Submitted by: Submitted by emilyb1624
Views: 10
Words: 1478
Pages: 6
Category: Literature
Date Submitted: 03/21/2016 05:36 PM
Hamlet’s Procrastination Deteriorates His Soul
In Hamlet, a tragedy by William Shakespeare, Hamlet’s procrastination leads him to his own character downfall. Procrastination can be defined as the action of delaying or postponing something. After hearing about his father’s death, Hamlet wants to react to his murderer, King Claudius. There are several factors that cause his procrastination: over thinking, morality, and revenge. These factors stimulate depression in Hamlet throughout the play, which causes him to procrastinate and be lead to his own tragedy, his death.
Literary critic George Bernard Shaw constructs his essay around Hamlet’s enlightenment. He compares Hamlet to the great heroes, such as Coriolanus and Othello. He explains early on in his essay that Hamlet is not a heroic figure, rather he is seen as part of the “common humanity” (66). He says,
On the contrary, he is a man in whom the common personal passions are so superseded by wider and rarer interests, and so discouraged by a degree of critical self- consciousness which makes the practical efficiency of the instinctive man on the lower plane impossible to him, that he finds the duties dictated by conventional revenge and ambition as disagreeable a burden as commerce is to a poet (67).
What he is saying here is that Hamlet is so enlightened that he is so far beyond revenge and killing the King. Shaw sees Hamlet as a procrastinator, but on terms of enlightenment. He does not need to seek revenge or over think his situation because he is so far beyond every character in the novel. Hamlet is the one is stripped of his chains and leaves the cave in order to discover truth and reality. However, when his tries to return to the cave and enlighten the other characters, they react with hostility and resentment toward hamlet.
On the contrary, literary critic George Bernard Shaw is inaccurate in his explanation about Hamlets reasoning for his procrastination. He explains that Hamlet is enlightened, which...