Hamlet’s «recoil movement»

The essay deals with the problem of Hamlet’s “inaction”: he vows to avenge his father's death at the beginning of the play, but delays the fulfillment of his oath until the last act. There are many different explanations for Hamlet's procrastination, most of them based on everyday logic, common sense, psychology and psychoanalysis. The author explores Hamlet's "inaction" in the light of the socalled "recoil movement", a device defined in a broad sense as the implementation of some action by first carrying it out in the opposite direction, and only then in the intended direction. In this sense, the embodiment of an action at a symbolic level is the opposite to its implementation in real life. Before some event takes place in reality, it is first expressed figuratively, in the form of a metaphor, ekphrasis or miniperformance. A special case of the "recoil movement” is the theatrewithinthe theatre design. Before killing Claudius in revenge for his father's death, Hamlet, nephew to the king, stages "The Mousetrap", a play within the play, in which his theatrical double Lucianus, “nephew to the king", kills the duke. The murder scene staged by Hamlet is, in fact, his "recoil movement" before the real murder is committed in the main action. The author argues that the "recoil movement" is a recurrent literary device to effectively express the theme of Hamlet’s “inaction”.