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.