Hamlet

The first is that Hamlet is differentiated from the angry young man by a certain ability to recognize and partly repudiate his own motives. For one thing, there is his naming of hell as one prompter of revenge. For another, there are the words to Ophelia, 'I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck', etc. (III.i.125-6)--supposedly lunatic, but so close to home as not to be obviously false; for a troubled man, madness is a vent as well as a façade. Yet there are hardly more than fitful bursts of light amid heavy clouds of turmoil. The second qualification, then, is that Hamlet's critical awareness of his own motives--of a virtually spontaneous ill-will that, initially at least, has small ground in others' ill-doing--is largely subliminal: it takes form, not as an element in consciousness, but as a burden which inhibits action: Hamlet's continual delay is his form of knowledge. He cannot act because his grounds for acting are too confused, a mixture of the tenable and the untenable. To a man with so powerful a hatred of Claudius, the news that Claudius is a murderer is a windfall; but it is because of a certain moral sensitivity--the very sensitivity indispensable to the tragic hero--that Hamlet cannot really accept the windfall. Hence all the hocus-pocus about proving Claudius's guilt: a way of trying to convince himself that the objective case really overrides any scruples that he may have in finding his bête noire so conveniently and gratifyingly guilty. Hamlet's sensitivity makes him, unawares, into something of a legalist: he can kill easily in 'self-defence' or in response to a threat, and have almost no qualms; he is equipped for the crime passionel, for the thoughtless thrust from the id. Such a person cannot easily translate into action a chronic resentment whose merits he apparently has doubts about, though the doubts are not articulated, and whose object, Claudius, does not present an immediate danger that makes one spring into...