Harold Bloom asserts that “our ideas of what makes the self authentically human owe more to Shakespeare than should be possible…” (15). If this is true, then the Prince of Denmark himself in Shakespeare's Hamlet is the embodiment of humanity in his perception of humanity and humanity's inevitable perversion of nature, and in his depiction of the vast uncertainties of the human mind. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay Hamlet reflects on – or, according to Bloom, invents – the concept and definition of man; his fundamental impression of man's natural being is "noble in reason...in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god..." (II, ii, 327-330) Yet in the even soliloquy, Hamlet manifests an ungrateful discontent towards his “express and admirable” peers (II, ii, 329), a contradiction which supports neither noble reason nor divine apprehension. Shakespeare projects one definition of man through Hamlet's words and another through man himself. These two ideas, which exist at polar opposites of each other, must be assumed to include all positions in between, because the person who is fully angelic or invariably dissatisfied is rare, if not even outgoing. By implying that this vague spectrum is the gauge of a being's mind, Shakespeare defines man as indefinable. The first of these human conditions, that which describes man as angelic, has been transmitted from Shakespearean times to modern philosophy through the work and legacy of John Locke; Hamlet's slightly contradictory but firm view of man as fundamentally good triggers an immediate connection with Locke in current Western thought. Trust in "noble reason" and the "infinite faculties" of man are also the basis of American democratic government, established by my Locke-influenced men, whose main philosophical program closely parallels the reflections of Hamlet. Hamlet's mental and family situations are perversions of the natural human condition he describes: contrary to "noble reason", Hamlet displays madness; he is more obsessed with a goal than “infinite in faculties”; his thirst for bloody vengeance and his uncle's incestuous and murderous tendencies oppose Hamlet's idealized notion of the man as "in action like an angel" (II, ii, 329). Much more than praising humanity, Shakespeare examines how the good natural state of human beings is tragically corruptible. Hamlet reprimands his mother's “incestuous” actions: “O, such an act/As from the body by contraction tears away/The very soul, and sweet religion makes/a rhapsody of words! (III, iv, 54-57). Hamlet makes what he perceives to be a moral argument to his mother, the queen. He sees it as a perversion of the natural being. Later, when she declares Hamlet's aside "Alas, he is mad" (III, iv, 121), Shakespeare plunges into uncertainty: does the Queen really deserve this blame, or is she- What the public blindly assumed that a perfidious misinterpretation of the madman Hamlet was true? In the same scene, Hamlet murders Polonius; the spectacle becomes a bastion of incest, madness, and death, all combining to display a blatant perversion of Hamlet's so-called "noble" goal of vengeance. Shakespeare reveals not only that moral and psychological failings are as prevalent in royalty as elsewhere, but also - on a more universal scale - the fragility of meticulously designed moral structures under the blows of evil traps. Hamlet commits the ultimate sin of taking the.