Characters

The characters in Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet are very different. Hamlet tends to have flatter characters: Claudius is the villain, Polonius is his advisor/accomplice Ophelia is the damsel in distress, Horatio is the voice of reason. Gertrude and Hamlet are the most complex or round characters in the play. Hamlet, the protagonist, is more round because he is struggling with an internal battle over whether to kill Claudius or not. Gertrude is also somewhat round because the reader is hardly ever clear of her motives for siding with Claudius and not Hamlet. In Pride and Prejudice, most of the characters are more complex, partially because the novel uses narration as opposed to just dialogue; the narration allows the reader to learn things about a character that no one says out loud. The flat characters in Pride and Prejudice includes Mrs. Bennet, Lydia, and Caroline Bingley, but the majority of the characters are more round than in Hamlet. The roundest character in Pride and Prejudice is definitely Elizabeth, the protagonist, who changes dramatically when she realizes that her judgements are not always accurate. What the two stories have in common in terms of characters is that both of the protagonists are the most developed characters, but Elizabeth is more developed than Hamlet.