While Hamlet initially agrees to do so, he comes to doubt whether the ghost is truly his father’s spirit, or a devil sent to tempt him. He decides to stage a play reenacting the murder (the famous play-within-the-play titled The Mousetrap) to gauge Claudius’s response. When Claudius reacts with consternation, Hamlet is satisfied of his guilt. Hamlet’s next opportunity for revenge, however, occurs when Claudius is praying alone in his chapel. Hamlet does not kill Claudius because he believes that if Claudius is killed while praying for forgiveness, his soul will mount directly to heaven. During a later conversation with his mother, Hamlet becomes aware that someone is eavesdropping on them behind an arras, or tapestry. The prince draws his sword and kills the counselor Polonius in the belief he is the king.

Realizing the threat that Hamlet poses to him, Claudius sends him to England in the custody of two of the prince’s childhood companions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with a letter secretly ordering his death. Hamlet rewrites the letter to require the execution of his two erstwhile friends. He then returns to Denmark, where Ophelia, who is Polonius’s daughter and Hamlet’s former lover, has gone mad with grief and committed suicide. Ophelia’s brother Laertes begins an uprising against Claudius, but Claudius successfully redirects Laertes’s fury toward Hamlet. The youth challenges Hamlet to a fencing match. Though purportedly just an athletic contest, the duel has been arranged by Claudius and Laertes with murderous intent. Claudius has poisoned Hamlet’s drink, and Laertes has envenomed the tip of his foil.

During the fencing match, Gertrude dies after she drinks from the cup meant for her son. Laertes and Hamlet mortally wound each other with the poisoned rapier, which changes hands during the match. On the brink of death, Hamlet finally kills Claudius. Word arrives from England that Rosencrantz and Guild-enstern have been executed according to Hamlet’s plan. Horatio wishes to follow the dying Hamlet by committing suicide, but Hamlet asks him instead to live and tell his story. Fortinbras, the prince of Norway, takes over the kingdom, restoring order at the cost of Denmark’s independence.

The core question of the play is why Hamlet delays his revenge. As literary critic A. C. Bradley states, “But why in the world did not Hamlet obey the ghost at once, and so save seven of those eight lives?” (Bradley 2005: 69). (The seven lives, in order of demise, belong to Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet.) The psychoanalyst Ernest Jones called the mystery of Hamlet’s delay “the Sphinx of modern Literature” (Jones 1976: 22).

As Marjorie Garber observes, critics have a powerful identification with Hamlet (I assume this is because critics are themselves intellectuals) (Garber 2008: 201). Because we see ourselves in him, we see his reasons for delay as our own: Freud sees Oedipus, Goethe sees his own sorrowful Werther, and Nietzsche sees his Dionysian man. I see no reason to depart from these great predecessors in proposing an explanation inflected by my own professional background. So I contend that Hamlet’s delay can best be explained by his pursuit of perfect justice. I do not think Hamlet delays because he is sexually conflicted, weak, or nihilistic. I think he defers his revenge because he wants it to be perfect. This explanation justifies his delays without justifying the ends they serve.

My initial point is that there is not one delay, but two. They occur during what a modern trial lawyer might call the “guilt” and “sentencing” phases of the play’s action. First, Hamlet delays because he is uncertain of Claudius’s guilt. This is a period of approximately two months between the ghost’s appearance and the performance of the play-within-the-play. Only after The Mousetrap does Hamlet become convinced of Claudius’s guilt. The second delay is more brief and more consequential. It is the delay in which Hamlet forgoes the chance to kill Claudius while Claudius is praying in the chapel. Both delays can be explained by Hamlet’s desire for perfect justice.

Everything begins with the ghost. Stephen Greenblatt notes, “[t]he ghost in Hamlet is like none other—not only in Shakespeare but in any literary or historical text … It does not have very many lines—it appears in three scenes and speaks only in two—but it is amazingly disturbing and vivid” (Greenblatt 2001: 4). These qualities are in sharp evidence during the ghost’s first speech to Hamlet.

The ghost is in purgatory, the place where his “foul crimes” are “purged away” so he can enter heaven. The spirit says his torments are horrible, and we believe him in part because he describes them as indescribable.

The ghost is not just the object of punishment, but its agent. The ghost’s imperative is often summarized as follows: “If thou didst ever thy dear father love … Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!” (1.5.23, 25). Yet the ghost’s commandment is a good deal more specific. The ghost gives a meticulous description of both the crime and the proposed punishment:

On this account, Claudius poured poison into Hamlet Sr.’s ears, curdling his blood. The ghost’s tale, poured into our ears, is likewise bloodcurdling. The horror begins with the description of the poison’s physical effect: how “swift as quicksilver” the “leperous distilment” moved through “[t]he natural gates and alleys of the body.” The conflation of the sovereign body and the body politic, made frequently in Shakespeare, arises here in the comparison of valves and veins with “gates and alleys.” The sovereign has been poisoned—we now know why “[s]omething is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.90). Yet the physiological effects of the murder are as nothing compared to the religious ones. The ghost decries how he was “[c]ut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled.” Deprived of last rites, he is sent to final judgment “[w]ith all [his] imperfections on [his] head.” The descriptions of physical and religious corruption merge. The body morphs into a disgusting object, as if the king’s sins were surfacing—“a most instant tetter barked about / Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body.”

Three instructions follow. First, “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest.” Prince Hamlet must kill Claudius. Second, “howsomever [he] pursues this act,” Hamlet must not “contrive / Against [his] mother.” Finally, he must remember his father: “Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me.” Hamlet immediately agrees to the ghost’s commands—he asks to be emptied out and made into a pure instrument of revenge.

Upon cooler consideration, however, Hamlet’s shock cedes to skepticism, resulting in the first delay. This skepticism is justified, especially in historical context. Ghosts were widely seen as instruments used by the devil to lure the virtuous to perdition. Sir Thomas Browne wrote in Religio Medici (1643) that those “apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of Devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood and villainy” (Browne 1951: 43). More specifically, as students from Wittenberg, known in Shakespeare’s time as Martin Luther’s bastion of Protestantism, both Horatio and Hamlet would presumably have doubts about a ghost returning from Catholic purgatory. Horatio warns Hamlet that the ghost may intend to “draw [him] into madness” (1.4.74). Even in his preliminary agreement to the ghost’s commands, Hamlet ponders where to place him: “O all of you host of heaven … And shall I couple hell?” (1.5.92–93). On reflection, he begins to take the latter possibility seriously: “The spirit that I have seen / May be a de’il, and the de’il hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape” (2.2.533–535).