Hamlet Lack Of Action Essay

Hamlet is regarded as one of the great Shakespearean tragedies. Many scholars believe that the chaos and suffering is caused by none other than the main character Hamlet’s lack of action. Although there are many theories as to what the main reason for this lack of action is, the overall reason is quite clear within the play. All of Hamlet’s indecisiveness is due to his overthought and over analysis of simple situations, leading to him wasting perfectly good opportunities to enact his revenge plot. While many individual moments in the play may be due to other reasons, all of his inaction in some way or another is because his overthinking.
A prime situational example of this over thought is when Hamlet has the perfect opportunity to kill the king. The king is kneeling down, defenseless, completely open to an attack from Hamlet. Although Hamlet is able to go in for the kill, but decides that he should not due to Claudius being mid-prayer. Had he made a quicker move and not spent time monologuing about the consequences of his actions, he would have been able to make a move and finish his …show more content…
This issue of his leads to the suffering of others around him and just leads to more and more deaths. Had he taken definitive action earlier in the play, many people would not have had to die and the end result of the king dying would have remained the same. Of course in hindsight any actions may seem incorrect, however even in the moment he should have been able to decide. It was not until he was forced into a life or death duel that Hamlet had to make a choice, and at that point it was too late for everything to end well. He had to be forced into an opportunity where he had to make a quick decision until he actually took action. Had he not been forced into that situation, it is possible Claudius would never had died. Hamlet needed to lose all thought in order to