speare 38). These lines also reveal Hamlet's low self-regard in comparison to the reverence with which he recalls his father. This storm of powerful thoughts and feelings--positive and negative juxtaposed--for Claudius, for his father and mother, and for himself, predispose him to both immediately believe the Ghost and then to subsequently entertain doubts about the Ghost's honesty.
The major conflict in the play is not between Hamlet and Claudius, but between two forces in Hamlet's soul--the drive for justice for his father and revenge against Claudius, and the fear of action which freezes the first drive. He is a thinking man who has been directed by destiny to commit murder against the murderer of his father, and he is determined to do all the thinking he can possibly do before events make his murderous deed absolutely unavoidable. However, it is his philosophical nature which both struggles against the fact of the murder of his father by Claudius and at the same time compels him from the very beginning to pursue the truth which makes his own murder of Claudius a necessary r
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