Posted on 11th Sep 2024 11:21:18 PM Theatre and Drama
Abstract
Hamlet has intellectual depth but his sensitive, melancholic, introspective and scrupulous nature make him irresolute and dilatory in his action. Now, without analyzing Hamlet’s situation and his inward nature, it is difficult to comment on the reasons of his irresolution and delay which have been the most celebrated questions of the critics. Excessive reflection and speculation are also responsible for Hamlet’s irresolution. We see that Hamlet prefers to think than to act. In the light of the inward nature of Hamlet’s character and the circumstances Hamlet has to bear, his irresolution and inaction concerning revenge have been discussed.
In Shakespeare Hamlet it is prominent that Hamlet feels irresolute. Hamlet himself is, of course, the first to raise it and to be defeated by it:
“-I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t.”
(Act IV, Scene IV, Lines 43-46)
Many critics have agreed that Hamlet’s melancholic, introspective and scrupulous nature make him irresolute and the shadow of death which is always in his mind helps him to be lost among his thoughts and thus he becomes dilatory in his action. Now in the light of the above statement we have to analyze how far these causes are responsible for his irresolution and inaction concerning revenge.
E. K. Chambers explains the delay in these words: “It is the tragedy of the intellectual, of the impotence of the over-cultivated imagination and the over-subtilized reasoning powers to meet the call of everyday life for practical efficiency.” His limitless thought which are full of intellectual depth and deep sadness of his mind snatches his capacity of quick action. According to Bradley, Hamlet’s irresolution is directly or mainly due to a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special circumstances. In other words we may say that the direct cause of his irresolution and delay is a state of profound melancholy in him. Many scenes and incidents may be considered as expression of that unique mental or spiritual suffering of the hero who is at the heart of the play. When we go through the play we become aware of the reality of pain which makes Hamlet irresolute and dilatory in his action.
From his speech we understand his mental agony:
“and yet within a month-
Let me not think on’t-Frailly, thy name is woman-”
(Act I, Scene II, Lines 145-146)
Hamlet has lost his faith. As his mother is unfaithful, he does not believe any woman. To him, the mind of woman is weak. Women have no intelligence to justify right or wrong. Hamlet thinks like this actually because of his mother’s foolishness to marry Claudius. It is difficult for Hamlet to accept the second marriage of his mother within a month of his father’s death.
When Hamlet first stands before us, his father has been two months dead; his mother has become the wife of Claudius. The whole world is against him. There is no such thing as naked manhood. A mass of sorrow, and of wounded feeling, of shame and of disgust has been thrown back upon him; and this secretion of feeling which obtains no vent is busy in producing a wide-spreading, morbid humor. The misery of self-suppression leaves him in a state of weak and intense irritability. Every word uttered pricks him and he is longing to be alone. When we first meet him, his words point the essential inwardness of his suffering:
“But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”
(Act I, Scene II, Lines 85-86)
When he is alone he reveals his misery more clearly:
“O, the this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His Canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.”
(Act I, Scene II, Lines 130-137)
The mood expressed by these lines is clear. To Hamlet the light has been extinguished from the things of earth. He has lost all sense of purpose. We already know one reason for Hamlet’s state, his father’s death. And another reason, we know from his soliloquy, is his mother’s second marriage. His disgust finds expression in his soliloquy:
“... within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married-O most wicked speed! To post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!”
(Act I, Scene II, Lines 153-157)
These to concrete embodiments of Hamlet’s misery are closely related. He suffers from misery at his father’s death and agony at his mother’s quick forgetfulness. Such callousness is infidelity, and so impurity, and since Claudius is the brother of the King, incest. It is reasonable to suppose that Hamlet’s state of mind, if not wholly caused by these events, is at least definitely related to them. Of his two loved parents, one has been taken forever by death; the other has been dishonored forever by her act of marriage. To Hamlet the world is now an “unweeded garden”. Hamlet hears of his father’s Ghost, sees it, and speaks to it. His original pain is intensified by knowledge of the spirit, by the terrible secrets of death hinted by the Ghost’s words:
“I could a tale unfold where lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood.”
(Act I, Scene V, Lines 15-16)
This is added to Hamlet’s sense of loss; this knowledge of the father he loved suffering in death:
“Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,”
(Act I, Scene V, Lines 10-11)
This is not all. He next learns that his father’s murderer now wears the crown, is married to his faithless mother. Both elements in his original pain are thus horribly intensified. His hope of recovery to the normal state of healthy mental life depended largely on his ability to forget his father and to forgive his mother. But forgetfulness is impossible, forgetfulness that might have brought peace. The irony of the Ghost’s parting word is terrible:
“Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me.”
(Act I, Scene V, Line 91)
Hamlet’s extreme mental agony, as in King Lear, tends towards expression in the region of the essentially cosmic. He cries out against the cruel fate that has laid on him, whose own soul is in chaos, the command of righting the evil in the state:
“... o cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set if right!”
(Act I, Scene V, Lines 196-197)
Now, Hamlet has lost all sense of life’s significance. To a man bereft of the sense of purpose there is no possibility of creative action. No act but suicide is rational. His soul is sick to death and yet there was one thing left that might have saved him. In the deserts of his mind, void with the utter vacuity of the knowledge of death-death of his father, death of his mother’s faith?was yet one flower, his love of Ophelia. The love of Ophelia is thus Hamlet’s last hope. But alas! She repulses and rejects him. Ophelia is a timid and unimaginative type of girl in Hamlet. She can’t take decision according to her own will. She is beautiful, innocent and soft-hearted girl but she fails to understand Hamlet’s nature. She obeys her father. Her child-like nature can’t bring peace in Hamlet’s mind. She is incapable not only to solve Hamlet’s problem but also to console his mind. Ophelia may be a sweet companion but has not sufficient intellectual depth. Her character is designed in this way in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
So we see that Hamlet is disappointed and thrown in the abyss of sheer hopelessness. “As a result he suffers from melancholia; and his life becomes ‘flat stale and unprofitable’. He is haunted by all the ills and wrongs of this life. He has lost all his might. To Hamlet, “Denmark’s a Prison”.
And the whole created universe appears to him in a very different aspect. A sigh rises from the depth of his spirit. He feels that all is over. He knows how strange and remote his voice would sound.
It may be thought that Hamlet is really a victim of mental disease. He hates to endure the rotten world. He not only reflects on the futility of life and uselessness of his purpose but also contemplates suicide. So it is clear to us that Hamlet’s soul is sick. He does not avenge his father’s death, not because he dare not, not because he hates the thought of bloodshed, but because his ‘Wit’s diseased’. (Act III, Scene II, Line 313) His will is snapped and useless like a broken glass. Now it becomes obvious to us that the sheer mental suffering, a sense of profound melancholy and the cancer of sadness in his mind weaken his willpower and make him indifferent, irresolute and dilatory in his action.
Hamlet is a meditative and philosophical type of man. Hamlet is by temperament inward-looking and introspective. A critic says, ‘his ruling passion is to think, not to act.’ The long course of thinking apart from action has destroyed Hamlet’s very capacity to accomplish his great mission. And that is why he hesitates and ultimately his action is delayed. Hamlet’s soliloquies express his thought that spring from the depth of his being. Hamlet’s nature and the circumstances in which he is passing his days are clearly expressed in every soliloquy of Hamlet. It seems that it is not a play; it is actually a true story of a young man who has intellectual depth and for that he is always thinking about his circumstances instead of taking revenge which is the demand of time. However, there are adequate evidences to support the view that Hamlet constantly analyzes himself and delves into his own nature to seek an explanation for this or that and gives vent to his thoughts in soliloquies. His soliloquies show more than anything else the basic contradiction in him between his desire to execute his revenge and his incapacity to do so. So far as a realization of his duty is concerned, he makes up his mind at the very outset but he is unable to carry his resolve into effect. His incapacity is expressed in his following soliloquy:
“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I.”
(Act II, Scene II, Line 544)
He scolds himself and calls “a dull and muddy-mettled rascal.” (Act II, Scene II, Line 562) And, again, he feels a great hatred for his own introspective nature for which he fails to avenge his father’s death. He says:
“That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words
And fall a cursing like a very drab,
A scullion! Fie upon’t! Foh!”
(Act II, Scene II, Lines 579-583)
In his next soliloquy, which is the most famous of all, Hamlet appears more a man of thought than a man of action. In this soliloquy we see a mental debate. Here Hamlet finds himself on the horns of dilemma:
“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.”
(Act III, Scene I, Lines 56-60)
This soliloquy, more than any other, reveals the speculative temperament of Hamlet, his irresolute and wavering mind, and his incapacity for any premeditated action of a momentous nature. This soliloquy shows further what the previous soliloquy also showed, his generalizing habit of thought. In his last soliloquy Hamlet again scolds himself for his inaction:
“How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge. What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.”
(Act IV, Scene IV, Line 32-35)
In this soliloquy Hamlet thinks that a man is no better than a beast if he is satisfied only with eating and sleeping. God has given reason to man so that he may make use of it. Hamlet asks himself what has prevented him for such a long time from carrying out his purpose of revenge. It is either his animal like forgetfulness or some cowardly hesitation. Perhaps, it is because he has been thinking “too precisely on the event” that is responsible for his procrastination. This soliloquy, again, emphasizes Hamlet’s introspective nature. His conscience keeps urging him to revenge, but a natural deficiency in him always thwarts his purpose. At this particular time he once again strengthens his resolve, saying that henceforth his thoughts would be bloody or nothing worth. But again he does nothing till he is forced into a situation which is not of his making. So his too much thinking that is his introspective nature makes him irresolute and dilatory in his action.
Hamlet’s scrupulous nature also makes him irresolute and dilatory in his action. He is always extremely careful and thorough in his action. He pays great attention to details and does not like to commit any mistake. So he is to proceed honestly and sincerely. There is always a “Cartesian Doubt” in his mind. He can not believe everything without a solid basis. He deliberately throws himself into the abyss of doubt only to search the truth.
Before the appearance of the Ghost Hamlet’s universe was ‘weary, flat and unprofitable’ and he did not know the cause of his father’s death; and so he did not feel it to take revenge upon Claudius. But when the Ghost discloses the truth that his father did not die of a serpent’s sting but was murdered by Claudius, he becomes revengeful. As he is a man of philosophical attitude, he ponders over the disclosure. He scruples to take revenge and becomes indecisive. His scrupulous nature is expressed in the following soliloquy:
“... The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.”
(Act II, Scene II, Lines 594-599)
In his above soliloquy he thinks that this spirit may have come from the hell or the heaven; it may be an evil spirit or a good spirit. In this circumstance it would be sinful to kill the king. So he thinks that he has to seek the original truth. For this he decided to stage a play from which he will be able to catch the conscience of the king:
“... I’ll have grounds
More relative than this. The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
(Act II, Scene II, Lines 599-601)
Sometimes the heavy burden of his suffering persuades him to commit suicide. But in this respect he also shows carefulness and moral scruple. He is not afraid of dying but he does not know what will happen after his death. He says:
“But that the dread of something after death
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,”
(Act III, Scene I, Lines 78-80)
Not only that. If he commits suicide he will not be able to reach his target. Moreover the religion does not approve of committing suicide. He is not a coward also. His religious consideration and his conscience make him dilatory in his action:
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”
(Act III, Scene I, Line 83)
He knows that his emotional attachment to Ophelia may affect his great mission. If he marries her, there will be a family and he has to be busy with the worldly business. But for the sake of his noble mission he is to forget marriage and Ophelia’s love. He says:
“I say we will have no more marriage. Those
that are married already-all but one-shall live;
The rest shall keep as they are.”
(Act III, Scene I, Lines 149-151)
Here we understand Hamlet’s hatred for his own marriage. He does not want to be submissive in the wave Ophelia’s love. He is now a different type of young man. The play staged by Hamlet confirms the Ghost’s story. So, now, there is no obstacle to act upon Ghost’s advice. Yet he makes a pause. He always remains careful not to harm his mother. Because he thinks that it will not be pardonable. As his mother always accompanies the king, so it becomes more or less difficult for him to accomplish his cherished design. For this he warns his mother not to accompany the king. Hamlet says:
“But go not to my uncle’s bed”
(Act III, Scene IV, Line 161)
Hamlet, again, shows his scrupulous nature when he finds a scope to kill the king at prayer. This is obviously a good opportunity to accomplish his noble mission. But no; he stops again. He does not like to send Claudius to heaven instead of giving punishment for his crime:
“A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Whey, this is hire and salary, not revenge.”
(Act III, Scene III, Lines 76-79)
So, Hamlet postpones his revenge till a more suitable opportunity comes, when the king is drunk, or in a rage, or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed, or busy doing some other evil deed. Here, again, we may interpret Hamlet’s postponement of his revenge to his moral scruple or to a natural irresoluteness of character.
It is clear that Hamlet is not in an ordinary circumstance. Hamlet’s mind is also not a normal state of mind. His hatred of woman and the thought of his father’s murder make his whole mind poisoned and thus his soliloquies are full of melancholic feelings and thought. Here, we can agree with Coleridge’s view that though Hamlet’s soliloquies are full of thought and feeling, he has less inclination to act. Delay is the ultimate result. Hazlitt’s view is that “The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility-the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action.” D. G. James says: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”. The word “conscience” here not only carries its usual meaning (which is a command to do what is right), but also means “reflection and anxious thought”. Dover Wilson comments: “Hamlet is the tragedy of a genius caught fast in the toils of circumstances and unable to get free. Shakespeare gradually unfolds to us the full horror of Hamlet’s situation, adding one load after another to the burden he has to bear until we feel that he must sink beneath it.” I would like to say that there are obviously some logical causes that make him irresolute and dilatory in his action. One of the prominent causes is that to kill a king surrounded by guards is not a simple matter. For this Hamlet is to wait till a suitable opportunity comes. It is also true that delay is simply inherent in the story. The axiom ‘No delay no play’ is ultimately incontestable.
Bibliography
1. John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet.
2. Lore to Todd, Shakespeare; Hamlet (York Notes).
3. William Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays.
4. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearian Tragedy.
5. E. Dowden, Shakespeare: His Mind and Art.
6. David Bevington (Ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet.
7. Kenneth Muir, Hamlet.
8. E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays.
9. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes.
10. E.E. Stoll, Art And Artifice in Shakespeare.
11. John Jump, Hamlet : A Selection of Critical Essays.
Written by Sanjida Moeed, Associate Professor, Department of Music, Rajshahi University, Rajshahi
Hamlet, Nature, Irresolution, Delay, Characters, Shakespeare, Mind, Art, Twentieth, Century, Tragic, Heroes, Critical, Intellectual, Sensitive, Melancholic, Introspective, Scrupulous, Irresolute, Dilatory, Action, Article
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