“Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.” (Act 2, scene 2). As the result of his over thoughts he is delaying his revenge. . At one point at act 1 scene 5, Hamlet starts to analyze the Ghost speech to seek revenge (Act 1, scene 5, page 30). When the Ghost and Hamlet finish their dialog Hamlet agrees to seek revenge against Claudius, but still doesn’t act.
If Hamlet were to have seen his father’s ghost by himself, there would be a greater argument for him being insane from the outset of the play. Hamlet also exerts control over his actions, which is the main reason why it could be argued that he is sane. He actively tries to convince Polonius that he has gone mad - mocking him when he would usually be respectful, acting cruelly towards Ophelia whom he was clearly affectionate to earlier in the play. He does this in the hope that Polonius will tell the court of his madness. Hamlet is often hesitant to do things, for example where he had the chance to kill Claudius in the chapel but couldn’t bring himself to do it, not because he would be killing another human but because he wanted Claudius to suffer and not go straight to Heaven.
Hamlet even seems to have forgotten the main reason why he is avenging his father’s death. Hamlet makes many decisions from not killing Claudius while he was praying to killing the innocent Polonius, and disobeying his father’s ghost’s instructions by tormenting his mother, and Laertes can be seen as the very opposite of Hamlet because he is everything that Hamlet is not. Hamlet’s delay of vengeance can also be seen as another
However, this is not the only type of type of play or drama in which the main character acts crazy or mad in order to enact revenge upon someone to avenge someone or just to purely gain revenge for some personal purpose. Yet, scholars interpret Hamlet’s madness in different ways, such as saying that he truly did go mad. In addition, when Hamlet is alone with Horatio and Gertrude away from the public and the king his speech and actions are different, and they do not include all the riddles and ‘madness’ or gestures that he talks with or uses throughout the rest of the play with everyone else. Hamlet’s flaw in all of this is that he likes everything to be perfect and due to that he procrastinates everything. Therefore, to perform his grand scheme, he must change the way he acts in order to prefect the chance to avenge his father’s death, and he must act in such a way to discover and learn everything he needs to do so.
However, Hamlet is pensive ad extremum, at times even brooding; he constantly overuses his intellect while ignoring his emotions and ignoring what "feels right." His extreme logic causes him to delay his revenge against Claudius until the final scene of the play where he kills Claudius and proves that he has progressed into a truly existential character. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet acts out of pure intellect and processed logic. He suppresses his natural instincts, his emotions, and trusts only in the power of his intelligence. For instance, when Hamlet encounters his
Hamlet delays the murder of his uncle due to the doubt he has in the validity of the information provided by the ghost. If Hamlet completely trusted the story that the ghost provided him with, he would have easily committed the murder in a more timely manner. Clearly doubt is one of the causes for Hamlet’s delay before finally killing Claudius. Hamlet delays the murder of his uncle since he is not a man of direct confrontation. Hamlet demonstrates peaceful ways when he arranged a getaway on a pirate ship.
However, Hamlet is pensive ad extremum, at times even brooding; he constantly overuses his intellect while ignoring his emotions and ignoring what "feels right." His extreme logic causes him to delay his revenge against Claudius until the final scene of the play where he kills Claudius and proves that he has progressed into a truly existential character. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet acts out of pure intellect and processed logic. He suppresses his natural instincts, his emotions, and trusts only in the power of his intelligence. For
The readers introduction to Hamlet and King Claudius occurs in Act I Scene ii where the King explains that he has married his sister in law with mixed feelings but he believes Hamlet’s mourning should seize, to which his nephew replies with disdain and offense. This sets the mood for the relationship between the two characters as well as set Hamlet up for his first soliloquy, seen in Act I Scene ii line 133 O, that is too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve into dew! Or that the everlasting had not fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! Oh God! God!
Which everyone knows will lead to his downfall. To prove this is the reason, while analyzing the play, the points that come to mind are that Hamlet only acts when he does not think about the consequences of his actions, and when he accuses himself of over thinking, catching himself in the act, or even when Hamlet had a clear chance to kill Claudius but stop and thinks of all the things that will happen to him. From all these points it is clear that the reason Hamlet delays to avenge his father’s death is because he is in a deep state where he “over-thinks” or “over-philosophizes” which can suggest that he is in fact “thought-sick”. Wolfgang Von Goethe presents the point that the delay is a natural struggle, of a “lovely, pure and most sensitive nature, without the strength of
By saying these words to her he is crassly calling her a harlot, and making to appear that he never really loved her. Ophelia made one decision and that was to love Hamlet, and now he is using her actions to make her feel inferior and sinful. Up to this point in the play, Shakespeare depicted Hamlet as a mad man hell-bent on avenging his fathers suspect death, however: his cruel outburst at Ophelia is not a turning point in the story in which he goes from being a hero to being a cold-hearted oppressor. Hamlet tells Ophelia that she will have to ‘marry a fool’ because ‘wise men’ would know better than to marry her; he yells at her ‘get thee to a nunnery’, and yet the way it fits into the plot makes it seem almost expected. As the plot progresses Ophelia begins to lose her mind, resulting in her eventually suicide, but at no point his Hamlet called out for his harsh words against her in a significant way.