Image Credit: Ferwa Razzaq
Steven Yu
Read the Faculty Introduction
Procrastination – the bane of college students across the globe. The tantalizing pleasures of Youtube and the immediate social gratifications of Facebook are all too alluring for the average student, especially when the alternative is a five to seven page essay about that old drab Shakespeare. And yet the title character of what most people believe to be Shakespeare’s crowning achievement, Hamlet, is probably the best-known procrastinator of all. In her paper, “Tragic Flaw in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” scholar P. Indira Devi argues that “Shakespeare’s tragic hero Hamlet’s fatal flaw is his failure to act immediately to kill Claudius, his uncle and murderer of his father” (2). Although the ghost of Hamlet’s father orders Hamlet to kill his uncle Claudius in Act I, our hero waits until the king is undeniably guilty before he ends his uncle’s life. Despite Hamlet’s eventual success in killing Claudius, Devi argues that his “procrastination, his tragic flaw, leads him to his doom along with that of the other characters” (2).
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