ABSTRACT
Hamlet's dilemma initially is that the values which his world accepts and which it expects him to accept have no apparent effect on the behaviour he sees around him. Shakespeare, by facing Hamlet with the call to action which the Ghost's demand for revenge initiates, sets him on a play-long inquiry into the values of his world in his effort to discover a valid basis on which action of any kind may be undertaken. Horatio first reports that Fortinbras intends to go to war to recover the lands lost by King Hamlet's victory over King Fortinbras. This assumption is a part of the melancholy which Shakespeare is at pains to assign Hamlet from the outset. His experience is a tragic one; to see Hamlet, as Spencer's argument forces him to do, as a man shattered by the recognition that things are not as they seem is to make the play pathetic, not tragic.
