throne The ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his murder Normally a typical hero would plan immediate action But Hamlet does not He is confused about whether the ghost is truly his father or an evil spirit trying to mislead him He thinks The spirit that I have seen may be a devil This hesitation makes Hamlet different from traditional revenge plays which focus more on action than on thought Hamlet s Overthinking and Delay Unlike the heroes of traditional revenge plays Hamlet spends a lot of time thinking He is not a man of action He thinks and overthinks but is unable to decide whether to kill his uncle or not He suffers from mental pain In his famous speech he says To be or not to be that is the question Here Hamlet wonders whether it is better to live and suffer or to die and end all pain His mind is full of questions and thoughts so he cannot act immediately This long inner debate adds a psychological depth that was new and unusual in Elizabethan drama Thus Hamlet is a revenge play with a thinking hero not a fighting one Moral Struggle Hamlet is not cruel by nature He feels a strong sense of morality When he finds Claudius praying he gets a chance to kill him But he stops himself Hamlet says Now might I do it pat now he is praying He fears that killing Claudius during prayer will send Claudius s soul to heaven Moreover Hamlet s delay comes from his moral struggle He wants to make sure his revenge is right not sinful This kind of moral reasoning is not found in common revenge plays So Shakespeare presents a moral hero in this play not just a vengeful one full of rage Shakespeare shows that real revenge is not simple when the heart is full of doubt and moral thinking Realism Shakespeare adds realism to the story Hamlet s madness Ophelia s death and the tragic end of many characters show the real results of revenge In old revenge plays the hero s final revenge often feels victorious But in Hamlet the revenge destroys everything Hamlet kills Claudius but he himself dies too His mother Gertrude Laertes and even the innocent Ophelia die in the process Just before his death Hamlet says these final words The rest is silence The play teaches that revenge does not bring peace it only creates more pain and death To sum up Hamlet is an unconventional revenge play The play focuses more on Hamlet s doubt inaction and moral struggle This revelation of Hamlet s psychology makes him the most human character Shakespeare ever created At the same time this play becomes a different kind of revenge tragedy and Shakespeare s finest