Hesitation/Indecision in Hamlet Hamlet, the hero of Shakespeare's dramatic tragedy of the same name, does everything to establish the absolute guilt of King Claudius – and then it seems to ruin everything. He hesitates at the prayer scene when the king could easily be eliminated. Let's talk about this problem of hesitation or indecision on the part of the protagonist. In “Acts III and IV: Problems of text and staging” Ruth Nevo explains how the protagonist is “confused” in both the prayer scene and the wardrobe scene: in the prayer scene and in the wardrobe scene his tools [Hamlet's] are overthrown. His mastery is confounded by the inherent tendency of human reason to jump to conclusions, to fail to distinguish appearance from being. He, of all people, is trapped in the fatal and deceptive labyrinth of appearances that is the phenomenal world. Perhaps never has the finiteness of the mind been so dramatized as in the prayer scene and the wardrobe scene. Another motto of the Player King is wonderfully realized in the nexus of ironies that constitute the peripateia of the play: "Our thoughts are ours, their ends are not ours." In the sequence of events that follow Hamlet's elation at the success of the mousetrap and culminate in the death of Polonius, all things are the opposite of what they seem, and the action achieves the opposite of what was intended . Here, in the vicissitudes of the play, Hamlet's fatal error is represented, his fatal error of evaluation, which constitutes the crisis of the action, and is the directly precipitating cause of his own death, of seven other deaths and of madness. of Ophelia. (52)David Bevington, in the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet, eliminates some possible reasons... half of the paper... film, television and audio performance. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. P., 1988. Levin, Harry. General introduction. The bank of the Shakespeare River. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. Nevo, Ruth. "Acts III and IV: problems of text and staging." Modern critical interpretations: Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Rpt. from Shakespeare's tragic form. Np: Princeton University Press, 1972.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.