1. Hamlet waits to kill Claudius because at the time that he sees Claudius, he is praying, and if he is confessing his sins, they will be forgiven and he will instantly gain entry into heaven. But that would be much better than living on Earth with the guilt anyway, so of course a vengeful Hamlet wouldn’t want that. He wants the worst punishment possible for Claudius, which would be thus induced by dying during an act of sin, such as being in bed with Gertrude. Claudius gave no mercy to King Hamlet when he killed him to confess his sins before, and Hamlet must be further punished now by not being allotted into heaven. It makes me wonder how long Hamlet was going to wait after he got back from England to fulfill his plan of killing Claudius
2. In feigning madness, Hamlet was able to take some of the accountability off him for being a reasonable person. If he was insane when he murdered Claudius, no one could have blamed him for not adhering to the morals he’s been raised on and such. Also, one can tell that insanity was sort of taboo in the era, because after Polonius was killed the identity of the killer was kept secret from as many people as possible, because the court was under the impression of his insanity. Also, when Ophelia became insane (this was real insanity because she being a weak character and the people who controlled her all abandoned her at once), not even her brother found out about it until he returned home. Being insane makes committing crime much easier because one doesn’t suffer quite as many consequences.
3. Since Freud was wrong about a great number of things, I don’t believe that Hamlet and Gertrude had an Oedipal Complex going on, just that the movie interpreted it that way. I mean, his obsession with his mother’s sexual behavior I believe stems from the uneasiness that anyone would have seeing their parents with another significant other. No one here wants to have sex with the other. Hamlet probably just wants things to be the way they were. I think the portrayal of Ophelia represents a very real young female of that era: timid, controlled, and delicate. In the book The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes is enraged to find out that his former fiance married his best friend only a month after he supposedly “died”, staged by his best friend to obtain his fiance. It is later discovered that she was pregnant with Dantes’ child, and married out of desperation to avoid scandal and shame. This was what women had to do back then to save their reputations. There was no room for them to be strong. I also think that Hamlet did love Ophelia, probably because she didn’t talk much and was a good listener–perfect for when you have a lot to say like Hamlet does. Part of me acknowledges that he is disappointed in humanity and now hates her, but another part believes that he just wanted to spare her from the world he was going to live in after he murdered Claudius. She would never be allowed to marry a criminal, and an insane one at that, and if she did, she would lose her status and her dignity for it.
4. I think that if the story had played out differently and Hamlet died before he could kill Claudius, that Claudius would’ve committed suicide anyway because he would’ve killed the woman he loves and his nephew, and thus that would’ve had an additive effect on the already heaving guilt laying upon him. He would’ve had nothing to live for, and with Fortinbras closing in, no land to rule over, either.