, what must he strive to change and overcome if he is to find safety, love, ease of soul, identity, and honor?"

Miller repeatedly searches in his writing for answers to these questions. In Situation Normal, Watson, a soldier training to be an officer is afraid his backwardness in mathematics may lead to his rejection for commission as an officer, which would seem to him like a betrayal of his company companions, to whom he has become deeply attached.

This expression of a bond among "brother" combatants in the army is echoed in All My Sons, the story of a manufacturer whose defective airplane parts cause the death of his son and other aviators in wartime. The "sinner" defends his malfeasance as being perpetrated on behalf of his family, and is brought to understand that to his son, Chris, there is indeed something bigger than the family: there is the family of mankind.

Proctor, in The Crucible, chooses to die rather than live and besmirch his "name," and in The Price, one son gives up opportunities which might have led to success equal to that of his brother, and the son has done this on behalf of a father who was hardly worth the sacrifice.

"What is the matter with you people?" asks a character in The Victor. "Nothing in the world you believe, nothing you respect. How can you live? You think that's the smart thing . . . that's so hard what you're doing. Let me give you a piece of advice. It's not that you can't believe nothing, that's not so hard, it's that you've still got to believe it. That's hard. And if you can't do that, my friend, you're a dead man."

Miller's work has variety but also an essential, overriding unity. Willy Loman speaks not of "success," so much as of being "well liked." He has given up a small inclination toward carpentry in order to become a salesman because it promises a brighter future of ease and affluence, and by turning away from himself he has become an utterly confused person. He dreams the American legend: the brother who walked into the jungle and came out of it rich. "William when I walked into the jungle I was 17. When I walked out I was 21. And . . . I was rich." Willy sees everything in this light: the good will of the boss, the business contact, glad-handing, being impressive. He can no longer recognize his own reality, or why he has failed. "Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it."

Thus he wreaks havoc on his own life and that of his family. Unaware of what warped his mind and behavior, he commits suicide in the conviction that a legacy of $20,000 is all that is needed to save his beloved but also damaged offspring all that is standing between them and success.

When Miller was asked in what way his plays were related to the events of his life, he replied that in a sense all his plays were autobiographical. He was born in Manhattan in 1915, middle class and Jewish. His grades were not high, and he apparently didn't read a serious book before he was seventeen. Finally gaining entrance to the University of Michigan, he wrote a play which won several small prizes, and he realized he could indeed become a playwright.

Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe from 1956 to 1961. He wrote about her in Timebends: "Comics on the whole are deeper, are somehow closer to the crud of life and suffer more than do the tragedians, who are at least accorded professional credit for seriousness as people.”

He also tells us in Timebends about Manny Newman, his uncle, who was a salesman. Manny greeted the Broadway opening of All My Sons with the information that "Buddy (Manny's son) is doing very well."

"I thought I knew what he was thinking," Miller writes, "that he had lost the contest in his mind between his sons and me. There in the lobby I still felt some of the boyhood need of his recognition. At the same time I knew that in reality he was not much more than a bragging and often vulgar little drummer. I had not the slightest idea of writing about a salesman then, but that was the genesis. I suppose, however, that if Willy Loman could be taken apart, five or six salesmen I have met would be found in him."

Miller has captured the tragedy of the American common man. He knows our lower middle class as few others do, and Willy Loman is his supreme character creation. Loman is a pathetic fool, but he is totally recognizable to laugh at, to commiserate with, or to deplore. At his funeral a friend points out, "Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

Hamlet – Deaths of The Royal Family

In the story of Hamlet, I would like to speak more of the deaths that took place and give my own opinions of the reasons of these deaths. Hamlet is mostly about tragedy, love and heroic situations. In Hamlet all of the main characters die towards the end of the story.

The first character to die in Hamlet is Polonius. Although Polonius often acts in a dishonest manner when dealing with Hamlet, it is only because he is carrying out plans devised by the king or queen to discover the nature of Hamlet’s madness. Being the king’s Lord Chamberlain, it is his duty to obey the king and queen’s wishes and it is this loyalty that eventually proves to be fatal for him. An example of Polonius innocent involvement with the royalty results in his death can be found at the beginning of Act III, scene iv, when Hamlet stabs him while he is hiding behind the arras in Gertrude’s room. This shows how Polonius, a man unaware of the true nature of the situation he is in, is killed by a member of the royalty during the execution of one of their schemes. This makes Polonius’s death a tragedy.

The next member of Polonius’s family to die is his daughter Ophelia. Ophelia is entirely manipulated and used by Hamlet and the king for their own selfish reasons. An example of how Ophelia is used by Hamlet takes place in Act II, scene I, when Hamlet uses her to convince his family he is mad. Ophelia explains to Polonius how Hamlet has scared her, causing Polonius to draw the conclusion that Hamlet has an oceanic dispositional. Many believe that this is simply Hamlet taking one last look at Ophelia before he becomes engaged in his plan to kill Claudius, the fact that he scares her and does not try to alleviate these fears points to the conclusion that he is simply using her to help word of his madness spread throughout the kingdom via Polonius.

Tragedy between

Hamlet and the death of salesman:

Every playright in the world has shown their tragedy by the major characters in their play. I have explained the tragedy in this way. Because of the major character occurred the main tragedy in the play.

Miller sets out the pattern for his own idea of a tragedy and the tragic hero. This pattern supports the idea that a tragedy can occur in characters of common men as well as those in high place. In his paper, he demonstrates that it should be possible for everyone to be able to identify with the tragic hero. Miller redefines tragedy as more common occurrence than what might happen in such tragedies as portrayed by Shakespeare and Euripides, thus defining Death of a Salesman as a tragedy.

Willy Loman and Hamlet, two characters so alike, though different. Both are perfect examples of tragedy in literature, though for separate reasons and by distinct methods. The definition of a tragedy, in a nutshell, states that for a character to be considered tragic, he/she must be of high moral estate, fall to a level of catastrophe, induce sympathy and in the audience, and usually die, and in doing so, re-establish order in the society. follows this to a "T". Death of a Salesman does not fall within these set guidelines but is still considered tragic for reasons, though different, somewhat parallel those of Hamlet's.Hamlet, a rich young price of high moral estate suddenly has his joyous life ripped away from him when his father, Hamlet Sr., suddenly passes away. Though originally thought to be of natural causes, it islater revealed to him through his father's ghost, that dear old dad was murdered by his Step-Father, and also his Uncle, Claudius. Vowing revenge upon his Uncle/Dad, Hamlet begins to mentally falter and eventually, is in such a wild rage that he accidentally kills Polonious believing him to be his father. Hilarity ensues.

Ophelia, Hamlet's love interest, commits suicide/dies (that's up for debate elsewhere) after going slightly mad from the impact of her father's death, then Laertes, Polonius' son, arrives on the scene enraged and ready to kill Hamlet for what he's done, and just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, unbeknownst to Hamlet, Claudius has been plotting to kill him. Talk about your bad days. A duel takes place between Hamlet and Laertes where Laertes, using a poison-tipped sword, cuts Hamlet, thus giving way for his impending death. Hamlet eventually gets hold of the sword and kills Laertes, then kills King Claudius. Just as the play ends, Hamlet takes his last breath of air, appoints Fortinbras Jr. as the new King of Denmark, and dies.

In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, a salesman who believed himself to be a powerful man, has his life unravel before him as he loses his job, his sanity and the respect of those around him. Many years before, Willy had an affair. This "dirtied" his appearance to his son Biff, though his wife never found out. Biff later went on to become a drifter of sorts, dabbling in one low-paying profession after another until finally settling on a farm.

After Willy was fired, for being too old, too inept or both,supposedly, Willy pretends he's still working and doesn't let his wife in on the bad news. Too stubborn to accept a job from his next-door neighbour, Willy is forced to lie to his family. Through visions of his older brother Ben, coupled with the degradation of his mind, Willy eventually commits suicide to ensure his son Biff's career through the Life Insurance policy. Willy dies an empty, shallow death.

Hamlet and Willy are both considered tragic. The Classical Tragedy's definition was tweaked with to make it a more general encompassor. A common man's injured sense of dignity, coupled with forces beyond his control and/or ability to comprehend, displace him from his perceived place, causing the audience to recognize such and prepare itself for the inevitable finale in which the hopelessness and defeat are more poignant than the actual death.

Willy and Hamlet both fell from grace, both commited morally bankrupt acts and evetually died, giving way to a re-establishment of order. Tragic men, for different reasons, bound together through their demeanor and their deaths.

Some other difference between Hamlet and the death of salesman can be reffered. Such as Hamlet is a five act play but the death of salesman is a thee act play. Hamlet arouse cathersias but the death of salesman dose not.