Hamlet’s Delay:

Hamlet’s delay has been an issue of endless controversy. Hamlet’s

soliloquies lend first true insight his contemplative nature and illustrate
the problem of his procrastination. John Holloway says:

“Hamlet’s soliloquies are foremost in bringing the idea of his delay to

our notice.”

Throughout reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is an underlying

question at hand that has plagued the minds of many scholars that
what took Hamlet so long to carry out the orders of his noble father
who contacted him beyond the grave.

Regarding this question a number of theories have been advanced. Of

course there are the critics like T.S.Eliot which refuse to take any notice
of it. According to them it is certainly an artistic flaw. If Hamlet would
have killed Claudius the play would have ended somewhere in Act-II. So
Shakespeare was forced to delay the revenge. Still there are some other
critics that argue that there was no delay at all on Hamlet’s part and
everything that he does is deliberate and calculated. These are of
course the extreme views. Shakespeare makes it clear to us that Hamlet
does delay and he is acutely aware of it.

The question of Hamlet’s delay has haunted the critics for about four
centuries. Whereas the critics like Werder and Campbell have held
Hamlet’s external circumstances responsible for his delay the majority
of Shakespearean scholarship including Goethe, Schlegal, Coleridge and
Bradley hold Hamlet himself responsible for his delay.

In Act-I the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to him and reveals the
secret of his vile murder. It further imposes upon him the duty of
avenging his “foul and the most unnatural murder.” The ghost’s
injunctions are very clear:

“Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned
incest”.

Hamlet’s mind is assailed with doubt whether or not this apparition is a

demon sent from hell, or if it is truly his father’s spirit which has come
from purgatory, to divulge the horrors of his murder, in the hope of
revenge:

“The spirit that I have seen/ May be the devil and the devil hath
power/To assume a pleasing shape.”

To verify the truth of the ghost’s statement, Hamlet first feigns

madness, and then gets enacted mousetrap play to “catch the
conscience of the king”. After the Players’ scene Claudius’ guilt is
confirmed but Hamlet finds him at prayer, confessing his sins:

“O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven/It hath primal eldest curse

upon it/A brother’s murder.”

It is golden opportunity for Hamlet to accomplish the revenge. He pulls

out his rapier but his scholarly nature intervenes and he starts
contemplating:

“Now might I do it pat now he is praying/And now I’ll do it and so he

goes to heaven/I so am I revenged!”

Many critics including Goethe have criticized Hamlet for delaying the
revenge at this point. Goethe argued that the ghost’s injunctions
comprised an unquestionable imperative to action:“A voice from
another world commissioned it would appear, by heaven demands
vengeance for monstrous enormity.”

Goethe further proposed what is called the sentimental view of Hamlet

that Shakespeare meant in Hamlet to “represent the effects of a great
action laid upon a soul unfit for performance of it.” In other words, “A
lovely, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve
which forms hero, sinks beneath a burden which he cannot bear and
must not cast away.”

Goethe suggests that “Hamlet is called upon to do what is impossible,

not impossible in itself but impossible to him. And as he turns and
winds and torments himself still advancing and retreating, ever
reminded and remembering his purpose; he almost loses sight of it
completely without recovering his happiness.”

Goethe’s Hamlet is weighed down to inaction due to the sensitive soul

of a poet as he reveals his disgust in the rhymed couplet: “The time is
out of joint, O cursed spite/That I was born to set it right.”

According to Goethe the key to the entire Hamlet’s problem could be

found in these lines. Hamlet the soldier son of a warlike father scoffs
himself for his delay in wreaking vengeance: “I, the son of a dear father
murdered/Prompted to my revenge heaven and hell/Must like a whore
unpack my heart with words.”

Goethe’s sentimental picture of Hamlet as “a graceful youth, sweet and

sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations, shrinking
from the touch of anything gross and earthly”, is outdated and certainly
not fit for a hero of Hamlet’s stature.

In 19th century Schlegal and Coleridge proposed that Hamlet is

rendered incapable of action because of his tendency to philosophize
too much. Taking the cue from his own words, they proposed that
Hamlet’s “native hue of resolution /Is sicklied over with the pale cast of
thought.” According to Coleridge Hamlet had “great enormous
intellectual activity and a consequent proportionate aversion to real
action.” Hamlet’s excessive reflectiveness inhibits his action and he
“loses himself in labyrinth of thought.”

The conscience theory of Ulrici suggests that Hamlet is incapable of

wreaking vengeance because of his scrupulous nature as supported by
Hamlet’s own statement, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us
all.” But the conscience theory was effectively refuted by Bradely.

In the start of 20th century A.C.Bradley in his famous “Shakespearean

Tragedy” suggested that Hamlet was unable to accomplish the revenge
because of his melancholic state of mind, which was sparked by the
exceptional strain that faced him with the sudden death of his father
and hasty remarriage of his mother. When the ghost gives him charge to
set the disjointed times he is already deep in his melancholy and
therefore cannot respond with normal vigour. For Bradley this “disgust
at life which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing for death,
sinking often into weary apathy” explains the problem of Hamlet’s
delay.

Summing up, the issue of Hamlet’s delay has provided critics with the
food of conjecture and everyone has given his own interpretation of
this problem.