Futility

While mining over abundant quotes, sonnets in a seemingly different language, and soliloquies with enough meter and meaning to write a doctorate, the main thing I’m left wondering is: What exactly was Shakespeare’s intent in writing Hamlet? He too, like the readers of today, was a mortal being. He too felt feelings of revenge and purposelessness, and questioned being and capability. As any other human has strived to comprehend at some point in their humble lives, I believe that this is one of Shakespeare’s attempts to justify the life given to man, or more fittingly, to comprehend man’s purpose in life. Hamlet is a pessimistic view of life that deems any man’s attempt at change, futile.

Several times within the play, Hamlet talks of man’s unused “capability and god-like reason” (259). He is distressed by “what a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties!” (217). Man has a seemingly infinite range of action and it distresses the hero of this play that he, as well as mankind, does not utilize it. I imparts a guilt within him and he asks, “why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’/ Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means to do’t.” (260). I believe this worry rings true more now than ever. Today’s society is driven by time-management and efficiency. If you can do something, well we are taught we must do it. High school students are reared to be exceptional scholars, recruited athletes, multi-talented, upstanding citizens, and somehow volunteer, too. Free time is a waste of time is the message I’ve been getting, and Hamlet is battling this issue as well.

Besides being torn over the discrepancy between his capability and actions of avenging his father’s death, Hamlet is also concerned that thinking over the matter too much yield no action and therefore makes him “a coward” (225). He states that by turning something over and over in one’s mind and not coming to an immediate action “conscience does make cowards of us all” (228) and that “a thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward” (260). Does he mean to have action without thought? Is acting, or the act of being, the essence of man? By Hamlet’s saying “the readiness is all” (289) I feel that he is saying that by having fulfilled one’s potential to act, it can be done without thinking.