Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/30

 length. The swift and subtle wit that had its play at the Mermaid Tavern was now incarnated in one of the creatures of Shakespeare's imagination.

Hamlet is not the exponent of a philosophy; he has, it is true, a remarkable power of reflection and a tendency to generalise, but he is not a philosophical thinker who seeks to co-ordinate his ideas in a coherent system. Perhaps Ulysses, perhaps Prospero approaches nearer to the philosopher, but neither Ulysses nor Prospero is a wit; and Hamlet is a wit inspired by melancholy. He is swift, ingenious, versatile, penetrative; and he is also sad. And when Shakespeare proceeded to follow the story in the main as he had probably received it from Kyd, it turned out that such subtlety overreached itself—which Shakespeare recognised as wholly right, and true to the facts of life. Hamlet's madness is not deliberately assumed; an antic disposition is, as it were, imposed upon him by the almost hysterical excitement which follows his interview with the Ghost, and he ingeniously justifies it to himself by discovering that it may hereafter serve a purpose. But in truth his subtlety does not produce direct and effective action. Hamlet is neither a boisterous Laertes, who with small resources almost effects a rebellion in revenge for a murdered father, nor a resolute Fortinbras, who, mindful of his dead father's honour, can march through danger to victory. Hamlet's intellectual subtlety sees every side of every question, thinks too precisely on the event, considers all things too curiously, studies anew every conviction, doubts of the past, interrogates the future; it delights in ironically adopting the mental attitudes of