Hamlet: Hesitation and IndecisionWilliam Shakespeare's Hamlet presents a hero who hesitates to avenge his dead father when given the opportunity: what should be his opinion? This article examines the decision from various perspectives. Mark Rose, in "Reforming the Role", comments on how the hero's hesitation to kill at the right moment, coupled with his subsequent hasty decision to kill, left the protagonist a changed man. :[. . .] the prince who returns from the sea is a changed man, resigned, detached, perhaps "tragically enlightened". Having refused to kill the king when the moment was in any case propitious – that is, when he found Claudius kneeling in an empty and ungenuine prayer – and then, having chosen the moment to act only to discover that instead of the king he had killed Polonius, Hamlet seems allowing his nerves to relax. He allowed himself to be pushed aboard the ship, he allowed himself in effect to be thrown into the sea of ​​fortune which is an image so common in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan poets, an image reminiscent of that "sea of ​​trouble" against which he had previously taken the weapons. When the opportunity to escape the king's trap presents itself, Hamlet takes it, jumping aboard the pirate ship, but what he is doing now is reacting to circumstances rather than trying to completely master them. (126-27)Is there a connection between verbal hesitation and hesitation in action and decisions? Lawrence Danson in the essay “Tragic Alphabet” discusses the hero's hesitation in action; this is related to his hesitation in speaking:To speak or act in a world where all words and actions seem equivocal is, for Hamlet, dangerous and humiliating, a kind of prostitution.All the vexed qu...... middle of paper ……g.” Modern critical interpretations: Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Rpt. from Shakespeare's tragic form. Np: Princeton University Press, 1972. Rose, Mark. “Reforming the role”. Modern critical interpretations: Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Rpt. from Homer to Brecht: European epic and dramatic traditions. Ed. Michael Seidel and Edward Mendelson. Np: Yale University Press, 1977.Shakespeare, William. The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.htmlWest, Rebecca. “A Court and a world infected by the disease of corruption”. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardò. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.