Hamlet's Reluctance To Revenge Essay

Alberto Mejia

Hamlet’s Reluctance to Revenge

I feel boggled by Hamlet’s reluctance to revenge? In Act one Hamlet swears he will not rest until the murder of his father has been revenged; in truth he seems sincere, engulfed by a tormenting need to fulfill the wishes of a his father’s restless soul. Everything I know of Hamlet, his intelligence, his courage, a rationing that borders insanity, leads me to believe this is one enterprise the young Hamlet will take seriously, a revenge to be carried out swiftly, nontheless this isn’t the case. Act Two renders a Hamlet hindered incapable of acting, and in Act Three Hamlet’s inability is portrayed under an even clearer light when he has a clear opportunity to take his uncle’s life and doesn’t,
It’s as if Hamlet is scared to carry out the former, as if he is crazy and delusional, yet things couldn’t be any more different; Hamlet is brilliant and sane, another reason why his inability to fulfill a revenge that is burdening his soul to lament-full extremes even more out of context. Even his uncle, oblivious of Hamlet’s knowledge, is quick to catalog Hamlet as “dangerous,” I’d even say crazy. And then, in Act Three Scene Four, as Hamlet speaks to the Ghost, his mother, whom sees nothing, is made believe that her son is mad. Hamlet on the other hand feels differently. He asks his father’s ghost, “Do you not come your tardy son to chide, / that, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by, / The important acting of your dread command?” Clearly Hamlet too feels the anguish of his inability to act. He is driven mad by the "lapse in time"; having had an opportunity to kill the King and having passed it up. This Hamlet, while to my eyes anything but demented, is sickeningly unable to do what he’s set out to do. He is bothered by the dark secret that burdens him but he is nontheless completely sane and nothing short of brilliant in his actions. He is constantly studying, writing, reading, and always-portraying behavior
Not to say he’s clear-minded, as he arguably delusional, but brilliant he is nontheless; this in itself another reason to render incongruent his inability to act. Compared to the other characters Hamlet is incalculably brilliant; next to him Polonius even seam’s comical, his peon-like behavior funny yet pitiful, his death even more. The same can be said of Claudius. Hamlet is clearly and uniquely more audacious and wittier than the other characters of the play, something that makes the fact that Hamlet doesn’t follow through with the promise he makes to himself and to his father a truly incongruent aspect of his persona. In everything else Hamlet does he excels while his peers fail, yet Hamlet is utterly impotent when fate knocks on his door, something that while intriguing I truly see as an absurd facet of the