I agree with Burnum [1] about Hamlet's relevance to our lives and clinical decision making, but I disagree with the characterization of Hamlet's inertia. Indeed, Hamlet spends most of the play vacillating, planning, and then failing to execute action. This does not represent confusion about the problems that need to be addressed, nor reluctance to "abandon ... halcyon student days," rather, it is a need to have to know for what motive.

It is unambiguously clear that the actions of Claudius demand redress: the murder of Hamlet's beloved father, regicide itself, the incestuous involvement of Hamlet's mother and Claudius, and the usurpation of Hamlet's claim to the throne. Hamlet's father's ghost's charge to "remember me," with the result that his "commandment all alone shall live/Within the book and volume of (Hamlet's) brain," reduces Hamlet to a mere appendage of his iconified father without purpose or existence of his own. Shakespeare confronts us with others of Hamlet's generation facing similar choices, all with bad outcomes. Laertes, avenging a murdered father, follows a path that culminates, by his own admission, in dying "by mine own treachery." Ophelia has a psychotic break, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are likened to a sponge in Claudius's mouth to be chewed and swallowed, and Fortinbras is off destroying innocent lives for meaningless land grabs.

After prolonged inactivity, only Hamlet faces the apparent meaninglessness of life and death and then, in the graveyard, comes to a recognition of himself and his place. He then takes rapid and decisive action. To act pointlessly, as did the others, is worse than not acting at all. I would commend his "delay" and apparent indecisiveness. He alone, as the prating Polonius admonished, had been "to thine own self ... true."