Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/32

 unlike Hamlet's own, are well commingled; one who can see the evil of the world, yet not grow world-weary; more of the antique Roman Stoic than a Dane. For Fortinbras Hamlet has the admiration which the man of ideas feels for the man of resolute action. In Claudius he might have perceived some of his own intellectual subtlety and reflective habit, but conjoined with grosser senses and an evil moral nature; and him Hamlet loathes with an impatient aversion.

Together with such an intellectual and such a moral nature, Hamlet has in him something dangerous—a will capable of being roused to sudden and desperate activity. It is a will which is determined to action by the flash and flame of an excitable temperament, or by those sudden impulses or inspirations, leaping forth from a sub-conscious self, which come almost like the revelation and the decree of Providence. It is thus that he suddenly conceives the possibility of unmasking the King's guilt, on the accidental arrival of the players, and proceeds without delay to put the matter to the test, suddenly overwhelms Ophelia with his reproaches of womanhood, suddenly stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, suddenly, as if under some irresistible inspiration, sends his companions on shipboard to their death, suddenly boards the pirate, suddenly grapples with Laertes in the grave, suddenly does execution on the guilty King, plucks the poison from Horatio's hand, and gives his dying voice for a successor to the throne.

Hamlet's love for Ophelia is the wonder and delight in a celestial vision; she is hardly a creature of earth, and he has poured into her ear almost all the holy vows