General Introduction. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.
Fox, Levi, ed. The Shakespeare Handbook. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987. Shakespeare, William. "The Taming of the Shrew."
As the play goes on, Hamlet's tendency of thinking too much causes him to become mad. Hamlet's focal problem is his madness. As the play progresses, Hamlet's moral perspective on life begins to alter. The first change in his morality occurred following Hamlet's first visit from the ghost. Hamlet is told by the ghost to avenge his father's murder.
Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Levin, Harry.
Mack, Maynard. "The World of Hamlet." Yale Review. vol. 41 (1952) p. 502-23.
Yes, Hamlet was atrophic after the loss but after meeting his father’s ghost his disposition is that of anger and vengefulness. Hamlet puts on an antic disposition throughout the play to unearth the resolution that is his father’s murder, for the pretense of insanity is an act. It is seen within the text Hamlet has a keen interest of acting and of several techniques for example, “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines” (Shakespeare III, ii, 1-3). His antic disposition is supported based on Hamlet’s intellect and emotional desperation. Hamlet demonically chases justice for his father’s death.
General Introduction. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.
James in his essay, “The New Doubt,” expresses his view: But few of us will deny that Hamlet’s procrastination is the major fact in the play and that it was intended by Shakespeare to be so. But are we really to find his procrastination a mystery and to leave it a mystery? Is there really anything mysterious about a man who has come to no clear and practiced sense of life, and who in the face of a shocking situation which quite peculiarly involves him, shuffles, deceives himself, procrastinates, and in his exasperation cruelly persecutes the person he loves best in the world? (46) Perhaps the most popular theme in the play is that of revenge. R.A. Foakes in “The Play’s Courtly Setting” explains the burden of revenge which the protagonist must carry for the duration of the play: And where there is no legal punishment for his father’s death, he must stoop, driven by the universal wrong, and “being thus be-netted round with villainies”, to revenge.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Granville-Barker, Harley. "From Henry V to Hamlet." Studies In Shakespeare. Ed.