What the Heck is Wrong with Hamlet?

Hamlet is not a very heroic hero. He wonders and waffles, vacillating between when and even whether he should kill his uncle and what he decides is the moral plan of action. He is mean and even cruel to Ophelia. He ends up killing everyone around him, even those who are relatively innocent. In my opinion, there is not even a clear moral at the end of Hamlet. Shakespeare does not make one clear point: should Hamlet have just killed Claudius? Does Hamlet really deserve to die? Should he have killed himself? What was the resolution of his “to be or not to be” speech? Clearly, not much is clear. Just as in Oedipus Rex, the protagonist is flawed and the ending is tragic – with uncertain conclusions.
Other characters, too, are portrayed as completely imperfect. Both of the women characters, Ophelia and Gertrude, are frustratingly inept and alarmingly docile. Ophelia’s willingness to blindly obey her father and ignore Hamlet adds to Hamlet’s madness (or at least to his depression), his mistrust of women, his rampage of killing, his falling out with Laertes, and her own suicide. Gertrude’s blindness to or ignorance of Claudius’s treachery and her inability to make strong actions without a man at her side leads to Hamlet’s unhinging and many of his unstable actions (based on this lost mother). Shakespeare allows Hamlet to berate and antagonize both women. In one scene, Hamlet even makes extremely crude remarks to Ophelia, cruelly antagonizing her to the point of tears. Why must these women be so weak? What is the point of having not one positive female figure in the play?
For that matter, there really aren’t any positive male role models either. Hamlet’s father is dead and goading him on to murder; Claudius is a murderer; Polonius is a spying old fool. There aren’t even any good friend role models – Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern all end up failing in that arena. Who, really, is left for Hamlet to sympathize with? Hamlet is clearly an empathetic and sensitive young man. He has thoughts of suicide and reflects on his own actions with a troubled eye. He is trying to be a good kid; but he has no one to help him. What can we expect, when Hamlet cannot trust anyone or talk to anyone about his fears?

Maybe Hamlet’s biggest problem, the problem that Shakespeare is trying to explore, is that when the authority (government) is out of whack, nothing can be right.