Reflections on the Hamlets Delay in Revenge
             If there are a thousand readers, there must be a thousand Hamlets. This wide-spread remarktells us that on the one hand, different people may have a quite different opinion while looking at the same thing; on the other hand, Shakespeare¡¯s Hamlet has a hard-to-define topic.
             Hamlet, written in 1601-1602, was the first of the greatest tragedies. Though the chief elements such as the story of murder and revenge, the appearance of a ghost, the performance of a play within a play, were nothing new, Shakespeare took all these and adopted the story of Hamlet the Prince of Denmark which had been the plot of an earlier play ¡°The Spanish Tragedy¡± by Thomas Kyd, and wrote his immortal masterpiece ¡° Hamlet¡±.
             Hamlet is the central character of the play. His character has remained a hard-to-answer puzzle for nearly 400 years. Is he firm or lightweight? Is his madness real or only pretended? Is the melancholy his nature or his moodiness? Is he afraid of no difficulties or is he always undecided? These kinds of questions confuse all the critics of Shakespeare of every generation. In the 17th century, Hamlet was considered as an eloquent, noble avenger. In the 18th century, he was not a heroic avenger, but an ordinary man. Then, Berinski, a Russian critic in the 19th century thought that Hamlet manifests the weakness of man¡¯s spirit. And this weakness is not his nature but the inevitable outcome from the inharmony between his ideal and the reality. Now in the 20th century, too many critics aired their opinions about Hamlet¡¯s character. Take Freud, the most famous psychoanalyst, for instance. He thought of ¡°Oedipus Complex¡± as the unconscious motivation of Hamlet. To me, every generation¡¯s knowledge as regards Hamlet reflects every generation¡¯s social psychology and ideological trend. But every generation can find identification, more or less, in the ima...