Examples Of Indecisiveness In Hamlet

Sorrow, melancholy, grief, these are emotions that most people can identify with. Emotions such as these, make a shadowy appearance in almost everyone’s lives at some point. Shakespeare’s characters in the play Hamlet are no exception to this. All of the characters experience tragedy in this play, and in the end the deaths of all but one become the main tragedy of the story. The character who had the most responsibility for the tragic outcome of the play was the main character himself, Hamlet. Hamlet’s indecisiveness plays a considerable role in the tragic outcome of this play. Throughout the time he knows about Claudius’s treachery, Hamlet is hesitant to exact his revenge. He claims to want Claudius to suffer as much as possible. As Hamlet was about to get his revenge while Claudius is praying, he changes his mind saying that he wanted “that his soul may be as damn’d and black as hell, whereto it goes.” (Shakespeare, 71) According to Hamlet he wants his Uncle to die while sinning so that his soul goes to hell rather than heaven. Passing up on this opportunity

Hamlet viewed his father, the previous King of Denmark, as a godly figure. He compares his father to “Hyperion” (Shakespeare, 11) one of the twelve main Titans in Greek mythology. This perception of his father caused Hamlet to be even more enraged by the idea that Claudius killed the previous king, because it shattered the powerful image of his father. How the previous king died goes completely against Hamlet’s perception of his father. Claudius is compared to the previous king as “Hyperion to a satyr.” (Shakespeare, 11) By this comparison there should be no way Claudius could have killed the previous king; the revelation that his father was not the man he envisioned made Hamlet act blindly, and irrationally. This irrationality eventually lead to the ensuing