Hamlet's Problematic Revenge: Forging a Royal Mandate provides a
new argument within Shakespearean studies that argues the oft-noted
arrest of the play's dramaturgical momentum, especially evident in
Hamlet's much delayed enactment of his revenge, represents in fact
a succinct emblem of the "arrested development" in the moral
maturity of the entire cast, most notably, Hamlet himself-as the
unifying disclosure and tragic problem in the play. Settling for
unreflective and short-sighted personal gratifications and cold
comforts, they truantly elbow aside a more considerable moral
obligation. Again and again, all yield this duty's commanding
priority to a childishly self-regarding fear of offending those in
nominal positions of power and questionable positions of
authority-figures, like Ophelia and Hamlet's fathers, for instance,
demanding an unworthy deference. While Hamlet fails to consider
with loving regard the improved well-being of the larger community
to which he owes his existence and, fails to interrogate the moral
adequacy of the Ghost's command of violent reprisal (two things he
never does nor even contemplates doing), "all occasions" in the
play "do inform against" him and merely "spur a dull revenge"-not,
as he interprets his own words, arguing the need for greater
urgency in his vendetta, but, instead, to "inform against" the
criminality of that very course itself. His revenge therefore can
be argued as "dull," not because he cannot summon the wherewithal
to enact it more bloodily, but because in obsessing about it
ceaselessly he remains unreceptive to its "dull" or "unenlightened"
opposition to the evil he hopes to eradicate. Hamlet does not
avenge his father; this book argues that he becomes him. Amidst a
wealth of previously unremarked figurative mirrorings, as well as
much of the seemingly digressive material in Hamlet within
Shakespearean studies, Hamlet's Problematic Revenge brings to light
a new interpretation of the tragic problem in the play.
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