‘Hamlet’ and the Circumference of Action

When Coleridge says that Hamlet's tragedy is owing to his failure to realize that ‘action is the chief end of existence’, when Dr. Johnson says that the prince is ‘throughout the whole play, rather an instrument than agent’, each is noticing the extent to which the nature and meaning of action by human agency is the pivot on which Shakespeare's play turns. Among modern critics, Maynard Mack has commented on Hamlet's central concern with action: he says, ‘“Act” . . . I take to be the play's radical metaphor. It distills the various perplexities about the character of reality into a residual perplexity about the nature of an act.‘ I see ‘act’ as not just a metaphor, in Mack's sense that the play uses its concern for action to imply something about the larger issue of reality itself, for I think Hamlet expresses what may be a deeper insight, that action may not only ‘represent’ reality, but, in some sense that the play tries to define, is reality, as Coleridge suggests.