cter enables him to stand firm under such a difficulty . Feeling isolated and lonely, he remains calm, using his intelligence to contend with his uncle’s crimes and finally carrying out the revenge, though at the cost of his own life. Throughout the play, we can see that Hamlet is “neither a frail and weak-minded youth nor a thought-sick dreamer”; on the contrary , he is “fearless and impetuous in action”. His rushes after the ghost , kills Polonius , deals with the King’s commission on the ship, board the pirate ship , jumps into the grave of Ophelia out of honest love and executes his final revenge during the duel with Laertes. He appears insensible to the fear of any ordinary kind.
Yet in the play , Hamlet’s delay and hesitations in carrying out his task of revenge is also obvious . He even appears to be shrinking and slow sometimes. He has several good chances to kill Claudius but he just lets them slip by. Sometimes, when he fails to make good use of a chance, he has to find some excuses for his inaction to comfort his guilty conscience. For instance , on his way to his mother’s when the play-show ends , he meets the king praying, he could have drawn out his sword and killed him on the spot. If his delay so far is due to the lack of evidence of the present King’s crime , now he has got what he needs and he should have taken immediate action. But he fails again on the pretext that he might send the King to heaven if he kills him then because the King is praying at that moment. Often he reproaches himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. He even asks himself in genuine bewilderment,“ what should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” “Do I linger? Can the cause be cowardice ?” what is it that makes me sit idle when I feel if is shameful to do so , and when I have cause ,and will, and strength , and means to act?” why in the world did not Hamlet obey the ghost at once, and save seven of those eight lives ? If he had been Laertes of fortinbras, he would have accomplished his task in a day .
3.1.2 Careful as Well as Careless
In the depth of such misery , Hamlet remains calm and acts cautiously for the most of the time. Instead of taking rash actions, he thinks things over again .He is perplexed by several questions: Is what his father’s ghost says true ? How can be ascertain it ? If it is true, his uncle , the murderer of his father , must be suspicious of him and be on guard against him. So how can he take the revenge ?
To find out the truth , he arranges the plat-show tries to detect the King’s reactions during the play; to protect himself from the King’s persecution, he feigns madness and he does so well that even his mother, the queen , his girl friend Ophelia and Ophelia’s father Polonius are all made to believe that he has really gone out of his mind . when the King tells him to go to England , he immediately realizes the scheme under it .
Nevertheless, despite all his efforts to be careful, Hamlet sometimes turns out to be careless or even rash. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet wears mourning dress and appears depressed at her mother’s marriage. When his mother asks him to exchange his clothes and “look like a friend on Denmark”. Knowing clearly that he is under the close watch by the King and his followers, he speaks out the King’s crime in his mother’s chamber. Fortunately , the eavesd
