What are some similarities between Hamlet and Claudius?

What is the similarities and differences between hamlet and claudius?

• im making a venn diagram and need some help.

• Answer:

  A comparison between Hamlet Jr and Claudius is complicated by two factors: (1) Hamlet Jr has a split personality. He is locked in an internal struggle between his own humanist values and the medieval warlike values of his father and of his uncle. Most of his speeches reflect that internal debate. (2) Hamlet Sr and Claudius, superficial opposites, are really very much alike. They both kill to obtain dirt. They both want Hamlet to be like them. Hamlet Jr, when he is not "from himself taken away" is a humanist scholar. To him, "Denmark is a prison." He is not ambitious. He just wants to return to school in Denmark. But Claudius and Hamlet Sr pressure Hamlet to be more like Claudius. Claudius urges Hamlet to "be as ourself in Denmark." Hamlet Sr urges Hamlet to "revenge this foul murder," but what he really wants is for Hamlet to kill Claudius in order to obtain the throne, so that Hamlet Sr can rule vicariously through the son who was named after himself, the son who was "born to set it right." Hamlet said Claudius was no more like his father than "I to Hercules." But later, by alluding to the nerves of the Nemean lion (out of which Hercules fashioned his tunic), Hamlet hinted that he was indeed like Hercules. So Hamlet was succumbing to the pressure to be like his father ("they commandment shall live all alone in the book and volume of my brain"), who was like his uncle. Both were ambitious, willing to kill to obtain dirt. Hamlet, speaking with his own voice, expressed his contempt for dirt when he described Osric. But that was right after he admitting the vice of knowing Osric, and just before remarking that "to know a man well were to compare with him." After writing his father in the book of his brain, Hamlet also set down his uncle in his tables. It seemed as if he was planning to copy Claudius's deviousness - "One can smile and smile, and be a villain still." - Ray Eston Smith Jr Source(s): http://academia.wikia.com/wiki/Motifs_in%E2%80%A6