By many accounts, William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Hamlet is a revenge play. The narrative’s central tension surrounds Prince Hamlet’s quest to avenge his late father’s death at the hands of his own brother, now King Claudius. However, the fact that no revenge is taken until the very end of the play makes one wonder about Hamlet’s true motivations. His hesitancy to act points toward his deep reservations about the source of his knowledge, i.e., his late father’s ghost, and its means of execution. Hamlet’s knowledge that his father, King Hamlet, possibly died from inner ear poisoning, undetectable without the aid of modern science, contributes to his hesitancy to act. He seeks clarity regarding the events of his father’s death and the implication of the ghost, who he does not fully trust—“The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil” (Shakespeare 2.2.594-595).
Nevertheless, this clarity does not come until Act III, when Hamlet cleverly stages his own play that reveals King Claudius’ guilt—and even then, he cannot see his revenge through until the play’s tragic end. These facts make the reader wonder about Hamlet’s true motivations. Is he motivated solely by revenge? This paper posits that, while revenge is a large motivator for Hamlet, he is also influenced by psychological and social factors that inhibit his ability to exact quick vengeance for his slain father. As a scholar and member of Denmark’s nobility, there are outside considerations that Hamlet must see through. He is not a killer by nature, nor even a soldier, so he must reconcile his passion for revenge with his own contrary aversion to killing, natural for sane individuals in an ordered society. Essentially, while Hamlet is motivated by revenge, he is conversely motivated by a desire for social order—both his skepticism of the reliability of his father’s ghost and his rational mind’s natural aversion to killing make him hesitate and lead to the play’s tragic end.
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Shakespeare scholar Harold Jenkins remarks that, Hamlet is “about a man with a deed to do who for the most of the time conspicuously fails to do it” (qtd. in Topchyan 286). Jenkins has a valid point. Hamlet knows what needs to be done but resists, at first because of the questionable reliability of his father’s ghost. Paradoxically, the ghost both sets Hamlet on his quest for revenge and gives him reason to wait. Shakespeare begins the play with the ghost’s appearance, making the supernatural a central focus. Additionally, it is significant that Hamlet is not the first to see the ghost. Shakespeare lends the phantom credibility in an ascending order of confirmation—first, the sentries Marcellus and Bernardo see the figure; then Horatio, followed by Hamlet himself:
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me! (Shakespeare 1.4.40-45)
Shakespeare’s laying of credibility, with multiple witnesses culminating with Hamlet himself, allows for the veracity of the ghost and its purpose. Still, Hamlet, with good reason, questions its authenticity. Any sane man would. Much has been written about Hamlet and madness; however, his deliberate actions in the beginning suggest a greater motivation and a rational mind. He thinks about social propriety as per someone in his position, a high-ranking member of a royal court. As the prince of a country, he cannot simply go and murder the king impetuously, not on the will of an apparition alone. He correctly wonders at the ghost’s true intention. What if it were the devil sent to deceive him instead?
the devil hath power
T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. (Shakespeare 2.2.595-599)
Once Hamlet utters these words, he knows what needs to be done. He cannot kill a man on the word of a ghost alone. He says, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.600-601). Hamlet’s rational mind requires proof, and he schemes to root out the King by staging a play that will expose his guilt.
Therefore, while Hamlet is motivated by vengeance, he also must obey the will of his rational mind, which seeks proof before action. He must also overcome his natural inclination against bloodshed. Much modern scholarship on Hamlet has suggested psychological disorders to be the root cause of Hamlet’s procrastination, i.e., he does not act because his feigning madness and the circumstances of his life have led him to literally go mad. However, this reading of the text fails to consider the natural (and normal) aversion to killing that most humans share. Only pure psychopaths shed blood without remorse or hesitation. Of course Hamlet procrastinates. He is human after all, and killing is not his business as the prince of a royal court and former son and now nephew to the king. Here, scholar A.S. Topchyan points out this flaw in the Hamlet-as-psychologically-disturbed interpretation: “if someone is obliged to kill but procrastinates, and we see him struggling with acute psychological problems or looking for various excuses to avoid action, this should not be regarded as something strange, morbid or unnatural, for delaying murder is human” (287). Even when receiving confirmation from Hamlet’s staging of the play of Claudius’ guilt, Hamlet pauses. He is torn between the normal human aversion to murdering a man in cold blood and exacting vengeance for his slain father. He has never killed a man before, and he does not know if he is capable of it under rational circumstances, i.e., those of regular daily life in the royal court, not on a battlefield or in self-defense. Moreover, when Hamlet spies Claudius at prayer, he still cannot act—for to stab a man in the back while he is in prayer seems unnaturally cowardly and cruel. Therefore, Hamlet uses the damnation aspect as an instrument to delay: “No. / Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent” (3.3.87-88). Instead of killing Claudius at that moment, he seeks to wait until a different time when he can instead catch the king in sin, and therefore, send his soul to hell. This vengeance sounds exacting, but it very well may be simply another symptom of Hamlet’s aversion to killing in cold blood.
Scholar Rene Girard posits that “The great artist is a magnetizer. He can channel our mimetic impulses in the direction he chooses” (271). Shakespeare certainly is a master manipulator of raw emotion. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gets the reader to feel pity for both Hamlet and Claudius (during the prayer scene), making the act of revenge not nearly as cut and dry as the ghost from the beginning would have it. Hamlet is motivated by revenge; however, he is also human and conversely motivated by a rational desire to keep the peace as a prince of a kingly court. Hamlet’s doubt of the reliability of the apparition and his lucid mind’s normal propensity to avoid cold-blooded murder make him procrastinate and, ironically, lead to his own death.
- Girard, Rene. “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge: Vengeance in Hamlet.” 271-289,
https://msu.edu/ - Shakespeare. “Hamlet.” Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. Peter Ackroyd.
HarperCollins Publishers, 2006, pp. 1081-1125. - Topchyan, A. S. “Once Again on Hamlet’s Procrastination.” Bulletin of PNU, vol. 32, no. 1,
2014, pp. 281-287.
