Hamlet's Procrastination : a Study on his Failure to Act

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Hamlet’s Procrastination: a Study on his Failure to Act

Joseph Busat

ENG4U

Mrs. Dickson

Holy Trinity Catholic Secondary School

Monday, November 7th , 2011

Hamlet is a play written by William Shakespeare, between the years of 1599 and 1601, under the reign of King James I. The play, set in the kingdom of Denmark, recounts the tragic tale of how Prince Hamlet enacts revenge on his Uncle Claudius, for murdering his father, (King Hamlet), marrying Gertrude, (his widowed mother, King Hamlet’s wife), and succeeding to heir of the throne.  The tragic flaw, (Hamartia), of the protagonist Hamlet, is arguably his procrastination in the enactment of his revenge. Throughout the play, Hamlet had many opportunities to avenge his father’s death by murdering Claudius; however, there was always seemed to be something restricting him. There are many reasons as to why Hamlet may have delayed the revenge: be it the fact that Hamlet feared the consequence of killing, maybe he doubted the ghost, it could be that Hamlet didn’t want to hurt his mother, or maybe even the fact that he was a renaissance Prince, and didn’t believe in violence. Hamlet’s procrastination cannot be proved by either one of these theories, but rather, a complex combination of them all. The most notable reasons as to why Hamlet delayed in the killing of Claudius are because he doubted the nature of the ghost, and the consequence that came with killing another man, and because he did not want to hurt his mother. Whatever the case, it is quite evident that Hamlet procrastinated the avenging of his father’s death, thereby causing the deaths of Gertrude, Laertes, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and most importantly, himself; this procrastination – no other factor – is refutably Hamlet’s tragic flaw.

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At the beginning of the play, the ghost presented itself. No one knew who, or what the ghost wanted. It was Horatio who had to speak to the ghost: “If thou art privy to thy country's fate, / Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, / O, speak! / Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life / Extorted treasure in the womb of earth, / For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, / Speak of it: stay, and speak” (Shakespeare 1.1). Hamlet was not sure however who the ghost really was. Following his religious beliefs, Hamlet may have ...

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