Sarah Fornace
“To act or not to act or to have acted to be acting or to have an action been done or to…”: The conflicts of “action” within Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Hamlet is not simply a play about delay, but about the complicated temporality of action. Certainly, the character Hamlet spends the most of the play deciding if he should act and debating this question philosophically in long soliloquies. With a few exceptions, the accumulation of death through violence and active killing (typical to the revenge tragedy) does not happen until the very end of the play. Yet for a play about delay and philosophical contemplation, the word “action” or “actions” occurs often, specifically it occurs twelve times throughout. This discussion of “action” and enacting of delay is a conflict within the play. The conflict around the word action is also reflected in the specific use and occurrence of this word in the play and in the word’s definition itself.
There is a temporal disjuncture in the use of the word action in Hamlet. This duality of “action” in time is reflected in its OED definition. According to the first definition in the OED, action is "the process or condition of acting or doing (in the widest sense), the exertion of energy or influence…”. (OED, s.v. “action” I.1) The etymological description’s first citation of this word is dated 1393 and a later etymological citation for this definition is a Shakespearean quote from Henry IV Part II, which is an earlier play than Hamlet. A later definition of action in the OED is "a thing done, a deed. Not always distinguished from act, but usually viewed as occupying some time in doing, and in pl. referred to habitual or ordinary deeds, the sum of which constitutes conduct." (OED, s.v. “action” I.3a, emphasis from the OED) The first etymological listing for this definition is from1600 and the second listing is actually from Hamlet, namely “And enterprises of great pith and moment,/ With this regard their Currants turne away,/ And loose the name of action.” (III. i. 88-90)
The first definition of action is associated temporally with present time. Action is a process and refers to the doing or making or exerting of something. So even if the word is referring to something in the past or the future, it involves a sense of the present in that the movement or deed is occurring specifically at that time. The action is occurring in the present of that future or past. On the other hand, the other definition (3a) is associated temporally with the past. While it does occupy a time in doing and thus has a slight sense of a present time in which it needs to occur, this definition refers to “action” as something “done” as a “deed.” So in this case, the movement has already been made or the influence already exerted. The process of this second definition of action has already been completed. This tension between the past and the present within the definition of the word action is reflected in the themes of Hamlet. Hamlet questions the nature of revenge and tragedy and what place a past action can have in the lives of the current world. Hamlet as a revenge protagonist is exerting present influence for a past deed that cannot be undone, namely that death of old Hamlet. At the outset of the play, both Gertrude and Claudius are admonishing Hamlet to set aside the events of the past and to change his current behavior. The obsession with a past event and the extent to which that determines the present proceeding is involved in the disparity between mourning and melancholia. Action is used at once in both temporal senses of the word in the idea of revenge keeping the wounds “still green.” (Bacon, Of Revenge). The current action is used as a way to relive the past action. The collision of past and present in the play also exists as a physical metaphor in the presence of the ghost of Old Hamlet.
The tension between action (as a present process) and contemplation is a major theme of the play. In a soliloquy during Act II, well after Hamlet has promised to revenge his father, he discusses conscience as something that stifles action. “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/…And enterprises of great pitch and moment/With this regard their currents turn awry,/ And lose the name of action.” (III.i.87-90) Action is also involved in the question of seeming and the contrast between appearance and reality. Hamlet associates action with seeming and outward appearance and performance. During Hamlet’s first lines in his first appearance on stage he says "These indeed `seem", / For they are actions that a man might play; / But I have that within which passeth show.” (83-85) Action is contrasted with interiority, which encompasses contemplation and thing and feeling. Thus Hamlet views the actions of Claudius as an intentional attempt to obscure his interior nature with “And pious action we do sugar o'er/ The devil himself.”(III.i.50-51) In this case, Claudius’s action is dissociated from and opposed against his true nature. The plural meaning of the second definition of “action” as “nature” or the sum of “habitual deeds” indicates a correspondence of action with the nature of a man. The disparity between the two is also one of Hamlet’s philosophical queries. (Notably, the word nature occurs 27 times in the play.)
The concept of action is important in Hamlet as a revenge tragedy. It is the accumulation and escalation of actions, as “the exertion of energy or influence” and counteractions that drives the plot of revenge forward. For Seneca, whose classical revenge tragedies influenced early modern drama, revenge is a symptom of anger, which is an emotion driven by action. In his work entitled De Ira (On Anger), Seneca characterized anger as the most destructive emotions and aligned it directly with action. “…but this (anger) consists wholly in the action and impulse of grief, raging with an utterly inhuman lust for arms, blood, and tortures, careless of itself provided it hurts another, rushing upon the very point of the sword, and greedy for revenge even when it drags the revenger to ruin with itself.” (Seneca, Minor Dialogues, 48) The interplay of both temporal senses of the word action is integral to the revenge tragedy and its reliance on done deed and responding action in the present (or in the case of Hamlet, current planning, which is an action, for a future deed, an operation occurring in the present time of that future). The completed and done action has reciprocal effects by engendering action in the current sense of the word. This is seen in Hamlet in that the death of the elder Hamlet has already occurred at the outset of the play. Yet the movements of Hamlet during the current unfolding time of the play are motivated by this death and his attribution of it to Claudius.