Action vs Inaction
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: The gap between deciding to act and actually acting, and the price the play makes its hero pay for thinking too well.
- Key Characters: Prince Hamlet, Fortinbras, Laertes, Claudius, Horatio.
- The Core Tension: Hamlet has the cause, the will and the means to act – and still he does not. Thought keeps getting in the way of the deed.
- Key Manifestations: The Ghost's charge in Act 1, Scene 5; the "conscience" speech in Act 3, Scene 1; the Act 4, Scene 4 soliloquy on Fortinbras's army; the contrast with men who simply do.
- Famous Quote:
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
(Act 1, Scene 5) - The Outcome: Hamlet acts only when events force his hand. The men who act without thinking get there first – and the kingdom passes to the one who never hesitates.
The Burden Laid on the Wrong Man
The trouble begins the moment the Ghost finishes speaking. Hamlet is handed a task – revenge – and almost at once he registers that he is the wrong person to carry it. The famous couplet that closes A1S5 is not a vow of action. It is a complaint about having been chosen at all.
Original
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All these events denounce my own inaction
And spur me to revenge! What is a man
If all he ever did throughout his life
Was sleep and eat? For then, he’s just a beast.
What makes Hamlet's situation a tragedy rather than a thriller is that he is not a coward and not a fool. He has, as he himself insists, "cause and will and strength and means" – every ingredient an avenger could want. The one thing he cannot manufacture is the simple, unreflecting movement from intention to act. The play opens with the burden laid on him and spends four acts watching him fail to lift it, not for want of motive, but because the same fine mind that produces the soliloquies also produces the delay.
This is the play's central irony. The qualities that make Hamlet the most articulate hero in English drama – his intelligence, his scruple, his refusal to act on anything he has not examined – are precisely the qualities that stop him acting. Action and intelligence, in this play, pull against each other.
Conscience Makes Cowards
Hamlet's most precise account of his own paralysis comes in A3S1, in the "To be or not to be" speech. He is talking, on the surface, about suicide and the fear of death. But the engine of the speech is a wider claim about how thinking itself disables the will. The more carefully a person weighs an act, the less able they become to perform it.
Original
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,...
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And so, awareness turns us into cowards;
And thus our natural drive to solve a problem
Recedes and fades through over-contemplation,...
"Conscience" here does not mean a moral sense of right and wrong. It means consciousness – self-awareness, the capacity to reflect. Hamlet is describing a kind of poison. Resolution has a "native hue," a natural colour and energy, and thought drains the colour out of it. The healthy impulse to act is left "sicklied o'er," pale and sickly, by the very process of considering it.
This is the closest the play comes to a diagnosis of its own hero. Hamlet is not weak. He is over-equipped. The "pale cast of thought" is what happens when a first-rate intelligence is pointed at a question that only a deed can answer. By the end of the speech, resolution has lost its colour and its name – it has become inaction in everything but label.
Thinking Too Precisely on the Event
By A4S4, Hamlet has begun to interrogate his own delay directly. Watching Fortinbras's army march off to fight for a worthless scrap of Polish ground, he is shamed into self-examination, and he reaches for an explanation. Is it forgetfulness? Cowardice? Or the specific intellectual habit of breaking an action down until there is nothing left to act on?
Original
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,...
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
By beast-like mindlessness, or cowardly
Over-contemplating what to do –...
"Thinking too precisely on the event" is the phrase that has launched two centuries of criticism. Hamlet names his own flaw with the same exactness that is the flaw. He cannot stop analysing, even when the thing he is analysing is his failure to stop analysing. The mind that should be planning the kill keeps turning inward instead.
He goes on to weigh the thought "which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward" – a piece of arithmetic that is itself a perfect example of the problem. A man about to act does not pause to divide his hesitation into fractions. The diagnosis and the disease are the same activity. Hamlet's tragedy is that he can see exactly what is wrong with him, and the seeing does not help.
Measured Against Men Who Act
The play does not leave Hamlet's inaction in the abstract. It surrounds him with men who simply do, and lets the contrast make the argument. Laertes, hearing of his father's death, raises a mob and storms the palace within hours. Fortinbras marches an army across a continent for a point of honour. Each is a mirror held up to Hamlet, and in each the same fact is reflected back: action does not require a perfect reason, only a willingness to move.
Original
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But being great
Does not require a monumental reason
To fight, but finding nothing much to fight for
When honour is at stake.
Hamlet's own conclusion convicts him. True greatness, he decides, is precisely the readiness to fight over "a straw" – over nothing at all – when honour demands it. Fortinbras will spend twenty thousand lives on ground "not tomb enough" to bury the dead. By that standard, Hamlet, with a murdered father and a usurped throne, has the largest argument imaginable and has done nothing.
But the play is too honest to let the comparison settle into simple praise of the men of action. Fortinbras's "argument" is an egg-shell; Laertes's decisiveness makes him easy meat for Claudius, who steers the passionate young man straight onto a poisoned blade. The men who act without thinking are not wiser than Hamlet. They are just faster. The play asks whether speed is the same as virtue, and quietly answers no – even as it shows, in the death of its hero, exactly what hesitation costs.
"For if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lecture on Hamlet, 1818
Key Quotes on Action vs Inaction
Quote 1
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And those endeavours, once thought so important,
Lose depth and influence as time ebbs by,
Resulting in inaction.
Quote Analysis: This is the climax of the A3S1 argument, and the phrase "lose the name of action" is the theme in miniature. Great undertakings – "enterprises of great pith and moment" – do not fail because they are wrong. They fail because too much consideration turns their current "awry," diverts the flow until the project is no longer recognisable as action at all. The metaphor is hydraulic: thought is a force that bends the stream of intention away from its target. Hamlet is describing, in the abstract, the exact thing the play makes us watch him do for five acts.
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'...
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A thought, which cut in four, is one-part wisdom
And three-part cowardice – I do not know
Why I’m still here without the task completed,...
Quote Analysis: Here Hamlet performs the very fault he is confessing. He takes his own hesitation and dissects it – "quartered" into a quarter wisdom and three-quarters cowardice – when a man on the edge of action would simply act. The line "I do not know why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do'" is the play's most naked admission: the task has been "to do" since Act 1, and it is still merely "to do." The deed exists only as a sentence in Hamlet's mouth, never as an event in the world. The arithmetic of self-blame is just one more way of not killing Claudius.
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,...
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Look at this massive and expensive army
That’s led by such a young and tender prince,...
Quote Analysis: The "delicate and tender prince" is Fortinbras, and the whole speech turns on the comparison. Fortinbras is no older and no stronger than Hamlet, yet he commits "such mass and charge" – men, money, lives – to a cause Hamlet considers worthless. The point is not that Fortinbras is right. It is that he moves. Where Hamlet has converted a real grievance into endless reflection, Fortinbras has converted a trivial one into an army. The contrast shames Hamlet precisely because it has nothing to do with the size of the cause and everything to do with the capacity to act on it.
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:...
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Because I have the will, the strength and means
To do it. I’m urged on by clear example:...
Quote Analysis: This is the line that closes off every external excuse. Hamlet lists what he possesses – "cause and will and strength and means" – and the list is complete. Nothing is missing that an avenger could need. If a man has the cause, the desire, the power and the opportunity and still does not act, the obstacle must be internal. The "examples gross as earth" – examples as plain and solid as the ground itself – are the men of action all around him. The speech is Hamlet eliminating every explanation for his delay except the one he cannot bear to name: that the failure is in him.
Key Takeaways
- Thought Is the Enemy of Action: Hamlet's intelligence is not a side feature of the play – it is the cause of the delay. The same mind that produces the soliloquies produces the paralysis.
- He Has Everything but the Deed: Cause, will, strength and means are all present. What is missing is the simple movement from decision to act, and that gap is the whole tragedy.
- Foils Make the Argument: Fortinbras and Laertes act without thinking; Hamlet thinks without acting. The play sets them side by side and lets the contrast do the work.
- Action Comes Only When Forced: Hamlet finally kills Claudius not through a plan but in the chaos of the final scene, when events leave him no time to think. The deed arrives the moment reflection becomes impossible.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why can't Hamlet act on the Ghost's command?
This is the oldest and most argued-over question in Shakespeare criticism, and the play deliberately refuses to give it a single answer. What it gives instead is a hero who knows he should act, wants to act, and repeatedly does not.
The facts are stark. The Ghost charges Hamlet with revenge at the end of A1S5. He does not kill Claudius until A5S2. In the four acts between, he has cause, opportunity and means, and uses none of them. He says as much himself in A4S4, where he reaches for an explanation and lands on the habit of over-analysis.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason...
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For when God gave us thoughts to speak our mind,
To plan based on the past, he didn’t grant us
These capabilities and godly thoughts...
The critical tradition has offered several diagnoses, and the striking thing is that none of them cancels the others. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1818 lectures, blamed what he called an "overbalance of the imaginative power" – a mind so vivid that thought smothers action before it can begin. On this reading Hamlet's flaw is not weakness but excess: too much reflection, not too little nerve.
A. C. Bradley, in his 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy, located the cause in melancholy – a profound, near-paralysing depression brought on by his father's death and his mother's remarriage, which drains Hamlet of the energy any decisive act would require. J. W. von Goethe, writing as early as 1796 in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, saw a great deed laid upon a soul unequal to it – a fine, sensitive nature crushed by a task that demanded a coarser man.
Twentieth-century criticism added a darker reading. Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and his follower Ernest Jones, in Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), argued that Hamlet cannot punish Claudius because Claudius has only done what Hamlet himself unconsciously desired – to kill the father and possess the mother. To strike Claudius would be to strike at his own buried guilt.
The play commits to none of these and to all of them. The delay is imaginative excess, melancholy, moral fineness and unconscious inhibition at once, and the refusal to settle the matter is itself the point.
What does Hamlet mean by "conscience does make cowards of us all"?
The line is often misread, because "conscience" no longer means in modern English what it meant for Hamlet. We hear "conscience" as the moral sense – the inner voice of right and wrong. Hamlet means something closer to "consciousness": self-awareness, the reflective faculty, the capacity to think a thing through before doing it.
His argument in the A3S1 soliloquy is that this faculty is itself disabling. Faced with any leap into the unknown – death, in the speech's surface argument, but action of any kind underneath it – the reflective mind imagines all the consequences and is frozen by them.
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
No traveller returns, and makes us ponder,
Concluding that we’d rather bear the pain
We know of than of that that we do not?
The logic is universal – "of us all" – but it applies with terrible force to Hamlet himself. The unknown "puzzles the will," ties it in knots, until we choose the familiar misery over the risk of an unfamiliar one. This is exactly Hamlet's relationship to revenge. Better the known torment of delay than the unknowable consequences of the deed.
A. C. Bradley (1904) read this speech as evidence of the melancholy that disables Hamlet throughout. Coleridge (1818) read the same lines as proof of the over-active imagination that, in his phrase, smothers the resolve before it can act. The two readings differ in cause but agree on effect: the speech is the play's clearest statement that for this hero, to think is to be unable to do. The "native hue of resolution" is healthy by nature; thought is the sickness that drains it pale.
How do Fortinbras and Laertes work as foils to Hamlet?
A foil is a character placed beside the hero to throw a particular quality into relief, and Shakespeare gives Hamlet two of them, each demonstrating the action he cannot manage. Both are young men who have lost a father; both are bound by the period's honour code to respond; both respond instantly.
Laertes, hearing of Polonius's death, returns from France, raises a mob and storms the palace inside a single scene. He does not pause to test the truth of the report, stage a play, or weigh his soul. He acts. Fortinbras is the colder example: he commits an entire army to a worthless patch of Polish ground purely as a point of honour, and his decisiveness is what carries him, untroubled, to the Danish throne at the play's end.
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,...
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Who’s driven by his own pretentious ego,
Just laughing in face of unseen danger,...
The line is double-edged, and this is where the foils become more interesting than a simple lesson in courage. Fortinbras "makes mouths at" – mocks, laughs at – the "invisible event," the unknown outcome. That is exactly what Hamlet cannot do; the unknown is what freezes him. But the same gesture also marks Fortinbras as thoughtless, his ambition "puffed" up and faintly ridiculous, spending lives on nothing.
This complicates the usual schoolbook reading. Critics in the Romantic tradition, following Coleridge (1818), tended to admire Hamlet's reflectiveness and see the foils as lesser men. A. C. Bradley (1904) was more balanced, noting that the play presents Hamlet's intellect as both his glory and his fatal weakness. The foils do not simply prove Hamlet should act more like them. They sharpen the question the whole play asks: is the man who acts without thinking really the better man, or merely the luckier one? Shakespeare lets both Fortinbras and Laertes survive longer than Hamlet without ever suggesting they are wiser than him.
Is "To be or not to be" really about action and inaction?
On its surface the A3S1 soliloquy is about suicide – whether it is nobler to endure suffering or to end it. But read in the context of the whole play, its deeper subject is the paralysis of the will, and suicide is only the sharpest case of a decision the reflective mind cannot make.
The structure of the speech is a man reasoning himself out of an act. He begins by framing a choice, weighs the unknown consequences, and ends exactly where he began – having done nothing but think. That is the shape of every Hamlet soliloquy, and it is the shape of his relationship to revenge.
Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,...
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Who’d bear such burdens,
To grunt and sweat their weary way through life,
Unless it was in fear of worse in death,...
"Fardels" are burdens, and the question – who would carry such weight rather than end it? – is answered by "the dread of something after death." Fear of the unknown keeps us "bearing" rather than acting. The speech never names revenge, but its mechanism is identical: the dread of a consequence not yet seen disables the deed.
T. S. Eliot, in his 1919 essay "Hamlet and His Problems," approached the play from an unexpected angle. He argued that the play fails to provide an "objective correlative" – a situation in the plot adequate to the enormous emotion Hamlet expresses. On Eliot's reading, Hamlet's feeling is "in excess of the facts," and his endless reflection is a symptom of an emotion the play cannot anchor in any single, actable cause. Whether or not one accepts Eliot's verdict that this is a flaw, it identifies something real: the speeches are larger than any deed could discharge, which is part of why no deed ever comes. The soliloquy is action-and-inaction precisely because it is a piece of thinking that takes the place of an act.
Does the play take a side – is action or inaction the wiser course?
The play is remarkably even-handed, and refusing to take a clean side is part of its greatness. It punishes Hamlet's inaction without ever endorsing the thoughtless action of the men around him.
The case against inaction is plain. Hamlet's delay does not keep his hands clean; it gets people killed. Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes and Hamlet himself all die, and a more decisive prince might have removed Claudius cleanly in Act 3 and spared most of them. By the standard of consequences, hesitation is catastrophic.
But the play is equally sceptical of pure action. Laertes acts at once and is steered, precisely because he will not stop to think, onto the poisoned blade that Claudius has prepared. His decisiveness is what makes him a tool. Fortinbras acts and prospers, but the play never lets us forget that his "argument" is an egg-shell and his triumph a matter of luck and timing as much as virtue. Action, in this play, is not the same as wisdom.
Critics have divided along this fault line for two centuries. The Romantics, led by Coleridge (1818), and to a degree Goethe before them (1796), treated Hamlet's reflective inaction with sympathy, even admiration – the tragedy of a soul too fine for a brutal task. Later critics such as A. C. Bradley (1904) held the two halves in tension, presenting Hamlet's intellect as simultaneously his greatness and his undoing. T. S. Eliot (1919) was harsher, treating the whole thing as an artistic problem rather than a noble flaw.
The deeper reading is that the play deliberately denies us the comfort of a moral. It shows that thinking too much is fatal and that acting too little is fatal and that acting without thinking is fatal too. What it will not do is tell us where the safe middle lies. The tragedy is not that Hamlet chooses wrongly between action and inaction. It is that the play offers no choice that does not end in a stage full of bodies.
How does Hamlet finally manage to act in Act 5?
The most important thing about Hamlet's eventual killing of Claudius is that he does not plan it. After four acts of soliloquy and scheme, the deed itself happens in a few seconds of pure reaction, with no time for the reflection that has disabled him throughout.
The change is signalled earlier in A5S2, in Hamlet's quiet conversation with Horatio before the duel. He sets aside the obsessive control of outcomes that defined the earlier acts and speaks instead of readiness – of being prepared for whatever comes rather than engineering it. The man who could not act because he thought too precisely has stopped trying to think his way to the perfect moment.
When the moment arrives, it arrives as chaos. Gertrude drinks the poison; Laertes names Claudius as the architect of the plot; Hamlet learns he himself is already dying. Only then does he strike – not from a plan but from the wreckage, in the one situation where there is no longer any room to deliberate. The deed Hamlet could never reason his way into finally happens when reasoning becomes impossible.
There is a bleak of irony here that the play means us to feel. Hamlet's revenge succeeds only at the cost of his own life and almost everyone else's. The capacity for instant action, when it finally comes, comes too late to save anyone, including him. A. C. Bradley (1904) read this final transformation as a kind of fatalistic calm settling over Hamlet, an acceptance that replaces the earlier turmoil. Whether one calls it growth or surrender, the structural fact is clear: Hamlet can only act once the conditions of action no longer permit him to think.
Is Hamlet's delay a flaw in his character or a flaw in the play?
This is the most provocative version of the question, and it splits the critical tradition cleanly in two. For most readers across four centuries, the delay is a feature of Hamlet's character – the very thing that makes him a tragic hero rather than a stage avenger. For a minority, most famously T. S. Eliot, the delay is a defect in the writing.
The traditional view treats the inaction as deliberate and meaningful. Coleridge (1818) saw it as the natural consequence of an over-imaginative mind; Bradley (1904) as the product of melancholy; Goethe (1796) as the crushing of a fine nature by a coarse task. On all these readings, the delay is psychologically true, and the play is a study of a particular kind of mind meeting a task it is unsuited to. The hesitation is the tragedy, not an accident of it.
T. S. Eliot's 1919 "Hamlet and His Problems" took the opposite line, and did so memorably. Eliot argued that the play is "most certainly an artistic failure," because Hamlet's emotion has no adequate cause in the plot – no "objective correlative." The hero feels far more than his situation warrants, and his endless, unfocused reflection is the symptom of an emotion Shakespeare could not successfully attach to the action. On this reading, the delay is not a window into Hamlet's soul but a crack in the play's construction.
The deeper reading is that Eliot's objection, even if one rejects his conclusion, points at something genuine. Hamlet's soliloquies really are larger than the revenge plot they are nominally about. But where Eliot saw a failure, most modern critics see the source of the play's permanent fascination. The "excess" of Hamlet's inner life over his outer task is exactly why audiences have found him the most human character in drama – a mind too vast for any single deed to discharge. Whether that mismatch is a flaw or the whole point is the argument the play has been generating, without resolution, for over four hundred years.
