Why does Hamlet wait so long to take revenge, and how have critics explained it?

Nobody agrees. In the first act, a ghost tells Hamlet that his uncle Claudius murdered his father and demands revenge, and Hamlet vows to do it. Then, for most of the play, he doesn't. Critics have offered several answers.

There are reasons inside the plot. Hamlet remains uncertain of the ghost's reliability, so he has the actors stage a murder like his father's to study Claudius's reaction. When Claudius runs from the room, Hamlet has his proof. Then he finds Claudius praying and does not kill him, reasoning that killing a man at prayer will send him to heaven.

But the larger debate is about character. Before the late 18th century, critics saw Hamlet as either mad or not, a hero or not. Then criticism began to focus more on character than on plot, and the 19th-century Romantics started to see his delay as a trait, not a plot device. A common way of putting it: unlike Othello and Lear, who are undone by hasty errors, Hamlet's fatal flaw is hesitation.

Later answers turned psychological: Freud developed part of his Oedipus complex from analysing Hamlet, and more recently Tom MacFaul has asked whether Hamlet fears that Claudius is his real father.