END: Hamlet is the culmination of Shakespeare’s expansion of the marginal, malcontent-Vice character. By creating the archetype of the tragic sidekick, he was able to show a view of the world which neither a hero nor a more narrowly-conceived malcontent could provide; he could also explore ideas of heroism and tragedy which more stable, hero-centered plays could only suggest. Falstaff and Mercutio introduce ambivalence into plays which, without them, would have dismayingly simple plots; because they cannot be dismissed with moralizing or treated as clowns, they destabilize not only the plays in which they appear but the entire enterprise of writing heroic characters. Though they are loyal to the heroes, they call into question the ideals of heroism and all the abstract notions that heroes defend; this tension between loyalty and cynicism is shared by the plays themselves, which present the heroic ideal but give equal attention and imagination to its heretics. The orbits of Shakespeare’s plays are constantly shifting, moving around the hero-sun but thrown off course by the powerful pull of the sidekick’s mercurial star.