This essay focuses on the redefinition of the figure of the revenger brought by Hamlet’s ambiguous sexual identity. Though Elizabethan tragedy frequently features anti-heroic revengers, Hamlet’s heroic limitation is unique in that it is intrinsically linked to his androgynous nature. Stereotypically virile heroes, such as King Hamlet or the aptly named Fortinbras, make but brief appearances in the play, whose protagonist is an indecisive intellectual torn between his multiple contradictions. Afflicted with “my weakness and my melancholy” (II.2.554), which was then considered a disease hampering men’s will and agency, Hamlet cannot find his place within the rigid world and system represented by the solid walls of Elsinore, where an encouraged separation between sexes leaves no room for androgyny to exist. Polonius’s advice to his children thus emphasizes the need for men to prove their virility through demonstrations of strength and bravery (“Beware / Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, / Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee,” I.3.65-67) while women must show submissiveness and restrain their own desires (“Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence,” I.3.121). Positioning himself as the mad outcast, Hamlet is quick to strip these stereotypical gendered roles of their socializing functions: “Man delights not me – no, nor woman neither” (II.2.290-291), driving both the maiden modesty of Ophelia and the hypersexuality of Gertrude to desperation and self-harm. Ultimately, he proves the folly of hyper-masculine revenge by ending his father’s and Polonius’s bloodlines in a fencing contest rigged by treachery and accident, thus deconstructing any remaining ideal of virile honour and masculine rationality.