To have a father killed, a mother stained, I should have fattened all the region kites In these, there is a continuous reiteration of self-disgust on Hamlet’s part at his tardiness as an avenger: The soliloquies, however, make up for any lack of emphasis on delay in the action of the play. The second passage is the one where the Ghost endorses Hamlet’s own suggestion that he has come his ‘tardy son to chide’ by telling him that he has come to whet his ‘almost blunted purpose’ (III, iv, 111). In the first, we see him turn down a genuine opportunity to kill Claudius when the latter is at prayer (‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying / And now I’ll do it, and so he goes to heaven… III, iii, 73). But, they suggest, apart from the soliloquies, the idea that Hamlet delays can be traced to only two passages.

This is one extreme position.īy contrast, we have the line of argument that it is meaningless to see a delay in a fiction such as Hamlet merely because something that requires doing is not done at once naturally it will be done at the end – it is a play after all! Those who take this point of view argue that we are entitled to stress delay in Hamlet only if the play underlines procrastination.

There are, for example, those who argue that Hamlet never does get around to taking any practical, deliberate measures to carry out the Ghost’s command, that his delay never ends, that when he does finally slay Claudius he does so almost inadvertently, at the end of a fencing-match not arranged by him but by Claudius – that the act of vengeance, in other words, has to be forced upon him or it would never be performed. We are dealing here with a play and a character which provoke the most contradictory responses from critics.

The problem of Hamlet’s delay in killing Claudius is usually considered in relation to his character and circumstances.

Warroom closet scene