The Delay of Hamlet

Taking revenge against his enemy can be a difficult task for young Hamlet, especially when the circumstances and conditions he is under require him to reevaluate his morals of life and soul. The delay in Hamlet’s revenge of his father’s death is caused by three main reasons: he is under strict and almost impossible guidelines laid out by the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, he is afraid of death either suffering it or inflicting it on someone else, and his lack of reasoning in committing a murder that he did not witness himself.

When the ghost of King Hamlet first appears to young Hamlet, he injunctions three requirements he needs Hamlet to act upon. Revenge his father’s death, do not emotionally affect his mother, Gertrude, with the killing of her new husband, Claudius, and to not let himself go insane by trying to accomplish these vital tasks. Hamlet is bewildered, overwhelmed, and shocked with what the ghost of his father told him, and responds with “ haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift as mediation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge” (1.5.29-31). This response from young Hamlet makes the audience believe that the plot against Claudius will be very swift. Yet on the other hand you get this sensitive side from the response because Hamlet compares the quickness of taking revenge, to the pace two people falling in love with each other. Eventually the revenge of his father’s death takes place, but not until the very end of the play, and the way Hamlet took revenge against Claudius is not how he had planned on doing it. Hamlet wanted the revenge of Claudius to be a very quick and a secret like task, yet his own emotions and conscience caused the murder to be a complete massacre and tragedy. The inj...

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...us, be shipped off to England, and be known has a crazed man throughout Denmark. These causes are all the effects of the delay Hamlet had.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of hamlet Prince of Demark. The new Folger Library. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1992. 57-58. Print.

Haigh, Christopher. “Anticlericalism and the English Reformation.” The English Reformation Revised. Ed. Cambridge GB: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 56-74

The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols. (London, 1765).

Gibinska, Marta. “‘The play’s the thing’: The Play Scene in Hamlet.” Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Eastern and Central European Studies. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1993. 175-88.

Shakespeare, William. "Hamlet." The Norton Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt, Ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. 1668-1756