action vs. inaction

• revenge. As Hamlet struggles

  throughout the play with the logistical difficulties and moral

  burdens of vengeance, waffling between whether he should kill

  Claudius and avenge his father once and for all, or whether to

  do so would be pointless, cruel, or even self-destructive,

  William Shakespeare’s unique perspective on action versus

  inaction becomes clear.
• there is no inherent morality in either action or inaction, insofar

  as each option is tied to vengeance: whether one acts or does

  not, death inevitably comes for everyone.
• There are two major arenas in which Hamlet’s ability to take

  decisive action are played out: the first being the question of

  whether or not he will kill Claudius and avenge his father, and

  the second being the question of whether Hamlet will take his

  own life in order to avoid making the former decision.
• When Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears to him and charges him with

  taking vengeance upon Claudius for murdering him, Hamlet is

  determined to do the ghost’s bidding—but as Hamlet (often

  purposefully) misses opportunity after opportunity to kill

  Claudius, he begins to wonder what his own inability to act says

  about him, and whether he is as weak and mad as he has led

  everyone to believe.
• On the matter of suicide, even, Hamlet cannot make a decision—to

  take his own life would be to fail his father, but to stay alive means reckoning with his own inaction day after day.
• Hamlet succeeds in killing Claudius—but not before realizing that his own death from being slain by Laertes’s poisoned rapier is imminent. Hamlet has acted at last, but has staved off his actions for so long that Shakespeare seems to be using Hamlet’s idleness to suggest that neither action nor inaction has any bearing on morality, or any influence on the ultimate outcome of one’s life.
• Fortinbras is determined to take back lands his father lost in

  battle—including Denmark—and marches relentlessly across

  Europe as he sets his eyes on lands in Poland and beyond.

  Hamlet overhears these murmurings of Fortinbras’s campaign,

  and though he never comes face-to-face with his foil and

  opposite, the audience (and Hamlet himself) recognize

  Fortinbras’s decisive action on his late father’s behalf as all that

  Hamlet is unable to bring himself to do.
• In the end, when Fortinbras arrives at Elsinore to find a massacre before him, he accepts Horatio’s (and the late Hamlet’s) nomination to the Danish throne. For his decisive action, Fortinbras is rewarded with the one thing Hamlet partly longed for but could never take the action necessary to secure: political and social control of his country—and yet other characters who have taken the same decisive actions as Fortinbras, such as Claudius and Laertes, have met their deaths as well.
• Death has come for all the major players, and while some have been slain as a result of Hamlet’s actions, others have been killed by his inaction. Death is humanity’s great equalizer, and Shakespeare shows that it does not discriminate between the valiant and the cowardly,

  the motivated and the fearful, or the good and the wicked.