Hamlet Delaying Leads To Significant Consequences

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Khan 1 The consequences in Delaying It is often said that patience is a skill which is required in order to succeed in life. It is a morally significant trait that allows an individual to process decisions before acting upon them and to endure discomfort, ultimately for the best possible result. This patience based complex is generally expected to obtain success; however Shakespeare’s Hamlet evidently seems to violate this theory, as Hamlets patience towards avenging his father’s death, ultimately leads to tragedy. As Hamlet avoided Claudius’s death for many logical reasons such as obeying the ghost of his father who ordered him to kill the king, but spare the queen, to ensure Claudius’s destiny to hell and to protect his mother due to the Oedipus complex he has towards her, he does not realize the loss he faces in procrastinating his actions. Due to Hamlet’s delay, he not only insanely kills Polonius which leads to Ophelia’s death, but destroys his friendship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and ultimately kills Gertrude as well. Clearly, Hamlets patience towards the situation had not been a wise decision, and instead added to his insanity and ultimately ended with a tragic loss of all those he cared about. Hamlet’s constant procrastination when it came killing Claudius makes it evident that his insanity triggers him into killing those he had not meant to kill. The longer Hamlet decides to wait, the more sanity he tends to lose. Moreover, his delay in killing Claudius also depicts the increase in his own loss. “How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!”(3.4.24) is evidence of Hamlets insanity as he Khan 2 kills Polonius thinking it had been Claudius. At this point, Hamlet’s intense aggravation towards the king blinded him from seeing what he had been doing, and resulted in the killing of Ophelia’s father. Due to Polonius’s death, Hamlet also had lost Ophelia

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