Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/31

 other minds; it refines contempt into an ingenious art; it puts on and puts off a disguise; it assumes and lays aside the antic disposition; it can even use frankness as a veil,—for sometimes display is a concealment, as happened with Edgar Poe's purloined letter. Hamlet the subtle is pre-eminently a critic—a critic of art, a critic of character, a critic of society, a critic of life, a critic of himself.

The intellectual dexterity and versatility of Hamlet are united with a moral nature essentially honest. He will not hire a couple of assassins to despatch his father's murderer. He will not himself take action until he has evidence of the King's guilt. Like the Amleth of Saxo, he is a lover of truth concealed in craft. His emotional nature, though deeply disturbed by his mother's lapse from loyalty, and liable to passionate fluctuations, is sound af heart. He reverences the memory of his great father, a man of action, whom Hamlet resembles as little as he resembles Hercules. He is bound to Horatio by ties of the deepest esteem and affection. He is kind to the poor actors. He expends his utmost energy in an effort to uplift and redeem his mother's faltering spirit. He is over-generous in his estimate of Laertes. He has loved Ophelia as a vision of beauty and innocence, and is proportionately embittered when he supposes that he has deceived himself and been deceived. But all his inclinations are toward those who are unlike himself He is complex and self-tormenting; Ophelia seems all simplicity and innocence; he is oppressed by melancholy thought; she is "something afar from the sphere of his sorrow." Horatio is a man whose blood and judgment,