Procrastination And Delay In Hamlet

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the troubled prince has a major flaw, which is his inability to deal with tasks at the proper opportunity. Throughout the play, Hamlet frequently delays opportunities he has to kill Claudius, the king of Denmark. Hamlet has several personal characteristic traits which lead to this flaw of procrastination and delay. During the play, Hamlet is commonly distracted by his own antic disposition and through this, is very rarely able to carry on a conversation or make decisions. Hamlet also shows a great deal of disrespect and unwillingness to listen to authority, regardless of whether or not he likes the person. For Hamlet, delay is also a problem, because he is only able to act on pure impulse and cannot plan complex acts such as killing a king. Finally, Hamlet’s self-centered attitude gets in the way of his ability to restore order and kill Claudius.

The first issue for Hamlet, when it comes to the matter of his delay, is the antic disposition which he showcases throughout the play. The display …show more content…
The only reason Hamlet desires to kill the king is because of how Claudius affected his own personal life by killing Hamlet’s father. The fact that Hamlet is acting in his own self-interest means that the act does not occur out of desperation. If Hamlet had cared about the nation as a whole, he would have wanted to act at a much faster pace in order to make things better for Denmark. Obviously, as Claudius took power, a wave of disorder swept over the kingdom of Denmark and the nation as a whole. If Hamlet had looked around and realized that his killing of Claudius was necessary to save Denmark, he would have acted more quickly. Hamlet never understood as Kenneth Burke puts it “the heroic is normally destroyed in the conflict, and the human situation goes on surviving” (Burke, 110). However, Hamlet was too caught up in Claudius’ murder of his father to care about