Ultimate Lesson from Hamlet: Don't Procrastinate

Procrastination is part of human nature. Whether we want to deny it or not, we would be lying if we say that we had never done our work in a deadline-induced panic. We love to hold off until deadline day to submit college applications, and right now, we are writing blog posts with one eye on the clock. Our parents' advice to do things ahead of time comes through one ear and exits through the other. After reading Hamlet, however, we would be ignorant and heedless to continue procrastinating.

When Hamlet is aware of the circumstances of King Hamlet's death, he is extremely motivated to avenge his father: "Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge" (1.5). However, in the same scene, his procrastination begins: "The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right!"

Hamlet's procrastination, or "delay" as he calls it, only makes him suffer more. Some quotes:
"O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit" (2.2).
"What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?" (2.2).
"Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, and can say nothing" (2.2).

Later on, Hamlet seems to have forgotten his plan for revenge as he doesn't even know if he wants to live or die: "To be or not to be, that is the question" (3.1).

In Act 3, Scene 3, Hamlet has the perfect opportunity to kill Claudius, who is praying, but Shakespeare doesn't want a premature ending to the play and Hamlet even offers excuses for his indecisiveness: "Now might I do it pat, now 'a is a-praying, and now I'll do't. And so 'a goes to heaven, and so am I revenged. That would be scanned" (3.3). He concludes that killing his uncle while he is praying would be a "hire and salary, not revenge," and procrastinates once more: "Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent. When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, or in th' incestuous pleasure of his bed, at game a-swearing, or about some act that has no relish of salvation in't—then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, and that his soul may be as damned and black as hell, whereto it goes" (3.3).

At this point, even Hamlet's dead father is tired of waiting for his son to do something, as he appears to him (and Gertrude, who can't see the ghost) and tells him not to forget.

When Hamlet sees Fortinbras and his army at a plain in Denmark, he has the opportunity to reflect on his procrastination: "What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed ... Now, whether it be bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on th' event ... Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means to do't" (4.4).

In the end, Hamlet kills Claudius, but he also dies. He took the complicated path when he could have done it the easy way.