Hamlet leaves a trail of bodies in his wake not because he is a monster like Macbeth, but because he is less of one, displaying hesitancy at the thought of killing his uncle for whatever reason as most of us probably would in a similar circumstance.
If Hamlet were Macbeth, the tragedy never would have happened. In both plays, the characters are granted knowledge of a secret through supernatural means very early in the proceedings, but their reactions could not be more different. When the witches inform Macbeth that he will be king one day, he takes the first possible opportunity to make it happen, conspiring with his wife to kill Duncan and seize the throne as soon as he can, literally the first night the king is under his roof and within his reach, but when Hamlet’s father’s ghost reveals that he has been killed by his own brother, Claudius, and his throne has been stolen, urging his son to take revenge and seek justice, he refuses to act with the same urgency. While we cannot say for sure, it seems intentional that Shakespeare set up both stories with at least some evidence neither Macbeth nor Hamlet were being lied to or deceived by their respective supernatural messengers, giving them a reason to believe what they have been told rather than merely hallucinating or being subject to devilish tricks. The witches hail Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor before claiming he will be “king hereafter,” but he has not yet been granted the title. Once he is, the prophecy becomes much harder to doubt. In Hamlet, the ghost appears to others, including perhaps his only friend, Horatio before the Prince and they too insist the vision must be his father returned from the dead, telling him the ghost had on the very same armor when he “the ambitious Norway combated” and he looked the same as he “So frowned…once when, in angry parle, He smoke the sledded Polacks on the ice.” The combination of the details provided by the ghost, the belief of others that the ghost is the real thing, and Hamlet’s own misgivings about Claudius and his mother, make it close to overwhelmingly clear the apparition is telling the truth.
Otherwise, their respective paths diverge based on their own unique personalities, leading to two radically different plays that somehow still manage to lead to similar outcomes including both Hamlet and Macbeth meeting their own doom in an unexpected fashion. In Macbeth, his actions drive the rest of the plot as maintaining his new throne requires ever more brutal, despicable acts, including killing one of his formal allies in Banquo and wiping out an entire family in Lady Macduff, but the inverse is largely true in Hamlet. Instead, it is the prince’s lack of action that causes the plot to be driven around him rather than by him, forcing him to react to events arranged by his uncle and Polonius rather than create them, and yet the bodies begin to pile up leading inevitably to his own demise all the same. The connections and inversions are even more interesting when you consider that Hamlet’s cause is just because his father was murdered, his mom takes up with the murderer, and his kingdom has been stolen. If he were to have killed Claudius as quickly as Macbeth does Duncan, we would not consider it a cold blooded murder, but a righteous revenge, returning things to their natural state before the actual cold blooded murder committed by his uncle. Macbeth, however, is the cold blooded killer himself. He has no claim on the throne and no cause to kill Duncan. He does so because he craves power and to maintain it, must continue to commit crimes. While some attribute the initial craving to the proddings of his wife and there is some truth to the idea he might not have done the deed on his own, the implication doesn’t make the cause more just or the crime any less. In a similar sense, many reasons have been posited for Hamlet’s almost inexplicable lack of action, everything from wanting to be certain of the charge against his uncle to being too much of a Christian to judge his uncle in this mortal realm, but that doesn’t change the outcome.
While Hamlet dithers in his righteous cause, he spurns Ophelia to toy with his uncle and her father Polonius, he kills Polonius, driving Ophelia to suicide, and though it happens off screen, signs the death warrant for his college friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Unlike Macbeth, these are not events to which we can ascribe all the fault to Hamlet himself, declaring him simply to be a cold blooded killer in the same sense as Macbeth. From his point of view, Hamlet has every reason to believe Ophelia has been ensnared in her father and his uncle’s scheme and the audience, privy to their own conversations on the matter, knows that to be the case. Though he is certainly cruel to her, telling her repeatedly to “get thee to a nunnery” and to avoid having children, he doesn’t directly harm her in any way. While Polonius dies at his hand later in the plan, it is also the direct result of his scheming, putting himself where he should not be for his own ends. Rather than minding his own business, he’s hiding in Hamlet’s mother’s bedchamber, eavesdropping on their conversation, making his death something of an accident. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die more directly by Hamlet’s hand, figuratively when he forges the letter, but they too are not without any guilt. They carry an original letter from his uncle to the English king, telling him to kill Hamlet himself. Though it’s unclear whether they were aware Hamlet was being sent to his death, they play a part in it and have been scheming with Claudius against him, making their deaths at least somewhat justifiable. Regardless, Hamlet is not without blame in any of these cases even if he believes something is rotten in Denmark as he claims. He could certainly have let Ophelia down easier, even potentially confided in her, he could’ve looked behind the drapery before he stabbed Polonius, and he could’ve confronted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about their potential scheming long before he dispatched them to their deaths.
Since he did not, Hamlet’s death at the conclusion is not surprising or dramatically unsatisfying. We are not shocked and at least on some level, we believe he deserved it to the extent that anyone does, that it had to happen this way. While he isn’t a monster like Macbeth, or perhaps more accurately, the monster Macbeth becomes as blood begets blood, he is at least somewhat culpable in the deaths of multiple people including his former lover and while Shakespeare tempers his own death by having Claudius meet his end as well leading to some victory however pyrrhic, there’s more than enough of a justification for the catharsis typical of the genre. At the same time, we can consider what would have happened if Hamlet had acted rather than procrastinated – indeed if he had been more like Macbeth, more of a monster – and we can reasonably conclude that no one else would have died if he immediately took his revenge on Claudius.
Thus, we are presented with an irony and an irreconcilable contradiction. Hamlet leaves a trail of bodies in his wake not because he is a monster like Macbeth, but because he is less of one and in that regard, what we might consider a more moral person, displaying hesitancy at the thought of killing his uncle for whatever reason as most of us probably would in a similar circumstance. Putting this another way, it’s not an exaggeration to say that morality, in this telling by Shakespeare, or even prudence at a minimum leads specifically to unnecessary death and destruction, nor is there a ready way to reconcile that position with our expectation of the opposite, that morality leads to justice and spares people violence. Even if you expand the scope of the discussion to another of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Othello the answer doesn’t become any more apparent. Othello, like Hamlet and unlike Macbeth, is not a monster or at least, not much of one. He does not on his own decide to harm Desdemona or even to doubt her. Instead, he is tricked into the course by one of Shakespeare’s greatest villains, Iago. Left to his own devices – as we can imagine Hamlet left to his own devices if Claudius were not a villain himself – the tragedy never would have occurred. Iago, however, takes advantage of his love for Desdomona, and twists into something evil, feeding Othello lies that she is having an affair with Michael Cassio. While the audience is aware from the very beginning that Iago is the chief villain in the play, Othello is not. He realizes the truth too late, after Desdemona is dead.
In some ways, this makes him both more and less culpable than Hamlet at the same time. Othello loves Desdemona, but either doesn’t trust her or perhaps more precisely, doesn’t trust himself. Similar to Hamlet, he could’ve easily spoken to her earlier in the play and prevented the tragedy from unfolding, but unlike the Danish Prince, he does not know who the villain is from the start, believing Iago is a trusted advisor rather than a scheming traitor. Hamlet is therefore directed towards the target at the onset while Othello is unaware there’s a target in the first place. This, however, doesn’t make the underlying morality any easier to reconcile or any less ironic. Whatever benefit of the doubt we give Othello for not knowing Iago is leading him to disaster, is removed by his blind willingness to accept what Iago tells him and believe the worst about Desdemona, the same way any benefit we give Hamlet for not immediately killing Claudius is overshadowed by the collateral damage he allows to occur and participates in to at least some extent. Either way, the audience is left with trying to understand how a man who refuses to immediately kill another and another who is duped can lead to such tragedy. Othello we might more easily understand, knowing how love that burns too hot can warp a person’s mind and prompt them to do things they would not normally have done, concluding that his passion overwhelmed his reason and his morality, but Hamlet remains far more inscrutable and inexplicable.
What, short of being more of a monster could he truly have done to prevent the tragedy? Even if he had treated Ophelia better, acted less rashly when he discovered someone lurking in his mother’s bedroom, and somehow managed to convince Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of his cause, the odds of him succeeding at all of them are exceedingly low, especially as we can assume Claudius and Polonius would’ve launched other schemes to get rid him. Ultimately, the only thing he could’ve done was to kill his uncle first, leading us back to the contradiction and the irony. Once again, we cannot say for sure, but the fact that the question cannot be reconciled certainly seems intentional, as though Shakespeare were making a statement about how the real world does not conform to our binary notions of right and wrong. You can do right in principle – and pretty clearly, hesitating to play judge, jury, and executioner is what most people would consider right – and still do wrong. Alternatively, the answer could simply be that justice requires swiftness, and the delay of it causes chaos. Indeed, Hamlet notes in the To be or not to be speech that are forced to suffer the law’s delay, giving credence to the notion that swiftness is an imperative, and yet that’s not particularly satisfying either, especially when justice in this case rests on the will of one person. If justice requires immediate execution with no hesitation, many of us would not consider it just in the first place, leaving the contradiction in place. Perhaps, however, we should not be surprised that in a play about the many contradictions of humanity, like an angel in some ways, a beast in others, the contradictions of morality are also at the heart.
