What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays is that the action we expect to see,

particularly from Hamlet himself is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain
knowledge about what he is doing. The play poses many questions that other plays would simply take
for granted. Many people have seen Hamlet as a play about indecisiveness, and thus about Hamlet’s
failure to act appropriately. It might be more interesting to consider that the play shows us how many
uncertainties are lives built upon, and how many unknown quantities are taken for granted when people
act or when they evaluate one another’s actions.

Directly related to the theme of certainty is the theme of action. In Hamlet, the question of how
to act is affected not only by rational considerations such as the need for certainty, but also by
emotional ethical, and psychological factors. Hamlet himself appears to distrust the idea that It’s even
possible to act in a controlled, purposeful way. When he does act, he prefers to do it blindly, recklessly
and violently. The other characters obviously think much less about action in the abstract than Hamlet
does, and are therefore less trouble about the possibility of acting effectively.

In the aftermath of his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and over the
course of the play he considers death from a great many perspectives. He ponders both the spiritual
aftermath of death, embodied in the ghost, and the physical reminders of the death. Throughout, the
idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and uncertainty in that death may bring
the answers to Hamlet’s deepest questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine
the truth in an ambiguous world.

Style in Hamlet frequently functions as an extension of character, the way characters speak
gives us insight into how they think. This observation is especially true for Hamlet himself, who speaks
more than one-third of the play’s total lines and whose linguistic style changes depending on context.
Hamlet is at his most philosophical when he delivers the monologue that beings with his famous
question: “To be, or not to be?”

Like all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet is written mostly in verse, but over 30% of the lines
are in prose, which is the highest percentage of any of the tragedies. One reason for the high amount of
prose is that Hamlet has more comic scenes than any of Shakespeare’s other tragedies. Shakespeare
preferred to use verse when he was tackling serious themes, and prose when he was writing comedy, so
in Hamlet he switches often
 Hamlet’s frequent switching between verse and prose is part of what makes the style of the play
feel evasive. Hamlet’s facility with both prose and verse, and tendency to alternate between the two
styles, also underscores the sense of him as a character who is of two minds; or who is not quite sure
who he is, so he adopts different speaking manners trying to figure out how to really sound like himself.
Another reason why Shakespeare switches between verse and prose is to mark the difference between
careful speech and disordered speech.