10. Tragedy, wrote the critic Eric Bentley, is extraordinarily dependent on comedy.

Discuss
what he meant by this, and cite five examples of it in Hamlet.
Answer: Comedy is necessary in a tragic work to give respite to the tragic feelings we
experience. It also heightens and intensifies the tragic emotion by its extreme contrast. Comedy
and tragedy are entwined in Hamlet, because the tragic hero himself is both a partly comic
character and a master of witty repartee even while under the strongest emotional pressure.
Hamlet has the disturbing gift of laughing at his own grief as well as at the shortcomings of the
world in general. His laughter strengthens the plot, by becoming one of the qualities of his mind
that enable him to evade his mission and postpone his revenge. In his own mind Hamlet is a fool,
trapped in tragedy by the fact that the rest of the world is made up of even bigger fools, who lack
his ability to laugh at himself. Claudius does not see anything funny in his situation as a
murderer and as an incestuous husband; but Hamlet, calling him my mother and unclefather
can joke about it. The only character with whom Hamlet is wholly serious is Gertrude; he
even calls his fathers ghost old mole.