Rough Draft Of Hamlet

Christopher Boggess
ENGL 202 Intro to English Studies II
Professor Samuel Smith
Draft Pages incorporating sources
28 March 2013
Motivations of an Avenger and Procrastinator
Now is his chance. His prey stands directly in front of him, completely vulnerable. The prey who has killed the hunter’s father and married his mother is finally unguarded with the hunter waiting in the wings. The killer has a perfect opportunity to enact revenge on the man who tore his family apart, but he hesitates. He cannot bring himself to murder a guilty man and claim the throne that is rightfully his. For centuries, scholars have debated what could have caused this moment of hesitation in Hamlet against his uncle, Claudius. Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst of the late 19th and early 20th century, suggested in The Interpretation of
Dreams that William Shakespeare’s marvelous character, Hamlet, suffered from what Freud named “Oedipus Complex,” a disorder in which a male holds an incestuous desire for his mother and therefore resents his father. Freud believed that “Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father’s place with his mother—the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood”
(163-164). At the moment when Hamlet could have taken revenge against Claudius, Freud believed that Hamlet’s repressed childhood desires resurfaced. This causes Hamlet to hesitate— how could he kill someone who has done the same thing that Hamlet subconsciously wishes to do? While Freud’s hypothesis initially found popular support and influenced some of his followers, Hamlet’s hesitation in Act 3 scene 3 and his actions and motivations throughout
Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be attributed to something more verifiable than Freud’s “Oedipus

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Complex” theory, for Freud’s speculations about the subconscious mind cannot be proven or disproven. By analyzing Hamlet’s words and actions, we can prove that Hamlet’s motivations comes from a deep love and reverence for his father and a desire to uphold his father’s reputation. From Hamlet’s first moments upon the stage, he shows true allegiance to his father.
Although King Hamlet died less than two months prior to the start of the play, Hamlet is the only one who still mourns for the beloved king. Meanwhile, Hamlet’s mother has remarried to
Hamlet’s uncle. During a time when the country should mourn for its fallen ruler, they celebrate a new marriage and king. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy, he shows his dismay regarding this ironic situation: “But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two – / So excellent a king, that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother…” (Ham 1.2.138-140). Hamlet showers praise on his father. He compares his father to Hyperion, “a summit of god-like perfections, beauty, and wisdom combined,” whereas Claudius is a satyr, a “hairy, horned, and lustful, a bestial creature of mere appetite” (Kahn 135). He cannot understand how his mother could have chosen Claudius so soon after King Hamlet’s death, especially since he treated her so well, not even “beteem[ing] the winds of heaven / Visit[ing] her face too roughly” (Ham 1.2.141-142). Before any knowledge of Claudius’s crime, Hamlet expresses partiality towards his father and a repulsion towards his uncle. Is this such a surprise? King Hamlet died less than two months before the events of
Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet would obviously still mourn for his father, and would be upset that no one else joins him in mourning for this great king. Furthermore, his mother—possibly the person who could relate to Hamlet the best in this situation—has already moved on to another man—the king’s brother. Hamlet’s frustration and rage towards these events comes as no

Boggess3 surprise. In fact, it would be more shocking if Hamlet was not upset about the situation in which he finds himself.
Ultimately, Hamlet decides that it must be a fault in Gertrude rather than King Hamlet, exclaiming, “frailty, thy name is woman” (Ham 1.2.146)! Gertrude has let her son down. Instead of comforting her mourning child, she neglects him in order to remarry Claudius one month later. She has fallen from a garden that was well-tended by King Hamlet to an “unweeded” garden that Claudius now rules over (Adelman 17). She should be the one person who still offers comfort and support to Hamlet during this difficult period of grief for him. She unfortunately provides no help though. And when he appears in King Claudius’s court wearing all black, she commands of him:
Do not for ever with thy vailèd lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity. (Ham 1.2.70-73)
Common advice regarding grief around Shakespeare’s time typically addressed the mortality of all humans and the uselessness of grieving forever (Young 82), Gertrude exaggerates by telling
Hamlet not to mourn forever. Furthermore, the context that she gives this lecture hardly seems appropriate. In front of Claudius’s court, She tells him to “cast thy nighted color off”(Ham
1.2.68). Perhaps Hamlet would receive her advice had it been a private conversation. Then,
Claudius voices his opinion. After reiterating Gertrude’s advice about the mortality of all people,
Claudius asks Hamlet to “throw to earth / this unprevailing woe, and think of us / as of a father”
(Ham 1.2.106-107). While Hamlet tries to give remembrance to his father, Claudius tells him to stop his useless grief, forget Old Hamlet, and think of Claudius as his new father. Surely, this

Boggess4 would convince Hamlet to adjust his perspective and actions. No, of course not. This kind of language directed at a grief-stricken son would only cause resentment. Claudius could never truly replace Old Hamlet’s place in Hamlet’s heart. It is no wonder then that Hamlet degrades his uncle shortly afterwards, claiming that Claudius is “no more like my father / than I to Hercules”
(Ham 1.2.152-153). Instead of forgetting his father, Hamlet spends time ruminating about how great his father was, especially when compared to Claudius.
When the Ghost finally does come to speak with Hamlet, Hamlet is more than willing to listen to the accusations against Claudius. The Ghost refers to Claudius as “that incestuous, that adulterate beast” (Ham 1.5.41), showing that Claudius has not only taken his sister-in-law as a wife, but he initiated this process while Gertrude was still married to Hamlet (Kahn 133). Hamlet realizes that “a mighty wrong has been done to a noble king; as he is noble, so must his anger and his cause be great” (Kahn 133). Knowing what has been done to his father (cuckoldry, murder, and an usurpation of the throne), Hamlet must defend Old Hamlet’s honor, “but insofar as part of that wrong is cuckoldry, his nobility is diminished, his anger impotent, and his cause an embarrassment” (Kahn 133). This knowledge disrupts Hamlet’s idealized vision of his father as superior to Claudius, for Gertrude chose to marry Claudius rather than to mourn King Hamlet, and the Ghost implies that Gertrude may have committed adultery with Claudius. Maybe King
Hamlet was not as glorious as Hamlet had thought. But Hamlet cannot allow that image to be tainted; he must defend his father’s memory. Taking the Ghost’s last commandment, “Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me” (Ham 1.5.91), to heart, Hamlet repeats the commandment three times, promising that “thy commandment all alone shall live / within the book and volume of my brain” (Ham 1.5.102-103).

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Despite this pledge, Hamlet procrastinates the revenge of his father for another four acts.
Why does Hamlet not confront Claudius immediately if he believes the Ghost’s tale? After all, when questioned by Horatio directly following the encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet does claim that “it is an honest ghost” (Ham 1.5.138). First, remember that Hamlet is the only one other than
Claudius and perhaps Gertrude with an awareness of Claudius’s guilt. Therefore, an attack on
Claudius might allow Hamlet to enact revenge, but it would also be a death sentence and damnation for Hamlet. Hamlet has no physical proof of Claudius’s crime, and Hamlet is not likely to get many opportunities alone with a king who usually has multiple guards around him
(Reed 179). He must wait until he has indisputable proof of the king’s guilt before he can make a public accusation or execution.
Furthermore, Hamlet does not fully believe the Ghost tells the truth. Indeed, Hamlet does state that he believes that the Ghost was honest with him, but, in context, Hamlet had just endured an undoubtedly emotional and stressful conversation when he says that. Whenever
Hamlet leaves the Ghost’s presence and begins to reclaim his thoughts and relax again, we can assume that Hamlet would slip back into the predominant “Protestant attitude, which denied the reality of ghosts” (Reed 180). Observing the events before Hamlet leaves to talk with the Ghost,
Horatio asks:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it. (Ham 1.4.69-74)

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Horatio believes that this ghost is not a benign ghost, let alone Hamlet’s father. Instead, he sees it as an evil spirit that only wishes to harm Hamlet. This belief aligns with the typical beliefs about ghosts during Shakespeare’s day: “Spirits, according to both Catholics and Protestants, were more likely to be evil spirits than the purgatorial or heavenly beings they claimed to be” (Spinrad
459). Hamlet agrees, contemplating that the Ghost “may be a devil” who “out of my weakness and my melancholy, / as he is very potent with such spirits, / abuses me to damn me” (Ham
2.2.586, 588-590). We can see that Hamlet does not fully trust the Ghost which further explains why he has not acted on the information given to him. But he has not forgotten his father. He hatches a plan to validate the Ghost’s words; using the players that have arrived in Denmark,
Hamlet writes a piece that would produce a reaction from Claudius if he indeed has murdered
King Hamlet.
The “Mouse trap” succeeds in producing an emotion in Claudius, enough proof for
Hamlet to proceed with his own revenge plot. We now arrive at Hamlet’s perfect opportunity to avenge his father’s death. There should be nothing holding him back from unleashing all of the rage that has built up inside him. Why does Hamlet stop himself? As stated previously, Freud believed that Hamlet realizes that he wishes to have done what Claudius actually did, making
Hamlet a hypocrite if he kills Claudius (163-164). However, the text proves otherwise. Looking over a vulnerable, praying Claudius, Hamlet nearly enacts revenge, but upon consideration of the circumstances, asks:
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
‘Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?

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No! (Ham 3.3.83-87)
With a clear insight to Hamlet’s thought process, we see that his hesitation here results from an assumption that Claudius would go to heaven if he died at that moment, whereas Claudius killed
King Hamlet at a moment of weakness and sin. Hamlet does not see this as just; he would rather catch Claudius in a moment of unpreparedness and “then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, / and that his soul may be as damned and black / as hell, whereto it goes” (Ham 3.3.9395). Hamlet has no Oedipus Complex here. Rather, he hesitates because of a loyalty to his father; he sees it unfit that Claudius should enter heaven when King Hamlet cannot. Reverting back to
Hamlet’s initial grief, Hamlet considers Claudius “no more like my father / than I to Hercules”
(Ham 1.2.152-153). Even when Hamlet hesitates, it originates from a deep loyalty and desire to honor his father.
Hamlet’s hesitation does not mean that Hamlet is not angry about what Claudius has done though. In fact, Hamlet is furious. Soon after discovering the truth about his father’s death,
Hamlet claims that he could “drink hot blood / and do such bitter business as the day / would quake to look on” (Ham 3.2.373-375). Hamlet then channels this rage towards his mother, who has been ignorant of Claudius’s crimes up until this point.. In a plan to confront Gertrude,
Hamlet resolves to “be cruel, not unnatural. / I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (Ham
3.2.378-379). He wants to expose Claudius’s true character to Gertrude, hoping to shame her for her choice of a husband. When Hamlet confronts Gertrude about Claudius, he eventually reveals the truth about Claudius, calling him a “murderer and a villain” (Ham 3.4.97), but he continually berates Gertrude for forgetting Old Hamlet and marrying Claudius. Again, Hamlet compares his father to Hyperion (Ham 3.4.56) and Claudius to a “mildewed ear, / blasting his wholesome brother” (Ham 3.4.64-65). Hamlet talks of his father throughout this conversation with

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Gertrude—a memory that encourages him to expose Claudius for the murderous, adulterer that he truly is.
In the middle of this confrontation, Hamlet discovers that someone has been spying on them. He rips his sword out of its sheathe, exclaiming, “How now! A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead” (Ham 3.4.23)! He kills Polonius in one thrust. Hamlet shows himself here to be more than just a man of thought and contemplation. He is also a man of action, killing a spy without any questions. Although this may seem strikingly different from the man just one scene prior, Hamlet does have a logical reason for his actions. Polonius surprised Hamlet which caused a jerk reaction, whereas Hamlet had ample time to consider his actions as he snuck up behind Claudius earlier. Hamlet also saw Claudius in the midst of cleansing himself of his sins, but he caught
Polonius in a treacherous act. As Hamlet identified before, he has no qualms about killing a sinful person. Furthermore, Hamlet has already expressed the dangerous things he could do that night. So, it is no surprise that Hamlet—in the middle of a heated discussion with Gertrude— would act rashly when he discovers someone has spied on their conversation. His first action after killing Polonius is to ask if he has killed Claudius (Ham,3.4.26). After all, who else would likely be in the queen’s closet other than the king? Hamlet’s slaying of Polonius is not a drastic disconnect from Hamlet’s character, but rather a culmination of Hamlet’s character up until this point. He has gone from a man deeply saddened by his father’s death, to an investigator of a murder, and now to an avenger out to strike down his father’s killer.
Just as the argument between Hamlet and Gertrude reaches its peak, the Ghost presents itself to Hamlet for the second time. Shakespeare’s use of the Ghost here seems much more peculiar than the first manifestation of the Ghost. When the Ghost first appears in Hamlet, it can be seen and heard by multiple people and has a clear purpose: to tell Hamlet about how his father

Boggess9 truly died. In this case, the Ghost only appears to Hamlet and comes at an inconvenient time when it did not help Hamlet enact revenge, protect himself, or convince Gertrude of Claudius’s guilt (Spinrad 470). Instead, Gertrude just thinks that Hamlet has truly gone insane. However, I believe the ghost does serve a purpose by appearing here. When the Ghost first spoke to Hamlet at the beginning of the play, it asks that Hamlet “taint not they mind, nor let thy soul contrive / against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven…” (Ham 1.5.85-86). When the Ghost appears for the second time, Hamlet has been berating his mother for being with the murderous Claudius.
The Ghost then tells Hamlet: “do not forget. This visitation / is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” (Ham 3.4.109-110). Whether the Ghost is only a figment of Hamlet’s imagination or not, it tries to convert Hamlet’s behavior from chastising to comforting. The Ghost’s manifestation turns Hamlet’s attention away from Gertrude’s sins and back onto the true tyrant:
Claudius.
Hamlet supposedly has his path set for seeking revenge against Claudius. However, we soon find Hamlet criticizing himself for procrastinating once more a few scenes later. Hamlet talks with a Captain of Fortinbras’s army who informs him that Fortinbras’s army will soon battle the Polish army for a seemingly worthless piece of land (Ham 4.4.17-22). Amazed by the army’s fight over nothing, Hamlet comments, “how stand I then, / that have a father killed, a mother stained— / excitements of my reason and my blood— / and let all sleep…” (Ham 4.4.5659). Hamlet, a man with every incentive to action, cannot actually perform the action required of him. So he chastises himself for his delay. This is a recurring pattern in Hamlet’s life—a similar example of self-criticism appears earlier in the play as well. After watching the First Player act out a part, Hamlet calls himself:
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak

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Like John-a-dreams, upregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing—no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward? (Ham 2.2.551-555)
While this actor can conjure up emotion about a part, Hamlet disparages himself for not passionately following the cause of avenging his father. He had been busy with the players arriving in Denmark, and he had procrastinated on looking further into what the Ghost had claimed about Claudius and Old Hamlet. Hamlet’s self-criticism comes from a “potent sense of guilt” (Reed 185). Hamlet then resolves to set up a play that will test Claudius’s conscience.
Similarly, Hamlet criticizes himself after talking with the Captain of Fortinbras’s army and realizing that he has still not accomplished the task of revenge set before him. He then resolves that “from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth” (Ham 4.4.65-66)!
Although Hamlet does have some distractions from his revenge cause after this statement, he no longer has long soliloquies when he contemplates how he has procrastinated. He now focuses more on enacting revenge.
Hamlet surely takes a long time to make some decisions, and even longer to act on those decisions. He contradicts himself, makes decisions, and does things rashly occasionally.
Shakespeare created a complicated and unique character that was, above all, a loyal son to his father. When he steps on stage dressed in mournful, black attire, he expresses a deep love and respect for King Hamlet. When the Ghost commands him to remember and revenge, Hamlet vows to clear everything else from his mind. When he stabs Claudius and ends his life, Hamlet reminds the “incestuous, murd’rous, damnèd Dane” of his crimes (Ham 5.2.311). From beginning to end, Hamlet remained loyal to his father.

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Works Cited
Adelman, Janet. "Man and Wife Is One Flesh: Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal
Body." Suffocating mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare 's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. 11-37. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Print.
Kahn, Copp lia. ""The Savage Yoke": Cuckoldry and Marriage." Man 's Estate: Masculine
Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. 132-140. Print.
Reed, Robert R., Jr. "Hamlet, The Pseudo-Procrastinator." Shakespeare Quarterly 9.2 (1958):
177-186. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 4 Mar. 2013.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Print.
Spinrad, Phoebe S. "The Fall Of The Sparrow And The Map Of Hamlet 's Mind." Modern
Philology: A Journal Devoted To Research In Medieval And Modern Literature 102.4
(2005): 453-477. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 18 Feb. 2013.
Young, Bruce Wilson. "Family Life in Shakespeare 's Works." Family Life in the Age of
Shakespeare. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009. 69-100. Print.

Bibliography: Web. 18 Feb. 2013. Young, Bruce Wilson. "Family Life in Shakespeare 's Works." Family Life in the Age of Shakespeare. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009. 69-100. Print.