Hamlet: Action vs Inaction

Hamlet, act 3 (Speak daggers)	“I’ll speak daggers to her but use none”
Hamlet, act 2 (pidgeon)	“I am pigeon-livered and lack gall”
Hamlet, act 2 (thinking)	“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”
Laertes, Act 5 (treachery)	“I am justly killed with my own treachery”
Laertes, act 4 (pappy)	“Where is my father?”
Laertes, act 4 (revenged)	“I’ll be revenged most thoroughly for my father”
Hamlet, act 3 (proud)	“I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious”
Claude williamson, Hamlet (intellectual)	“Is a man too intellectual to be practical”
Coleridge 1930s (spur of moment)	“Hamlet is obliged to act in the spur of the moment”
Samuel Johnson (Instrument)	“Hamlet is rather an instrument than an agent”
Goethe, 1795 (hamlet, moral)	“Pure, noble and most moral nature”
Goethe, 1795 (Hamlet, soul unfit)	“Represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it”
Loreta Todd (impulsive, Laertes)	“He is an impulsive man of action”
GH Lewis 1800s (thought)	“Hamlet may be called the tragedy of thought”
Goethe, 1795 (Idealist)	“Hamlet is an idealist trapped in a world demanding action”
Hazlitt, 1800s (Eaten up)	“His powers of action have been eaten up by thought”

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