Shakespeares Hamlet - Indecision within Hamlet Essay -- Indecision He

The Hesitation/ Indecision within Hamlet Hamlet, the hero in Shakespeares dramatic tragedy of the same name, goes to great lengths to establish the infrangible guilt of King Claudius and then appears to blow it all. He hesitates at the prayer scene when the king could easily be dispatched. Lets discuss this riddle of hesitation or indecision on the part of the protagonist. In Acts III and IV Problems of Text and Staging Ruth Nevo explains how the protagonist is confounded in some(prenominal) the prayer scene and the closet scene In the prayer scene and the closet scene his Hamlets devices are overthrown. His mastery is confounded by the inherent liability of human reason to jump to conclusions, to fail to distinguish seeming from being. He, of all people, is trapped in the fatal deceptive maze of appearances that is the phenomenal world. Never maybe has the minds finitude been better dramatized than in the prayer scene and in the closet scene. Another motto of the Player Ki ng is marvelously effect in the nexus of ironies which constitutes the plays peripateia Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. In the sequence of events following Hamlets elation at the success of the Mousetrap, and culminating in the death of Polonius, all things are the opposite of what they seem, and action achieves the reverse of what was intended. Here in the plays peripeteia is enacted Hamlets fatal error, his fatal misjudgment, which constitutes the crisis of the action, and is the directly precipitate cause of his own death, seven other deaths, and Ophelias madness. (52) David Bevington, in the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet, eliminates some possible reasons ... ...ilm, Television and Audio Performance. Rutherford, NJ Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. P., 1988. Levin, Harry. superior general Introduction. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. Nevo, Ruth. Acts III and IV Problems of Text an d Staging. Modern Critical Interpretations Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Rpt. from Tragic Form in Shakespeare. N.p. Princeton University Press, 1972. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts give of Technology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html West, Rebecca. A Court and World Infected by the Disease of Corruption. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1957.