set things right by convincing her (once he knows she was not knowingly a part of the king's murder) to give up Claudius. The demise of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is particularly exemplary of Hamlet's "flaw." They are disloyal, shallow, foolish and opportunistic. They are the embodiments of the things which Hamlet, dedicated, contemplative, planning and solitary, hates. They are the flaws that rake against Hamlet's virtues. Escape from them is not enough. Half-victory and a muddling of affairs is victory for them and their kind, not Hamlet. His dealings with them must be final. He must "delve one yard below their mines," not to confound them, for they are already confounded, but to "blow them at the moon."(Act 3, Scene 4, 209,210) It would be pleasant, satisfying, to end a description at that, as it would be pleasant and satisfying to end the play with a complete victory for the protagonist. But that is intoxication, smashing together the true and the false into one jagged aggregate that glitters and pleases and does no good. That is the form of the imperfect world. A tragic hero cannot survive there. So Hamlet must go to his death, as he does, having purged himself of doubt and contradiction, driving through to immortal purpose. Hamlet’s truest “flaw” is that he is trapped in a world of personal injustices, and that he must endure through them toward their final resolutions, all the while in conflict with his own mind. It is thus that Hamlet’s “flaw” is himself, with his indecisions and his own humanity eating away at him. It thus remains in great irony that the advice given to Laertes by Polonius would have been in great use for Hamlet as a person: “to thine own self be true”....
