write an essay of between 2 to 2.5 pages on the following:
"HAMLET is the architect of the tragedy that befalls him even though it is Claudius who is the chief perpetrator of the crimes"
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Answer:
Hamlet’s major antagonist is a shrewd, lustful, conniving king who contrasts sharply with the other male characters in the play. Whereas most of the other important men in Hamlet are preoccupied with ideas of justice, revenge, and moral balance, Claudius is bent upon maintaining his own power. The old King Hamlet was apparently a stern warrior, but Claudius is a corrupt politician whose main weapon is his ability to manipulate others through his skillful use of language. Claudius’s speech is compared to poison being poured in the ear—the method he used to murder Hamlet’s father. Claudius’s love for Gertrude may be sincere, but it also seems likely that he married her as a strategic move, to help him win the throne away from Hamlet after the death of the king. As the play progresses, Claudius’s mounting fear of Hamlet’s insanity leads him to ever greater self-preoccupation; when Gertrude tells him that Hamlet has killed Polonius, Claudius does not remark that Gertrude might have been in danger, but only that he would have been in danger had he been in the room. He tells Laertes the same thing as he attempts to soothe the young man’s anger after his father’s death. Claudius is ultimately too crafty for his own good. In Act V, scene ii, rather than allowing Laertes only two methods of killing Hamlet, the sharpened sword and the poison on the blade, Claudius insists on a third, the poisoned goblet. When Gertrude inadvertently drinks the poison and dies, Hamlet is at last able to bring himself to kill Claudius, and the king is felled by his own cowardly machination.
For centuries critics have tied themselves in knots trying to solve the baffling problem Hamlet appears to pose. Commanded by his father’s ghost in Act 1 to ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ by his brother Claudius, who has robbed him of his wife and throne as well as his life, Hamlet swears that ‘with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love,’ he will ‘sweep to [his] revenge’ (1.5.25, 29–31). He then spends almost the entire play spectacularly failing to keep his oath, despite the ghost's reappearance in Act 3 to remind him: ‘Do not forget! This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose’ (3.4.110–11). Indeed after his departure for England, Hamlet’s obligation to avenge his father seems all but forgotten, and on his return he shows no sign of planning to take his uncle’s life. When he does at last kill Claudius in the dying moments of Act 5, he does so suddenly, without forethought, poisoning the King in revenge for conniving to poison him and for accidentally poisoning Gertrude.
It’s only by chance, in other words, that Hamlet finally avenges his father’s murder, which might otherwise have remained unavenged. The retribution he happens to exact is exacted too late, moreover, to prevent all the deaths that need not have occurred, if only he had killed Claudius sooner. As a direct or indirect result of his procrastination, Hamlet slays Polonius instead of Claudius; Ophelia goes mad after her father’s murder and drowns; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dispatched by Hamlet to their deaths; and in the play’s climactic duel Hamlet’s mother drinks from the lethal cup intended for her son, who is fatally wounded by Laertes in revenge for the deaths of his father and sister. On the face of it, it’s hard to resist the conclusion most critics have drawn, which is that the main cause of the whole tragic train of events is Hamlet’s compulsion to postpone. And for those who assume that to be the case, all that remains is to crack the conundrum with which the play confronts them: why does Hamlet delay?
The crux of the matter
There’s no point asking Hamlet why, because Hamlet himself is baffled by his inability to act promptly. He rebukes himself bitterly in Act 2 after watching an actor weep, convulsed with simulated sorrow for an imaginary character, who means nothing to him. The actor’s performance ‘But in a fiction, in a dream of passion’ (2.2.552) puts Hamlet to shame, because ‘the motive and the cue for passion’ (2.2.561) that Hamlet has are real and compelling, yet all he can do, as he says, is mope about ‘Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause’ (2.2.568). A whole act later, Hamlet is still at a loss to explain why, ‘laps’d in time and passion’, he still ‘lets go by / Th’ important acting’ of his father’s ‘dread command’ (3.4.107–08). Deep into Act 4 he finds himself shamed yet again for dragging his heels, this time by the sight of Fortinbras’s army marching headlong to their doom, merely ‘to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name’ (4.4.18–19). And he voices his bewilderment at his inexplicable inertia once more in his last great soliloquy: ‘I do not know / Why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do”, / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do’t’ (4.4.43–46).