But we both obey, /And here give up ourselves in the full bent/To lay our service freely at your feet/To be commanded’
There was no way Hamlet could even risk telling the courtiers about this because they would surely tell the King, to get on his good side.
The question of Kingship leads us to the concept of the Divine right of kings. Although the courtiers’ flattery may seem exaggerated and blown-up to modern day readers, it must be noted that this was exactly how the people of that day felt about the King who was-‘That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests/ The lives of many … Or it is a massy wheel…which when it falls,/Each small annexment, petty consequence ,/ Attends the boist’rous ruins.’
The divine right of Kings was an idea accepted all over Europe. It consisted of the theory that the King was a representative of God on earth. He would rule in any way he wanted because his word couldn’t be opposed. His place was above, higher than the nobles or the commoners, and this idea was generally accepted without any resistance.
The idea of the King being divinely ordained concurred with the Elizabethans’ need for order and discipline in their society. For this reason, the Elizabethans also had a belief that everyone was born into the positions that they would live in through out their lives. You could not step out of your place for this would cause disorder and chaos. This was also part of the reason why the Elizabethans could not commit revenge. Taking revenge just caused chaos and destruction and this is why all avengers in revenge tragedies died in the end – to destroy the cause of disorder.
In maintaining this idea of peace and order, religion played its part too. Religious beliefs and ideas all forbade its followers to commit revenge, especially Murder.
Again this also explains why the murderer would have to die in the end. The only way to redeem oneself of a murder would be to die as well. Religious and moral beliefs play a big part in making Hamlet question his actions and thoughts and are probably one of the reasons that the prince of Denmark delays killing Claudius. Even though the play was set in Denmark, the beliefs and morals portrayed are still very much Elizabethan. According to the Elizabethans ghosts, spirits and other supernatural occurrences were a sign of danger, an omen that something terrible was going to take place. When the ghost is seen this belief is brought out as Marcellus starts to assume that the appearance of the Ghost is ominous: -
‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’
The supernatural was usually associated with the devil. Elizabethans believed that the devil could come down in the form of spirits and make humans commit sin. Hamlet expresses this concern and doubts the ghost’s credebility. He says: -
‘Be thou a spirit of health or a goblin damned. / Bring with thee airs from Heaven or blasts from Hell’
Hamlet doubts the ghost’s intentions here. He wonders if he is the devil or the real spirit of his father. Hamlet has always been more of a thinker than an actor. So even when he is ready to take revenge at the beginning, he quickly slows down and thinks about the ghost’s authenticity. In fact this is what leads him to put on the play The Mousetrap.
When the Ghost gives his speech about his misfortune, he starts off by describing, very passionately, the torments of hell. He speaks powerfully with words that inspire terror and panic in both the audience and Hamlet. ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood’ Lines like these stir up feelings of pity towards the Ghost as well as fear and caution. Unconsciously the Ghost has probably warned Hamlet to stay sin-free and pure. So it is highly contradictory when the King proceeds to then ask Hamlet to avenge his murder, which will put Hamlet in the same position and place as the dead King. Hamlet is torn between his duty as a son and his responsibility towards his moral beliefs.
This brings us to look at Hamlet’s character as a reason for his delay in the killing of the King. Hamlet’s character is what made the whole play very different from the other revenge tragedies of that time. Hamlet’s character is one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters. Perhaps this is why he is a source of fascination to most of his audience as well as critics. His humanity makes him a very appealing personality. He symbolizes what many of us are constantly doing – asking questions. Unanswered questions are silently asked throughout the play like whether or not Queen Gertrude was a conspirator in King Hamlet’s murder, whether the King’s spirit is friendly or a demon or whether Ophelia dies accidentally or commits suicide.
Hamlet’s ironical situation probably made the audience more interested in the outcome. Hamlet would be the very last person imaginable in the play to commit murder. Yet he is the one who is assigned the role of an avenger. This adds to the many reasons why there is substantial delay before the actual deed is committed. His situation - or rather his reaction to the situation – make the play on the whole very intriguing.
Shakespeare needed Hamlet’s humanity to capture and sustain the audience’s interest in the play. If all were as easy as it seemed, and the characters had no development in their roles, the play would have been over in the first Act itself. But this would not have made it one of the most successful revenge plays in the history of English Literature. Shakespeare explores extensively in Hamlet, how human nature reacts to extraordinary situations and in doing so gives us many reasons as to why Hamlet delays the killing of the King.
Firstly, Hamlet is more of a thinker than a doer. His mind works fast – sometimes maybe too fast – and this would not help him. For example when Hamlet first sees the ghost he immediately questions its authenticity. Although it was a customary belief of the Elizabethans that ghosts spelled danger, I would not expect Hamlet to be so suspicious because I just saw him mourning the death of his father in the court. By this I mean that if Hamlet were more of a doer, then he would probably have been portrayed as leaping to avenging his father’s murder and although he does seem quite willing at first (‘Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift/As meditation…/May sweep to my revenge’) this does not result in anything as we proceed to see that he still has considerable doubt about the validity of the Ghost’s noble existence because he sets up the play, The Mousetrap.
‘Be thy intents wicked or charitable,/ Thou com’st in such a questionable shape.’
Hamlet’s mind again, stood in the way of killing the King in the church. Hamlet stands above the King, with a sword on the back of his throat, yet he stops. Why? Because of his mind. He could have simply killed the King and ended it all there, but he chose to wait for he thought that killing the King – who was now praying and (apparently) free of sin – would prove useless. ‘Why, this is hire and salary not revenge’
He concludes in the end that he would kill the king ‘when he is drunk, asleep, on in his rage,,/Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,’
Why did Hamlet simply not kill the king now? The answer would be his character. He chooses to stop and think thus, ironically, paving the path to his demise and the deaths of five other characters. He admits that one of his problems is to ‘think too precisely on the event’.
Hamlet endlessly analyses his reasons and motives for delay in his soliloquies. When the opportunity arises, he doesn’t act, but analyses the implications of his actions if he does act. For instance, he doesn’t kill the King while the latter was in the church? In the essence of the moment why would he stop to think about if it was right or not?
When he fails to act upon the moment he proceeds to abuse himself for being a coward. ‘Why what an ass am I! This is most brave/ That I,…/Must like a whore unpack my heart with words /And fall a-cursing like a very drab.’
‘Yet I, /A dull and muddy-mettled rascal’ Hamlet continues to insult himself here. He stoops to common, colloquial language, a language uncommon to a prince’s tongue trying, perhaps, to stir some form of anger in him, something that would drive him to killing the King.
In his soliloquy after his meeting with Fortinbras, Hamlet compares himself to the Norwegian price and in many ways diatribes himself for acting the way he has in comparison to Fortinbras. He says that Fortinbras has stirred up an army ‘of such mass and charge’ to fight Denmark ‘for an eggshell’ . Hamlet says that Fortinbras has found ‘quarrel in a straw when honour is at stake’ Hamlet brings to our attention the stark difference between he and Fortinbras. In this soliloquy he glorifies Fortinbras and depicts him as a man who would fight for the most worthless cause and in doing so reproaches himself for not having done enough when his cause is much more worthier than Fortinbras. He elevates Fortinbras into the position of a hero with words like: ‘a delicate and tender prince/ whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d’
In addition to being a quick thinker, Hamlet was also a character who was given in to melancholic disposition. Many critics have said that this was one of the major reasons why he didn’t kill the king. I agree with this idea that Hamlet was simply much too passive and intellectual to actually be dragged in to murdering another human being. Even though he does finally murder the King, it is obvious that it was not pre-meditated. I believe Hamlet merely killed the king in the end because he was responsible for the death of his mother and that, perhaps, he was not even thinking about his dead father.
From the very beginning we see that Hamlet is a character that is sensitive, and introverted. From his soliloquy we can say that the death of his father has left a scar on him and his mother’s incestuous marriage as hurt him even further – ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/ Seems to me all the uses of this world/…..Frailty thy name is woman/…but no more like my father/ Than I to Hercules…’ His language has the tone and wordings of a true philosopher or a poet. He is a sensitive man alive to and aware of the beauty of the world and the glory of human beings. His mother and uncles actions have hurt him deeply yet he doesn’t succumb to vulgar and crude language as a way to vent out his resentment. He instead puts his feelings in to beautiful poetic sentences that bring out his feeling in a more dignified fashion.
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question:/Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them’
The above is the beginning to Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. From the language, we can clearly see that Hamlet is a man of great intellect and therefore not one to rush into things. This soliloquy, like many others, presents to us Hamlet’s character with no strings attached. His wordings lead us to believe that the quintessential philosopher.
But many have asked the reason to why Hamlet, being the sensitive person he was, kills Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius. I feel that these murders were done in a fit of rage. We have seen how Hamlet seems to go with the moment for a short while and then come back to reality, without any substantial action taken. I believe the same thing happened here. When hamlet discovered that there was someone behind the curtain he, perhaps impulsively, killed the person, in a fit of rage. As for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Hamlet probably sent them off too their death to get them out of the way. He believed that they would be a hindrance to his revenge.
There are, throughout the play, many reasons as to why Hamlet delayed the killing of the King until the last scene. Some critics even believe that he only did manage to kill the King at the end because the King poisoned his mother. He took revenge for his mother’s, not father’s murder. There are many justifications for Hamlet’s delay and they can be interpreted into whether he was just procrastinating or whether they were truly understandable basis for delay. In conclusion I feel that Hamlet delays the King’s murder because of his own character. If he were more like Laertes or Fortinbras the play could have had a different conclusion. But his character - or rather his mind - stood in the way even when he had many an opportunity to kill Claudius. External events might not fully contribute to Hamlet’s delay but can be - and perhaps were - used as a reason or an excuse to further delay avenging his father’s murder.