After ReadingThere is a simple way to summarize Hamlet: a man thinks himself out of action. From beginning to end, Prince Hamlet wanders between the heat of impulse and the paralysis of reason, and dies not by his own design but by sudden, chaotic accident. As a man of the world, he fails. But his failure opens onto something far bigger than any revenge plot — questions about existence, meaning, and what it even means to act that human beings have never stopped asking.
Does Hamlet Lack Courage?
Critics have long debated whether Hamlet lacks what the ancient Greeks called thymos — the spirited, honor-driven energy that moves heroes to act. It’s a fair accusation on the surface. His tragedy does seem to stem from an inability to do what needs to be done. But this reading flattens a more complicated picture.
Greek heroes like Achilles drew their strength from a radical indifference to their own fate. Hamlet’s situation is far messier. His instinct for revenge collides with the moral hesitations of a Christian worldview, and his confidence in human reason is haunted by the ghost of something older and darker. The result is not cowardice, but a man caught between two worlds, unable to fully belong to either.
So let’s ask the question directly: is Hamlet actually lacking in spirit and passion?
If we define thymos generously — as a person’s deep sense of what is right, what is honorable, what deserves to be defended — then Hamlet has plenty of it. His passion shows up not just in anger or impulsive violence, but in the fierce loyalties and personal codes he carries throughout the play.
Consider three moments.
In Act III, Scene 4, Hamlet hears movement behind a curtain and drives his sword through it without hesitation, killing Polonius. When he discovers he has killed Ophelia’s father by mistake, he feels almost nothing — no guilt, no softening. He turns straight back to his fury at his mother. There is something almost Herculean in this moment, a raw, dangerous energy that cuts against the brooding image we usually carry of Hamlet. Reading it, you feel a sudden charge of life.
Later, at Ophelia’s funeral in Act V, Hamlet cannot bear watching Laertes grieve more dramatically than he does. He leaps into the grave and declares his love in the most extreme terms possible, challenging Laertes to physical combat. Love, for Hamlet, is tied to masculine honor — something that cannot be shared or outperformed by another man.
And at the very end, dying from poison, Hamlet fights Horatio for the cup that would end his friend’s life too. His concern in that moment is not for Horatio’s safety in any tender sense — it is for his own legacy. Tell my story, he says. Let the world know the truth. Even at death’s door, his pride and his sense of honor burn clearly.
What’s striking is that this fire never goes out, even as Hamlet’s philosophy darkens toward fatalism and resignation. Thymos, it seems, is not something he loses. It simply keeps getting suppressed — by thought, by doubt, by the enormous weight of the questions he cannot stop asking.
The Trap of Too Much Thinking
Here is the real irony of the play: Hamlet does not complete his revenge through clever planning. He completes it in a final desperate burst of passion, after he realizes he has been poisoned and has nothing left to lose. The revenge that all his scheming and hesitation never achieved is accomplished in seconds, on pure instinct. Shakespeare may be making a quiet argument here — that political will ultimately requires action, and that endless deliberation doesn’t refine action so much as dissolve it.
What holds Hamlet back is not a lack of intelligence or courage. It is his addiction to thinking itself.
He is not a medieval king like his father, who acted from clear codes of duty and tradition. He is not a modern pragmatist like Fortinbras, who marches forward without existential doubt. He is something in between and belonging to neither — a Renaissance humanist who has thought his way into a corner. His inner life is too rich, too restless, too honest to let him simply do.
When Claudius murders his brother and marries Gertrude, Hamlet doesn’t just lose a father and a throne. He loses faith in the entire moral order of the world. The corruption he sees around him seems to confirm every dark suspicion about human nature — that greed and lust will always win, that the world is indeed “an unweeded garden” and “a prison.” From inside that vision, it is almost impossible to believe that one person’s actions could actually change anything.
This is where Hamlet’s famous soliloquy lives — not as a personal death wish, but as a genuine philosophical crisis. To be or not to be is a question about whether existence itself is worth enduring. The classical tragic hero answers yes, hurls himself forward, and burns brightly. Hamlet cannot quite get there. The light of heroic action never tempts him enough.
Religion adds another layer of paralysis. Hamlet is steeped enough in Christian thinking to feel the weight of its prohibitions. Revenge is not sanctioned by God; a man should not make himself “God’s instrument of punishment” on his own authority. Most famously, when Claudius is alone and praying, Hamlet has the perfect opportunity to kill him — and stops. If Claudius dies mid-repentance, his soul may be saved. Hamlet cannot allow that. What looks like moral scruple is also, in a deeper sense, evidence that he takes the afterlife more seriously than the present one. He is a man haunted by souls, including his own.
Two Extremes, One Human Condition
Hamlet often makes me think of another figure from the same era — Don Quixote. In my mind they form two magnificent poles of the same world.
While Don Quixote charges windmills and sheep herds, roaring into the wind, Hamlet stands alone on the castle battlements asking what existence means. These may be the two most symbolically loaded images in all of Western literature. One man never thinks; the other never stops. One acts without meaning; the other finds meaning without acting.
Both are, in their own way, heroic. And both pay a price for their particular greatness.
Hamlet fails as a man of action, but earns a permanent place among literature’s greatest thinkers. Don Quixote never reflects for a moment, yet his wild, absurd bravery moves readers to tears centuries later. The tension between these two figures is not a problem to be solved. It is the human condition itself — the endless, unresolved oscillation between throwing yourself into the world and stepping back to ask why.
Hamlet’s tragedy is that he was born for the second of these, into a story that demanded the first.
