Portraits Of Avengers--An Inter-Cultural Study Of Three Deep Motives For Hamlet's Hesitation

Hamlet' delay, a most controversial topic over the past four centuries, has aroused forever-heated debates by readers and literary critics, who are enchanted by the prince's perplexed humanity and tragic charm in the play. In-depth interpretations and explorations have been conducted through historical and social approaches and psychoanalyses. However, most of those analyses were confined to the western cultural background only. This thesis, therefore, would like to propose an inter-cultural view for another interpretation of Hamlet's delay by referring to Wuji Episode in Journey to the West(《西游记·乌鸡国》), another revenge story of how the late king has been murdered; how his ghost discloses all the evil of the usurper and finally how his son avenges him. More specifically, in such a comparative-cultural view, what lies deeply and profoundly beneath all the seeming similarities and essential differences in these two classics are the reflections of cultural affinities and variations between the West and China in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, namely, logics and reasoning vs. intuition, concept of religion vs. concept of magic, and differentiated outlooks towards death on the basis of different organization of time etc. Owing to those Chinese cultural constituents, i.e., intuitive thinking pattern, magic orientation and polychronic organization of time etc., none of the avengers in Wuji Episode are due be hesitant in their actions at all. In other words, once compared and contrasted with this other revenge story in classical Chinese culture, what underlies Shakespeare's Hamlet are also the deep cultural constituents or deep motives that account for the delay of the Danish prince, who stands for a new model man, a humanistic figure with scientific spirit and religious faith that found the isolated individual self not only confronted with difficulty in revenge but also confused by his failure to testify the suspectible ghost and his return both logically and religiously! Then and only then does the old revenge literature regain its vitality in an age of revival and changes.