The speed and slowness of time impact decisions and lead to many different outcomes. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, time is a very important aspect of the play. The timing of King Hamlet’s death and Hamlet’s choices thereafter all highlight the importance of both taking action and delaying actions. Hamlet’s hesitation with avenging his father’s death along with the queen’s decision to quickly marry her dead husband’s brother not only emphasizes the importance of choices, but also how the timing of these choices leads to other decisions. Author Eric Levy states that Hamlet and the other characters’ choices are chaotic and add emphasis to the idea that “time is out of joint” and needs to be set back in place (1.5.196).
Hamlet grieves about the chaotic timing of his mother’s marriage. He believes it is of “most wicked speed! To post/ with such dexterity
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In the moment she tries to return them because of her father’s orders, he is contemplating the complexities of life and death and is already at a fragile point of being. Because Ophelia decided in that moment to confront Hamlet, he is cruel and tells her that “[he] loved her not” (3.1.115). His words that are a result of his pent up anger due to his mother’s incestuous and rash wedding decisions, lead to a series of reactions that dictate the lives of certain characters. As a result, Ophelia begins to go mad and eventually is believed to have “willfully seek[ed] her own salvation” because she cannot handle the burdens of Hamlet’s words (5.1.1). However, during her funeral, he claims that the does in fact love Ophelia and that “forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum” (5.1.255). Despite his words towards her the night she returned the letters, he does love her, indicating that the Ophelia’s madness and eventual death was a result of chaotic