[Page 112.] The idea of Hamlet is conscious plenitude of intellect, united with exceeding fineness and fulness of sensibility, and guided by a predominant sentiment of moral rectitude.

STRACHEY (1848)

(Shakespeare's Hamlet: An Attempt to find the Key to a great Moral Problem by Methodical Analysis of the Play. London, 1848, p. 44.)—Observe how Hamlet's generalisations are really drawn from the excessive brooding over his own character and circumstances, and only afterwards applied to the men and things about him. It is plainly he himself who is the original of this his description of the man in whom either nature or circumstances have unduly developed some one tendency of the character, to the injury of the proper and rational balance and harmony of the whole, and who, in consequence of this one defect, for which he is not responsible, and should be rather pitied than blamed, is looked on with disparagement by the world, however excellent all his other qualities may be. Coleridge has not noticed how exactly this description agrees with his own estimate and explanation of Hamlet's character, and the unobserved coincidence is a strong confirmation, if any can be needed, of the true insight of the great critic.

[Page 51.] The development of Hamlet's character is so rapid, that it cannot be considered as the mere ordinary opening out of the story and action of the play. The successive appearances of Hamlet on the stage are not (as in the case of other characters) merely the successive pages in a book, in which we read what has been written there long before; but the enormously quick growth, before our very eyes, of a plant subjected to the forcing action of tropical rain and sun. In all Shakespeare's varieties of characters there is none in which he has chosen to draw the man of genius so purely and adequately as in Hamlet; in Hamlet we see genius in itself, and not as it appears when its possessor is employing it in the accomplishment of some outward end; and this genius bursts forth with a sudden and prodigious expansion, into the regions of the pure intellect, as soon as its quiet course through its previous channel of the ordinary life of a brave, refined, and noble-minded prince-royal was violently stopped up by the circumstances with which we are familiar. Hamlet now shows himself in that character which is properly,-though not according to the popular appropriation of the word,-called skeptical. Partly because he is cut off from all legitimate practical outlet for his intellectual energies, partly from the instinctive desire to turn away from the harrowing contemplation of himself and his circumstances, he puts himself into the attitude of a bystander and looker-on (σKÉTTIKOS) in the midst of the bustling world around him. And like other such skeptics he finds it more and more difficult to act, as his knowledge becomes more and more comprehensive and circular,—to take a part in the affairs of a world of which he seems to see the whole; and like them, too, he throws a satirical tone into his observations on men, who, however inferior to him in intellect, are always reminding him that he is dreaming while they are acting.

[Page 63.] I have endeavored already to point out that we can neither assert that Hamlet is mad, nor that his mind is perfectly healthy; much confusion and misapprehension about the character of Hamlet have arisen from thus attempting an impossible simplification of what is most complex. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the small critic who thinks he has only to rule two columns, with mad' at the top of one, and 'sane' at the top of the

other, and then to put the name of Hamlet in one of the two. Hamlet, like all real men, and especially men such as he, has a character made up of many elements, ramifying themselves in many directions, some being healthy and some diseased, and intertwined now in harmony, now in contradiction with each other. And, accordingly, it presents different aspects to different observers, who look from opposite points of view, though each with considerable qualifications for judging rightly. We have just seen the view taken by Ophelia, whose deep love, and woman's tact and sentiment, can best appreciate the finer and more delicate features of Hamlet's character, though she, perhaps, exaggerates the extent of the untuning of his reason, from the influence of her own fears and of her father's declaration that he had gone mad. The shrewd, clear-headed King, with his wits sharpened by anxiety, considers the question from the side of its practical bearing on his own interests, and sees that as far as these are concerned Hamlet is not mad, but most dangerously

sane.

[Page 77.] The speeches of the Ghost, and of the King and Queen in the Interlude, with the real Queen's behavior at the latter, give sufficient, though negative, evidence of her innocence of the murder; while Hamlet's whole conduct in the scene [with his mother] would be preposterous if he had any doubt of that innocence:for how could he reprove the guilt of the second marriage, and pass over that of the murder, if the Queen had been a partaker in this? She must have known facts which might reasonably excite her suspicions after the event, and perhaps, from her neither pressing for an explanation, nor attempting a refutation of Hamlet's implied charge against her present husband, such suspicions may have passed through her mind. But nothing is more universal (though often nothing more puzzling) than that characteristic of the female mind which, even in grave and thoughtful women, and much more in the light and trifling, enables them to receive impressions, and make observations, without bringing them before their minds in distinct consciousness. Women feel and act with an intuitive wisdom far superior to that of men, but they have not the same power of reflecting on their feelings and acts, and translating them into the shape of thoughts. The Queen's want of any clear and distinct views and opinions on this occasion' is in perfect keeping with her whole character, and at the same time it helps the action of the Play far better than her admission to a knowledge of Hamlet's designs, for it would have been madness for him to have trusted them with so weak a person, and one so much under the influence of the King.

[Page 84.] There is something very poetical in Ophelia sharing her Hamlet's destiny, even in the very form,-a mind diseased,—in which it has come upon him. Her pure and selfless love reflects even this state of her beloved; no cup is so bitter but that if it is poured out for him she will drink it with him. Nay, she, the gentle, unresisting woman, drains to the dregs that which his masculine hand can push aside (at least for a time) when he has but tasted it. United as their hearts were by love, this madness of Ophelia brings her closer to Hamlet than any prosperity could have done. So thoroughly feminine a being could never have understood the self-conscious wretchedness of Hamlet's gloomy moods, but now she is made to feel it in her own person. I do not, of course, mean that this would practically be an additional qualification for her as a wife to Hamlet, but that it heightens to the utmost the beauty of the tragic picture of a love which is to end, not in marriage, but in death. There is more to be felt than to be said in the study of Ophelia's character, just because she is a creation of such perfectly feminine proportions and beauty.

[Page 100.] Hamlet has come once more into the King's presence, not with any plan for the execution of his just vengeance, but with what is much better, the faith that an opportunity will present itself, and the resolution to seize it instantly. It does present itself, when he finds that he has in his hand a deadly weapon, unbated and envenomed by the King's own device, and when at the same moment he is spurred on by hearing that his mother and himself are already poisoned; he sees that the hour is come, recognizes the command he waited for, and strikes the blow. If this be the true view of the closing act of Hamlet's career (and, as I have asked before, does any other explain all the circumstances equally well?), we must not only utterly reject the notion that Hamlet kills the King at last to revenge himself and not his father, though we may allow that the treachery to himself helped to point the spur which was necessary to urge him on to instant action,—but we must also come to the conclusion which I proposed to prove by this inquiry into the whole plot and purpose of the Play,-that Hamlet does not, as Coleridge and other great critics have asserted, ' delay action till action is of no use, and die the victim of mere circumstance and accident.' True it is that he delays action till it is of no use to himself, and has allowed his chains to hang on him till the time for enjoying liberty and life is past and it is doubtless a part of the moral of the Play that we should recognize in this defect in Hamlet's character the origin of his tragic and untimely fate. He ought to have lived to enjoy his triumph, but surely he has triumphed, though only in death. If he had not triumphed, if he had not done his work before the night fell, but had been a mere idler and dreamer to the last, could we part from him with any feeling but that of the kind of pity which is half blame and contempt? And is not our actual feeling, on the contrary, that of respect as well as sympathy? Do we not heartily respond to Horatio's

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince;

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!'

There is something so unpretending, and even homely (if I may apply the word to such a state of things) in the circumstances of Hamlet's death, that it does not strike us obviously that he dies for the cause to which he has been called to be the champion. Yet so it is.

REV. DR MOZLEY (1849)

(The Christian Remembrancer, vol. xvii, January, 1849, p. 174.*)-[After the revelation by the Ghost, Hamlet] has a vivid sense of a particular wrong which has been committed, and he vows, as a religious task, its punishment. But now comes in the philosophical element in him. It occurs to him that, after all, this dreadful act, carried out with such successful artifice and self-possession, is but a sample of a vast system of wrong and injustice in this visible state of things. The King and Queen represent to his mind a great evil power, or tyranny, resident in the system. The court of Denmark, the scene of their crime and prosperity, is the world; its business and festivity, in which his father's fate is forgotten, the world's stir and bustle burying thought, and covering up wrong as soon as done; its courtiers, the idle and careless mass of mankind who look on as spectators of injustice, and do not concern themselves with it. Now all things expand to his mind's eye, and no one

For the admirable article from which these extracts are made I am indebted to my friend, Dr INGLERY. ED.

wrong deed retains him; he rises from the single to the generic, and from the concrete to the abstract; and he thinks of a system, and a wholesale scheme of things beneath the sun. He can think of nothing but he instantly thinks of the whole world. Denmark is a prison, and the world is a prison. If the world is grown honest, then is doomsday near.

'The time is out of joint :-O cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right.'

In all his soliloquies he deals in generals, and harps upon the discords and burdens in the order of things here as a whole. Upon this generalizing vein an unsettlement of will with respect to his task of vengeance immediately follows. For, after all (he seems to say), what is the good of it when it is done? This deed of violence is only one out of a thousand. You may adjust a particular case, but the wrong system goes on; it is out of your reach; do what you can you cannot touch it; and true evil, impalpable and ubiquitous, still mocks you like the air. To set one case right is only to commit yourself to do the same with respect to others, ad infinitum, and to enter upon an impossible task. Thus the work of vengeance lags; he takes it up and lays it down again, according to his humor; he plays with it, and, when he might easily execute it, puts it off for an absurd reason, which had he been practically earnest would not have weighed a feather with him. Upon the basis of the philosopher he erects the child again; an assumed volatility, waywardness, and indifference express the hopelessness which a large survey of things has produced in him. The lofty ruminator within exhibits himself as a jester and an oddity without; and, not content with levity, he assumes madness, as if to enable himself to enjoy a fantastic isolation from the world and human society altogether, and to live alone within himself. And when at last he does execute his work, he seems to do it by chance, and from the humor of the moment more than from any constancy of original purpose. Such appears the explanation of Hamlet's weakness and irresoluteness. So true is it that a mind may easily be too large for effectiveness, and energy suffer from an expansion of the field of view. . . . .

For success in action a certain narrowness and confinement of mind is indeed almost requisite. If a man is to do any work well, he must be possessed with the idea of that work's importance. He has this idea of necessity strongly so long as the particular scene in which he is is the whole world to him, and therefore, while he thinks this, he is effective; but once enlarge his vision, and show him that his field of labor is only the same with a thousand others, and that he himself is one of a class containing thousands; make him, that is to say, realize the world and its vastness, and he ceases to be absorbed in his task, and is tempted to unconcern and disrelish for it; and thus the class of what are called able men, in the departments of public business or trade, may be observed as a whole to have the idea of the immense importance of their several departments even to excess, and advantageously so,—a wise providence, securing, by the exclusive pretensions of each department of the world's business, a most effective pledge for the safe and careful administration of the whole, and converting the ignorance and narrowness of mankind individually to their great benefit as a body.

The stimulus of narrowness, then, being requisite for vigor in action, Hamlet wants vigor, because he is without it. His want of vigor does not proceed from a want of passion, for he has plenty of that, but from a disproportionate largeness of intellect. He has not too little feeling, but too much thought. He is never satisfied with, never rests in, feeling, however strong, but carries it up immediately into

the intellectual sphere. The quickest impulse, by some twist of his mind, takes immediately the expansive form of some general contemplation. He is always thinking of the whole of things, and any one work seems nothing. As the air we breathe is not all air, and true courage has an ingredient of fear in it, the intellect should part with something of its own nature to qualify itself as proper human intellect. It should yoke itself contentedly with a wholesome narrowness in a compound, practical, and intellectual being. Its largeness tends, without such check, to feebleness. The mind of Hamlet lies all abroad, like the sea,-a universal reflector, but wanting the self-moving principle. Musing, reflection, and irony upon all the world supersede action, and a task evaporates in philosophy.

MRS LEWES (1860)

(The Mill on the Floss, Book VI, chapter vi, p. 355. New York, 1860.)—' Character,' says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—' character is destiny.' But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

KENNY (1864)

(The Life and Genius of Shakespeare, London, 1864, p. 379.)--We cannot help thinking that the perplexity to which we are thus exposed is founded on conditions which, from their very nature, are more or less irremovable. It has its origin, as it seems to us, in two sources. It is owing, in the first place, to the essential character of the work itself; and in the second place it arises, in no small degree, from the large license which the poet has allowed himself in dealing with his intrinsically obscure and disordered materials.

ness.

All Nature has its impenetrable secrets, and there seems to be no reason why the poet should not restore to us any of the accidental forms of this universal mysteriousThe world of art, like the world of real life, may have its obscure recesses, its vague instincts, its undeveloped passions, its unknown motives, its half-formed judgements, its wild aberrations, its momentary caprices. The mood of Hamlet is necessarily an extraordinary and an unaccountable mood. In him exceptional influences agitate an exceptional temperament. He is wayward, fitful, excited, horrorstricken. The foundations of his being are unseated. His intellect and his will are ajar and unbalanced. He has become an exception to the common forms of humanity. The poet, in his turn struck with this strange figure, seems to have resolved on bringing its special peculiarities into special prominence, and the story which he dramatised afforded him the most ample opportunity of accomplishing this design. Hamlet is not only in reality agitated and bewildered, but he is led to adopt the disguise of a feigned madness, and he is thus perpetually intensifying and distorting the peculiarities of an already over-excited imagination. It was, we think, inevitable that a composition which attempted to follow the workings of so unusual an individuality should itself seem abrupt and capricious; and this natural