PAPER-1 ASSIGNMENT

"Hamlet irresolution and Procrastination"

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Name:- Zankhana .M.Matholiya

Course:-M.A.(English)
Roll.No:-50

Paper No.-1- Renaissance Literature

Sem-1
Batch:-2017-2019
Enrollment No:- 2069108420180036

College:- Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English

Email ID :- zankhanamatholiya96@gmail.com

Submitted:-Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English MKBU

Introduction:-

Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic career has been divided into four periods corresponding to the growth and experience of his life and mind.

   (1)PERIOD OF EARLY EXPERIMENTATION(1588-1593) 

Ex:-Romeo and Juliet.                                 

   (2)PERIOD OF THE GREAT COMEDIES AND CHRONICLE PLAYS(1594-1600)

   Ex:-As you Like It.

(3) PERIOD OF THE GREAT TRAGEDIES,AND OF THE SOMBRE OR BITTER   COMEDIES(1601-1607)

   Ex:-Julius Caesar, Hamlet , Othello.

   (4)PERIOD OF THE LATER COMEDIES OR DRAMATIC ROMANCES(1608-1612)

     Ex:-The Tempest.

      The Tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark , often shortened to “Hamlet” Shakespeare  was wrote “Hamlet” in 1600 or 1601, when he was 36 years old.

Hamlet is a play concerned with son’s revenge for the murder of his father. Revenge, the desire to retaliate for an injury, is a powerful, natural, and dangerous human emotion.

Ben Jonson wrote poem on Shakespeare

“Sweet Swan of Avon!

My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room.

A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire.

He was not of an age, but for all time!

Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.

Ø Hamlet's Delay, Due to External

Difficulties:-

 One of the many theories attributes Hamlet's procrastination to external which difficulties. The King, it is said, was surrounded not merely by courtiers but by a Swiss body-guard, and it was not possible for Hamlet to get him. If he had accused the King publicly of the murder, he had nothing to prove the charge except a ghost story. In that case, the court would have considered him mad and would have put in prison. He could not decide what to do, and so he waited. Then came the actors, and he arranged for the staging of a play, hoping that the King would betray his guilt to the whole court Unfortunately the King did not. It is true that immediately afterwards Hamlet got his chance when he found the defenceless on his knees. But what Hamlet wanted was not a private revenge to be followed by his own imprisonment or execution he wanted public justice. So he spared the King and, as he unluckily killed Polonius just afterwards, he had to consent to be despatched to England. But, on the voyage, he discovered the King's commission ordering the King of England immediately to put him to death; and with this in his pocket, he returned to Denmark. He now thought that the proof of the King's attempt to murder him would be enough evidence for his accusing the King of the murder of his father. The King, however, was too quick for him, and Hamlet's public arraignment of the King was prevented by the King's plot against Hamlet's life.

Ø Objections to This View:-

 This theory seems very plausible, but there are serious objections to it.

 In the first place, Hamlet never at any point in the play makes the slightest reference to any external difficulty. Secondly always speaks as if there were no difficulty in the way of his killing the King. When, for instance, he spares the King, he speaks of killing him when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is in the incestuous pleasure of his bed, when he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases the least obstacle  (Act III, Scene iii,).

Thirdly, Shakespeare shows Laertes quite easily raising the people against the King, thereby giving us the impression that Hamlet could have done so even more easily, if he had planned to destroy the King by that method. Fourthly, Hamlet did not stage the play in the hope that the King would betray his guilt to the court. He staged it, according to his own account, in order to convince himself by the King's reaction that the Ghost had spoken the truth, This is perfectly clear from.

 Wherein I will catch the conscience of the king.(Act II, Scene ii.-)

Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt.( Act III Scene ii,)

Ø Conscience, A Hurdle in the Way:-

 Hamlet's main difficulty therefore, may be regarded as being internal, something that is part of  his mental make-up. It may, for instance, be supposed that Hamlet is restrained from action by his conscience or a moral scruple. But even this approach is not supported by any evidence from the play itself. Hamlet habitually assumes, without any questioning that he ought to revenge father's murder. Even when he doubts the honesty of the Ghost he expresses no doubt as to what his duty would be if the Ghost has spoken truly: "If he but blench I know my course."He reproaches himself bitterly for neglecting his duty in the two soliloquies where he examines his position

 ("o what a and peasant slave am” - Act II, Scene ii), and

("How all occasions do inform against me"-Act IV, Scene iv).

When he reflects on the possible cause of this neglect, he does not mention among them any moral scruple. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber, he does not plead hat his conscience comes in his way. There is only one passage

Hor. :- Why what a king is this!

Ham.:-Does it not,think thee stand me now upon-(Act V, Sence ii,)

 in which Hamlet speaks as if his conscience were retarding action on his part. If this passage be regarded as a correct analysis of his mind, then conscience would appear to be only one hindrance in Hamlet's way but not the sole or the chief hindrance.

Ø Hamlet's Moral Repulsion to the Act of Murder:-

If  may also be asserted that, in the depths of his nature and unknown to himself there was  a moral repulsion to the deed. But  this view is, to a large extent, contradicted by Hamlet's sparing the king when  he finds the King at prayer. The reason Hamlet gives himself  for sparing the King is that, if he kills him now. he will send  him to heaven,where as he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be an unconscious excuse, but it is difficult to believe  that, if reason has been the stirrings or moral scruples of his deeper conscience it could have masked itself in the form of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell. However, there can be no doubt at Hamlet has strong moral nature and a great anxiety to do the right thing. In this anxiety he  resembles Brutus Hamlet's shrinking from the deed of murder is probably due to a repugnance to the idea of suddenly attacking a man who cannot defend Scene himself

Ø The Mistaken view that Hamlet is Frail and weak

 There is yet another possibility. Goethe describes Hamlet of a lovely, pure, and most moral being, not having the strength nerve which forms a hero and therefore sinking beneath a burden  which he cannot bear. This view gives us the picture of Hamlet as a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and  yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and earthly, frail and weak. And so we are led to believe that such a man could not perform the terrible duty laid on him. This is a  sentimental view of Hamlet which, to a great extent, lowers Hamlet in our eyes. If we adopt this view, we can only feel pity for Hamlet but little admiration. Apart from that, the text of the play does not support this view of Hamlet as delicate, frail, sensitive, and weak y, for should remember that, when summoned by the Ghost, he bursts from his terrified friends saying: "Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me". The man who speaks thus cannot be frail and weak . Hamlet  hardly everspeaks  to the King without an insult, or to Polonius without an insult or to polonius without a gibe. He storms at Ophelia and "speaks daggers" to his mother. Hearing a cry behind the arras, he whips out his sword in an instant and slays the eaves dropper. He sends his “school fellow” to their death and never troubles his head about them thereafter.He is the firstman to board a pirate ship. He fights with Laertes in the grave. He rusheson the King, drives his foil right through his body, and then seizes the poisoned cup and forces it violently between the wretched man's   lips. This man, the Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. To treat him as a sentimental sort of person is unfair to him and would besides, turn this tragedy into mere pathos. Furthermore, the sentimental view of him ignores the hardness and cynicism, which are indeed no part of his nature, but which are undoubtedly present in him at this crisis of his life. He shows an almost inhuman insensitiveness towards his murder of Polonius There is the same insensibility in his language about the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern whose deaths were not in the least required by his purpose. The manner in which he insults ophelia is disgusting. In view of this embitterment, callousness, grossness, and brutality, it would not be  correct to adopt the sentimental view of Hamlet.

Ø Hamlet's Irresolution, Due to Excessive Reflection and Speculation

Then there is the view for which Schlegel and Coleridge are mainly responsible that the cause of Hamlet’s  delay is irresolution and that this irresolution is due to an excessive tendency in Hamlet to reflection and speculation. According to this view, this play is the tragedy of reflection. Schlegel thus puts the case "The whole is intended to show how a calculating consideration, which aims at all the relations and exhausting, so far as human foresight can all the relations and possible consequences of a deed, cripples the power of acting Hamlet is a hypocrite towards himself his  far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of determination. He has no firm belief in himself or in anything else. He loses himself  in labyrinths of thought Similarly Coleridge finds in Hamlet an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it On the whole, this theory is most widely accepted view of Hamlet's character, and it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies-such words,for  example, as those about the native hue of resolution being  sicklied over by the pale cast of thought or those about "the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event". The energy of resolve is dissipated in Hamlet by an endless brooding  on the deed that requires to be done. When he does act, his action does not proceed from this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive  And most of the reasons he gives for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons, but unconscious excuses.

Ø The Delay Due to Hamlet's Profund  Melancholy

But even this theory does not satisfy us fully, because it represents  a Hamlet inferior to the man of Shakespeare's conception. The cause of Hamlet's irresolution says Bradley, is not directly or mainly a  habitual excess of reflectiveness in Hamlet. The direct cause is a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special circumstances. The direct cause is a state of  profound melancholy in Hamlet. Hamlet’s  reflectiveness doubtless plays a certain part in producing that melancholy, and is thus an indirect contributory cause of his irresolution. But an excess of reflection is not a direct cause of the irresolution, nor is it the only indirect cause. Nowhere does the textof the play support the idea that Hamlet, just before his father death, was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who knew seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a scholar incapable of forming a resolution or executing a deed. Ophelia refers to him as a soldier, and he is really fond of fencing. He creates an impression of being a fearless man. He must have been quick and impetuous in action. It is downright impossible that the man we rushing after the Ghost, killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship, boarding the pirate ship leaping into the grave, executing his final revenge, could ever have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.

Ø Hamlet's Nervous Instability

 It seems that by temperament Hamlet was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood (joyous or depressed) that possessed him. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it. This kind of temperament has surely something to do with Hamlet's irresolution. Further, we would not be wrong in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier days an exquisite sensibility (to which we may give the name moral, the word "moral" being used in a wide sense). Hamlet shows an unbounded delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. (This goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air "What a piece of work is a man how noble in reason With the same eager enthusiasm he turns to those around him. His adoration of his dead father, his manner of speaking to Laertes loved you ever"). in his affectionate manner of greeting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern his love for Ophelia all illustrate his exquisite sensibility or his idealism. And the negative side of this idealism is seen in his disgust at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality and his contempt for everything pretentious or false. A man with this kind of moral sensibility would be deeply affected by any great shock that life might bring for him. In fact, this play is as much a tragedy of moral idealism as a tragedy of reflection.

Ø Hamlet's Intellectual Genius

With this temperament and this sensibility, we find in Hamlet an intellectual genius which shows  itself in his unusual quickness of perception, his great agility in shifting the mental attitude, and his striking  rapidity and fertility in resource. This intellectual genius shows itself in conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour and, alike in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.

Ø Hamlet's Highest Gifts Become His Enemies

Hamlet's irresolution in relation to the duty of avenging his father's murder may now be explained thus Hamlet, a man with melancholic temperament, an exquisite moral sensibility, and an intellectual genius receives a violent shock. As a result of that, he begins to sink into melancholy. In this state of deep and fixe melancholy, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action is made upon him. He indulges an endless and futile mentaldissection of the  required deed. The futility of this process, and the shame of the required feed.  The futility of this process and the shame of his delay , further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy still more. The shock (to which we have referred above) to his moral being comes with the sudden disclosure of his mother's true nature She has remarried within a month of her husband's death, and she has married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and hateful in Hamlet's  eye.This experience brings to him a feeling of horror,then loathing, then despair of human nature His whole mind is poisoned. He can never see Ophelia in the same light again she is a woman and his mother is a woman. Now the conditions have arisen under which Hamlet's highest gifts, his moral sensibilityand his intellectual genius, become enemies. A with a blunt moral nature and with a lesser intellectual capacity would not  have felt  the revelation so keenly.

Ø Bradley's View

And this is the time, an hour of uttermost weakness, which gives the revelation, through the Ghost, of his mother's adultery and his father's murder, and with this, the demand on him, to arise and act. But the demand comes too late. It simply deepens the melancholy. Within an hour of his vowing revenge, he mutters

The time is out of joint O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right

 (Act I, Scene v, 196.7)

 And the rest of the story shows his vain efforts to fulfil this duty, his excuses and his self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay. It is by this mode of argumentation that Bradley finds melancholy to be the root cause of Hamlet's inaction. According to Bradley, Hamlet's melancholy is, from the psychological point of view, the centre of the tragedy. To omit his melancholy from consideration or to underestimate its intensity would be to make Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But, having once given due weight to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we must admit that the tragic interest of the play proceeds from the speculative bent of mind which, according to Schlegel and Coleridge, is responsible for Hamlet's indecision.

Ø Coleridge's View

This is how Coleridge deals with the problem of delay on Hamlet's part: Shakespeare places Hamlet in the most stimulating circumstances that a human being can be placed in. He is the heirapparent of a throne his father dies suspiciously his mother excludes her son from his throne by marrying his uncle. This is not  enough; but the Ghost of the murdered father is introduced to assure the son that he was put to death by his own brother, The all effect of all this on  the son is not instant action or instant pursuit of  revenge, but endless reasoning and hesitating, constant urging  and  solicitation of the mind to act, and constant escape from action, ceaseless  reproaches of himself for sloth and negligence while the whole energy of his resolution evaporates in these reproaches. And this is not from cowardice, for he is drawn as one of the braves of men of his time. Nor is this from want of forethought or slowness of apprehension, for sees through the very souls of all who surround him .this is merely from that to which prevails among persons who have a world in themselves .

Ø The Element of Decisiveness in Hamlet's Nature

There is no indecision about Hamlet as far as his own sense of duty is concerned. He knows well what he ought to do and over and over again he makes up his mind to do it. The moment the players, and the spies set upon him, have withdrawn, he breaks a delirium of rage against himself for neglecting to per y and form the solemn duty he had undertaken and contrasts the artificial display of feeling by the player with his own apparent indifference:

 What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba That he should weep for her?

(Act II, Scene ii,-)

 yet the player did weep for her, and was in an agony of grief at her sufferings, while Hamlet is unable to rouse himself to action in order that he may perform the command of his father, who had come from the grave, to incite him to revenge:

 That I, the son of a dear father murdered Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words tory And fall a-cursing like a very drab,A scullion.(Act II, Scene ii, -)

 It is the same feeling, the same conviction of what is his duty that makes Hamlet exclaim in a subsequent part of the tragedy.

 How all occasions do inform against me And spur my dull revenge. What is a man,  If his chief good and market of his time, Be but to sleep and feed ? A beast, no more .(Aet IV, Scene iv, -)

Ø Hamlet's Irresolution When the King is at Prayer

Yet with all this strong conviction of duty and with all this resolution arising out of strong conviction, nothing is done. This admirable and consistent character, deeply acquainted with his own feelings, painting them with such a wonderful power and accuracy le t and firmly persuaded that a moment ought not to be lost in executing the solemn charge committed to him, still yields to the same retiring from reality which is the result of having a world within himself. Hamlet's shrinking from murdering the guilty King when the latter is at prayer annoyed Dr.Johnson but shrinking is only part of a pretext for not acting when he might have acted instantly and effectually therefore, he again postpones his revenge and declares his determination to accomplish it at some other time:

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed.

 (Act III, Scene iii, )

This was merely the excuseHamlet made to himself for not taking advantage of this particular and favourable moment for doing justice upon his guilty uncle.

Ø A Man Living in Meditation

Even after the scene with Osric, we see Hamlet still indulging in reflection, and hardly thinking of the task he has just undertaken he dispatch and resolution, as far as and present intention are concerned, but all hesitation and irresolution, when called upon to carry his words and intentions into effect that resolving to do everything he does nothing. He is full of purpose, but devoid of that quality of mind which acomplishes purpose. Hamlet combines himself all that is amiable and excellent in nature, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.

Ø Hazlitt's View

Hazlitt's thus explains Hamlet's procrastination "The character Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility-the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of  his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius; and again, where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act he remains puzzled undecided, and sceptical, rallies with  his purposes till the occasion is lost, and finds some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness  again. For this  reason  he refuses to kill the King when he is at his prayers,  and by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution defers his revenge to a more fatal opportunity when  he shall be engaged in some act  "that has no relish of salvation in it "

He is the prince of philosophical speculators and because he cannot have his perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he declines it So he the suggestions of the Ghost, contrives the scene of the play to have surer proof of his uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied with this confirmation of his suspicions, and the success of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he is sensible of his own weakness, takes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it.

 "Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not from any want of attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity  crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any  vague pretext that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous purposes.”

Ø Conclusion:-

Nothing in the world could entertain him and he loses interest in everything. He hates women and generalizes their nature as 'frailty'. Thus, his whole mind is poisoned because of his melancholy. Unnatural melancholy destroys the brain with all his faculties and disposition of action and thus results in his delay.

If however we analyze the action of Hamlet, we find the cause of delay linked to the theme of the play. Hamlet is not merely concerned with Killing of his father’s murderer. In doing so he feels he must set right the decay in the world around him and in the heart of man.             

The time is out of joint, O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right.

Shakespeare has endowed Hamlet and the action of the play with a complexity in the context of which the delay is understandable and inevitably has tragic consequences.