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Hamlet — To Be or Not to Be, the Tragedy of Hesitation

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Opening — The Ghost on the Battlements

On a cold night, the ghost of the dead king appears on the battlements of Elsinore Castle in Denmark.

The soldiers on watch freeze, and word soon reaches the young prince, Hamlet.

His father''s spirit asks one thing of his son.

He asks him to take revenge on the man who murdered him.

Read this far, Hamlet looks like a typical revenge play.

Yet the reason this work has survived for more than four hundred years lies not in how the revenge is carried out, but in how it keeps being put off.

Hamlet does not simply pick up a sword.

He thinks, doubts, questions, and blames himself.

This essay begins with Shakespeare and his age.

It then moves through the frame of the plot, the famous puzzle of the delay, the invention of interiority through soliloquy, the mixture of real and feigned madness, the play-within-a-play and the problem of appearance, the mark left on the English language, and the vast body of descendants on stage and screen.

Finally, it offers a balanced sense of how we might read or watch the play today.

One note in advance: this essay describes the whole plot, including the ending.

1. Shakespeare and His Theatre

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in central England.

He was an actor and a playwright, and also a shareholder in his theatre company.

The fact that he held all three roles matters for understanding his work.

He was not a writer who worked only at a desk, but a practitioner who always kept the actual stage and audience in mind.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage

Hamlet is thought to have been written around the year 1600.

This period straddles the end of the reign of Elizabeth the First and the beginning of the reign of James the First.

The theatre of London at the time was very different from today''s quiet indoor venues.

Audiences stood or sat according to their means, and traded loud reactions with the actors.

The Globe Theatre

Shakespeare''s company was first called the Lord Chamberlain''s Men, and after James came to the throne it became the King''s Men.

The open-air, round playhouse this company built in 1599 was the Globe Theatre.

In this roofless theatre, performances took place under natural daylight.

Because the sets were not elaborate, the job of telling the audience the time and place fell mostly to the words.

Even the fact that the battlements were cold and dark reached the audience through the actors'' speech rather than through lighting.

The Revenge-Tragedy Tradition

Hamlet was not born out of nothing.

On the English stage of the time, a genre called revenge tragedy was enjoying great popularity.

Thomas Kyd''s The Spanish Tragedy is a leading example, featuring a wrongful death, revenge for it, the appearance of a ghost, and the motif of madness.

Audiences were already familiar with this kind of structure.

Shakespeare took that familiar frame and, by placing a hero who delays his revenge at its very center, transformed the genre itself.

2. The Plot — The Ghost, the Murdered King, the Demand for Revenge

The setting of the story is the royal house of Denmark.

Before the play begins, the king has already died.

Claudius, the dead king''s brother, has taken the throne and hastily married Gertrude, his sister-in-law and Hamlet''s mother.

Prince Hamlet takes in his father''s death and his mother''s remarriage with deep grief and disillusion.

The Ghost''s Revelation

Then his father''s ghost, appearing on the battlements, tells Hamlet a shocking truth.

He did not die a natural death, but was poisoned by his own brother Claudius.

The ghost asks his son to repay this murder.

At the same time, he urges Hamlet not to punish his mother, but to leave her to the judgment of heaven.

The Delayed Revenge

Hamlet resolves on revenge, but does not act at once.

He doubts whether the ghost''s words are truly the truth, or whether it might be an evil spirit trying to deceive him.

To gain certainty, he pretends to be mad and watches the reactions of those at court.

Meanwhile this change in him unsettles his beloved Ophelia, her father Polonius, and King Claudius alike.

Toward Catastrophe

Hamlet summons a group of traveling players to stage a scene closely resembling the circumstances of his father''s murder.

When Claudius, watching this play, is shaken and leaves his seat, Hamlet becomes certain that the ghost spoke the truth.

Yet the events that follow become tangled beyond control.

While speaking with his mother, Hamlet mistakes Polonius, hidden behind a curtain, for Claudius, and stabs him to death.

Broken by her father''s death and Hamlet''s coldness, Ophelia loses her mind and finally drowns.

Laertes, Polonius''s son, returns to avenge his father and sister.

Claudius plots to use Laertes to destroy Hamlet with a poisoned blade and a poisoned cup.

In the final duel, Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup in her son''s place, and Laertes and Hamlet wound each other with the poisoned sword.

As he is dying, Hamlet at last stabs Claudius and completes his revenge for his father.

The bodies of the royal house lie piled on the stage, and the story closes as Fortinbras, the prince of Norway, arrives.

3. Hamlet''s Delay — The Central Puzzle

The oldest question surrounding Hamlet is a simple one.

Why does he not take revenge at once.

In the course of the play he is given several chances to kill Claudius, but each time he puts off acting.

This delay is not a flaw in the work but rather its core.

For centuries critics and actors have offered different answers.

The Reading of Morality and Faith

One reading holds that Hamlet fears the act of killing itself.

He is torn between the ghost''s command and his own conscience.

In the scene where he moves to kill Claudius at prayer and then stops, he himself says the reason is a theological calculation: that killing him now might send him to heaven.

Whether this calculation is sincere, or simply one more excuse, remains a matter of debate.

The Reading of Excessive Thought

Another reading sees Hamlet as a man who thinks too much.

He tries to reason everything through to the end, and in the meantime the moment for action passes.

Romantic critics of the nineteenth century were especially fond of this view.

They portrayed Hamlet as a figure whose will is crushed by reflection, an intellectual paralyzed by the weight of thought.

The Psychological Reading

In the twentieth century, attempts appeared to explain this delay in the language of psychology.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, a reading that ties Hamlet''s hesitation to his relationship with his mother and to repressed feeling became widespread.

Such a reading is less a single correct answer than an example of how many readings this work allows.

What It Means to Have No Single Answer

The important point is that no one of these is the only correct answer.

Shakespeare does not fully explain the inside of Hamlet''s mind.

It is precisely that empty space that lets a new actor and a new reader in every generation discover a Hamlet of their own.

4. Soliloquy and the Invention of Interiority

One reason Hamlet is special is the soliloquy.

A soliloquy is a speech in which a character, left alone on stage, speaks his inner thoughts as if to himself.

At such moments the audience feels as if it is looking directly into the character''s mind.

To Be or Not to Be

The most famous soliloquy is the passage that weighs being against not being.

Its opening words in the English original are widely known and are often rendered as a choice between living and dying.

In this soliloquy Hamlet quietly weighs whether to go on living, or to end the suffering of life.

He compares death to sleep, and says that people endure life because they cannot know what dreams may come in that sleep.

The speech reaches beyond one character''s story and touches a question anyone who is human must face.

Interiority as a New Stage

Soliloquies existed before Shakespeare too.

But Hamlet''s soliloquies go beyond simply conveying information or explaining a plan.

They show the process of thought actually moving, wavering, and arguing with itself.

For this reason many regard Hamlet as a starting point for the modern self, the individual who observes and doubts himself.

At the moment the inner life becomes a stage of its own, literature gained a new depth.

5. Real and Feigned Madness — Hamlet and Ophelia

Madness is another thread running through the work.

Interestingly, Shakespeare shows two kinds of madness side by side.

Hamlet''s Feigned Madness

Hamlet decides to pretend to be mad.

Through this disguise he tries to avoid the court''s surveillance and to sound out people''s true feelings.

His words often seem to make no sense, yet within them lie sharp satire and truth.

One character remarks that there is method in his madness, hinting that his madness is not complete confusion.

Still, it is not clear exactly where the line between playacting and reality lies.

In his extreme grief and anger, the audience keeps asking whether Hamlet may not really be breaking down to some degree.

Ophelia''s Real Madness

Ophelia''s case is different.

She is placed in the position of being seemingly abandoned by the man she loves, and then suffers the shock of her father Polonius dying at that same man''s hand.

Every man around her only tells her what to do and does not listen to her voice.

Amid these layered losses, Ophelia''s mind truly breaks.

She wanders singing and handing out flowers, and in the end loses her life by the water.

Placing the two characters'' madness side by side, the feigned and the real reflect each other and deepen the sorrow of the work.

6. The Play-within-a-Play and Appearance versus Reality

Hamlet is a world where what appears on the surface differs from what is real.

Claudius plays the gracious king but is in truth the man who killed his brother.

Hamlet plays the madman but in truth grasps the situation more clearly than anyone.

The court is full of the language of courtesy and friendship, yet beneath it run surveillance and betrayal.

The Play Called the Mousetrap

This problem of appearance and truth reaches its peak in the play-within-a-play.

Hamlet has the traveling players stage a play, and gives it the nickname the Mousetrap.

This play tells of a man who poisons his brother and takes his wife, a structure almost identical to Claudius''s crime.

Hamlet''s intent is clear.

He means to read the evidence of guilt in Claudius''s face as the king watches the scene on stage.

Catching the Truth Through a Play

The plan succeeds.

At the moment the murder scene is reenacted, Claudius is shaken, rises, and leaves.

Hamlet takes this reaction as proof that the ghost spoke the truth.

An interesting paradox arises here.

The play, which is a fiction, becomes the very tool that reveals a real crime.

Speaking of theatre inside the theatre, Shakespeare reflects on how art can hold a mirror to the truth.

7. Shakespeare''s Language and Its Mark on English

When speaking of Hamlet, language cannot be left out.

Most of Shakespeare''s lines are written in a meter called blank verse.

Blank verse is a poetic form that keeps a steady rhythm of stressed and unstressed beats without rhyming at the line ends.

This rhythm stays close to natural speech while lending it a dignity above prose.

Expressions That Became Everyday

Shakespeare is famous for coining new expressions or spreading them widely.

Many idioms that English speakers use without a second thought today are thought to come from Hamlet and his other works.

Of course he did not invent every word on his own.

But because his plays were read and performed so widely, many phrases seeped into everyday language.

It is rare for a single playwright to leave such a mark on the vocabulary and expressions of a language.

Hamlet in Translation

When the play is carried into languages whose structure differs from English, such as Korean or Japanese, it is hard to preserve this meter directly.

The translator must always choose whether to give up the rhythm and keep the meaning, or to create a poetic resonance in some other way.

So the same line can leave quite a different impression from one translation to another.

Reading several translations side by side is itself one way to enjoy the work.

8. A Vast Afterlife on Stage and Screen

Hamlet is perhaps the most frequently performed play in the world.

Over more than four centuries, countless actors have taken on this role.

Playing Hamlet has long been regarded as a kind of touchstone for an actor.

Many Hamlets on Stage

The Hamlet on stage differed from age to age.

One age preferred an elegant, contemplative prince, while another portrayed a young man full of anger and unease.

Depending on the actor''s age, the director''s interpretation, and the mood of the times, the same lines sound entirely different.

There have long been instances of women playing Hamlet as well.

Hamlet on Screen

Since the twentieth century, Hamlet has also been carried to film several times.

From classic black-and-white films, to adaptations that move the court to a modern city, to full-length versions that keep the whole original, the approaches vary widely.

Such screen works serve as a good entry point for audiences who cannot easily attend the stage.

A Story Retold

Hamlet''s influence does not stop at direct performance.

The frame of this story, the delaying avenger and the court whose surface differs from its depths, has seeped into countless later novels, films, and dramas.

There are works that retell the story from the viewpoint of a minor character, and there are cases that reinterpret this tragedy, surprisingly, as a bright story.

The very fact that one play has produced so many descendants is proof of its power.

9. How to Read or Watch Hamlet Today

Hamlet is a long play written in the language of four hundred years ago.

We should honestly admit that it can be daunting for someone meeting it for the first time.

But knowing a few approaches can bring it much closer.

Starting Without Pressure

First, it is fine not to strain to understand every line perfectly.

Shakespeare''s language contains much old speech that is unfamiliar even to native speakers.

Simply following the main line and feeling the flow of emotion is already a good start.

An annotated edition or a modern-language parallel text is a great help in this process.

Watching Rather Than Reading

Second, a play was written not to be read but to be performed.

If possible, seeing a good performance or film first helps with understanding.

Heard through the actors'' voices and gestures, lines that were hard on the page suddenly come alive.

A Balanced View

Third, there is no need to worship the work only as a flawless masterpiece.

Some scenes may feel long or strange by today''s standards.

There are also passages, such as the situation of the female characters, that reveal the limits of the age.

When we look at it in a balanced way, including those parts, the work becomes not a museum relic but a living conversation partner.

The diagram below lays out, in simple form, the web of revenge that drives this tragedy.

                   Dead old king (Ghost)
                          │
                  demands "take revenge"
                          │
                          ▼
     Claudius   ◀──target of revenge──   Hamlet
 (poisoned the                             │
  old king, took                           │ (kills by mistake)
  throne and queen)                        ▼
      │                              Polonius
      │                             /         \
  (strikes back           Ophelia            Laertes
   through Laertes)      (abandoned,        (returns to avenge
      │                   goes mad, dies)    father and sister)
      └──────────────────────┴──────────────────┘
                     the fatal duel

Closing — The Rest Is Silence

Hamlet wears the clothes of a revenge play, but within it lie far larger questions.

On what grounds should we act.

When we have no certainty, is stepping forward courage, or is it recklessness.

In the face of death, what meaning does life hold.

Hamlet gives no tidy answers to these questions.

He hesitates, and in that hesitation he loses much.

Yet it is precisely because of that imperfection that he resembles us.

The dying Hamlet''s last words are that what comes after is silence.

Behind that silence, for more than four hundred years, audiences have called this prince back in their own ways.

Perhaps that is the way this tragedy has, in the end, won.

Questions to Ponder

  1. How do you understand Hamlet''s delay. Is it caution, weakness, or something in between.

  2. Are there times when putting off a major action while lacking certainty is the right choice. If so, in what cases.

  3. When you compare Hamlet''s feigned madness with Ophelia''s real madness, what does the difference in their situations tell you.

  4. A story structure in which appearance and truth come apart is often seen in today''s stories too. What examples can you call to mind.

References

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