Claudius's murderingof King Hamlet are Hamlet's enemy. His dead father is the destroyedcountry, painful truth which leaves so much hatred and resentment inhis heart. Being a loyal prince and son, and one whom entire kingdomrespected, he should seek revenge and bring justice back in the royalcourt. The whole play would be very simple if this murdered was an openassassination. But no, Shakespeare made sure that this assassinationwas secret, that no one, except maybe Claudius, knew about it. Thisputs in a completely different context the play that was written byThomas Kyd, a play titled Ur-Hamlet, which Shakespeare used as a basisfor his Hamlet (Grebanier, 111).This way, Shakespeare accomplished verydifferent development of action, and ultimately one of the best playsin the history. Along with that, Shakespeare created disagreementconcerning reasons why Hamlet waited so long before killing Claudius. A careful reader can notice that more than two months passbetween Hamlet being told by the Ghost about the evil deed, and Hamletfollowing through his plan. One can argue that from this follows thatHamlet procrastinated, having that one flaw - being passive, not daringto act. But Shakespeare never payed attention to this time interval. Anaudience wasn't aware of it, because Shakespeare didn't want it to be -the rather large time interval was of no consequence, and truly onecannot notice this without a conscious calculation (Grebanier, 179).More critics, especially during popularity of Freud, have tried toexplain Hamlet's delay exclusively from psychological point of view.But how can one psychologically analyze a character that doesn't existin physical world; whose existence is dependent merely on his actionsand reactions to the events and other characters from play? J. DoverWilson summarized it by saying that Hamlet is a "character in a play,not in history" (Weitz, 107). From the point of view of these critics,it follows that character preceded ...
