Discretion, pushed to extremes, ends in vacillation, and this is the leading trait in Hamlet’s character. His father’s ghost appears, tells how he was “sleeping, by a brother’s hand cut off,” and enjoins on him, as a solemn duty to avenge his death. Hamlet acknowledges the duty, and resolves to perform it; he feels himself “prompted to his revenge by heaven and hell,” and yet he shows from the first a painful consciousness of his own infirmity of purpose.

His numerous soliloquies are accordingly for the most part mere developments of this trait of his character; and illustrations of the inevitable tendency of meditation to beget inaction. The narrow or bigoted mind, which either can not or will not see more than a single feature of a subject, may well be prompt and decided; but whoever is capable and willing to survey any great question in all its aspects, will reach a firm conclusion,—if he reach it at all,—only by slow and painful steps. Laertes, who is little better than a ranting madcap, no sooner conceives a purpose, than he hastens to execute it; whilst Hamlet, who is a calm philosopher, ponders, and procrastinates, and does nothing.

In the last scene of act second, Hamlet, after having listened to the recitation of a player, compares his own “motive and cue for passion,” with that of a fellow, who spoke merely “in a fiction, in a dream of passion;” and reproaches himself for coldness and inaction; but ends at last in the conclusion that the spirit he had seen may be a devil, and that he must have “grounds more relative than this.”

The next scene contains the great soliloquy on death. “To be or not to be,” etc. On a former occasion Hamlet had exclaimed:

And he now concludes that the most profound meditation on the subject merely

This soliloquy has sometimes been condemned as taking an unworthy and inadequate view of the great subjects of death, and “that undiscovered country” beyond the grave; and if it had been Shakspeare’s purpose to discuss these subjects, the criticism would undoubtedly be just. But let us bear in mind that his object in this passage was simply to illustrate “vacillation of mind” in connection with the highest subjects of human contemplation, and we shall find that he has accomplished all he undertook in a manner entirely worthy of himself.

Very similar to this is the king’s soliloquy on repentance, in act third, scene third.

Throughout the whole speech the mind of the guilty monarch fluctuates between hope and despair; and Hamlet, seeing him on his knees, exclaims: “now might I do it, pat; and now I’ll do it;” but again falls to moralizing, and puts it off to a more convenient season.

Hamlet’s first soliloquy, before he has seen the Ghost, (act first, scene second,) turns on the queen’s inconstancy in forgetting his father and marrying his uncle so soon: “But two months dead!” “A beast that wants discourse of reason, would have mourned longer.” And his conversation with Horatio immediately after is to the same effect:

In his interview with the queen in act third, scene fourth, where he compares the picture of his father with that of his uncle, he dwells on the same topic. See also the dumb show in act third, scene second, and the dialogue between the Player King and Player Queen. Every line of these speeches illustrates the theme.

The constancy of Hamlet’s father is throughout opposed to the inconstancy of his mother. The Ghost on his first appearance dwells on the subject:

And after all the wrongs he has suffered, whilst enjoining upon Hamlet to change his course, he charges him to contrive nothing against his mother; and when he afterward appears at the interview between Hamlet and the queen, he interposes in her behalf:

The queen also, with all her faults, remains constant in her affection for Hamlet, and “lives, almost, by his looks.” Ophelia is constant in her love,—to insanity and a watery grave; and Hamlet makes fine speeches on constancy of purpose. His soliloquy in act first, scene fifth, is in a noble strain:

But his “remembrance” is like that of a man who “beholdeth his natural face in a glass, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.”