In all myths, tragedies and plays there is always a tragic hero. The main character makes the whole story work with their fate, flaws and words. In "Hamlet", the leading role was young Hamlet. His dead father, the King, sought Hamlet out so that he could discover the truth about, and get revenge for his father's death. In "Oedipus Rex", Oedipus was also the character that was looked to as the savior and was asked to find the murderer of King Liaus. But in these types of stories we seem to pin point only the "good guys" and mourn over their tragic lives. Often overlooked, there is always your antagonist, the potent mastermind in the play who eventually comes to his death when his evil ways are discovered. In "Hamlet", the antagonist is Claudius, Hamlets uncle and King Hamlet's brother. Claudius kills poisons the king and marries the kings wife to become king. In "Oedipus Rex", the antagonist is actually Oedipus himself. Although you may think it is impossible to be both the enemy and the ally, Oedipus does manage by trying to deceive fate, but fails and then kills his father and marries his own mother. Claudius and Oedipus are highly comparable. Throughout both plays they prove to be one and the same by their mirror actions and personalities. .
Sophocles and Shakespeare both used disloyalty with murder to one's family in the stories "Oedipus Rex" and "Hamlet". Tragedy is almost a synonym to death in that by the end of both stories, every immediate member of Oedipus's family has died and everyone in Hamlet's immediate family, along with most of the people he cared about, is dead as well. Oedipus murdered his own father (not to mention the rest of the party he came across) without knowing, but then drove his mother to kill herself when his truth was revealed. In the later stories, his sons kill each other fighting over control of Thebes, and his daughter was sentenced to death for honoring both of her brothers.