Revenge and Vengeance in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Study of Hamlet’s Pursuit and Procrastination Regarding Revenge

Abstract

Shakespeare was the phenomenal writer of Elizabethan era. Among his many greatest writing pieces, Hamlet was one of his most famous work. If we proceed to elucidate the play Hamlet, then we willsee there were three significant plots which has been presented with great importance. The main revenge plot and two othersub plots including the romance between Hamlet and Ophelia and the looming war with Norway. With these three significant plots Hamlet has dealt with procrastination, because the revengewas not done until the final scenes. However, Shakespeare did depict the direct reference to the traditionwith the play within play. For doing such, he did presentan Italian Picarro play called “ The murder of Gonzago”. In order to establish the true justice of Hamlet‟s father‟s murder, Hamlet attempted todecorate that Italian play with grim tenacity, he was very adamant to catch the real culprit of his father‟s death. To accomplish this hard task, Hamlet became slow and ponderedover many things. In this way Hamlet was slowin the process of taking revenge and as a result some other deaths has been taken place, such unnecessary deaths were the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. To shed the highlight of Hamlet‟s inability of taking revenge on time, Shakespeare has exhibited a number of other characters who were capable of taking resolute and determined revenge as per their requirements. For examples, Fortinbrashas travelled from many miles to take revenge of his father‟s murder and ultimately he gothis desired success in conquering Denmark. Another character Laertes did plot against Hamlet to kill him in order to take revenge of his father Polonius‟s murder, and towards the end of this novel Laertes also got success in killing Hamlet by the poisonous sword. As a whole the predominant goal of this paper is to exhibit Hamlet as a revenge play where all other incidents of revenge has been incorporated brilliantly by Shakespeare.