Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/76

 others must take the initiative. The very expression which Hamlet uses in that frenzied burst of passion on parting with the Ghost, "While memory holds a seat in this distracted globe," is suggestive of a rotund and corpulent person. We can not conceive of the phrase-culling poet applying it to the narrow caput, for instance, of Master Slender, but must believe that Shakespeare kept well in mind the personnel of his hero; in fact, when did he ever forget that important item in the description of his creations! Indeed we are very soon again reminded of the characteristic physical development of the Prince by the expression Ophelia makes use of when she applies the term "bulk" in her sad description of Hamlet's visit to her closet.

Bulk! the very word Shakespeare employs to describe the ponderous Wolsey—"His very bulk take up the rays o' the beneficial sun."

Ophelia had taken an accurate survey—she notes the disorder of his garments, mentions that he is pale (a symptom of anæmic adipose), but gives no hint that he has "fallen away vilely," which would have been the first thing to attract the attention of a young lady who believed one mad for the love of her. No, his "bulk" is evidently undiminished either by love or lunacy.

As with Ophelia, so with all the persons who address or describe him, none make any comment which would suggest a thin or haggard appearance. When Polonius describes to the King the course of the seeming madness, he confines himself exclusively to the mental analysis, and makes no mention that the Prince's body has succumbed to the malady. When the King drinks to him, it is not to his better health or better wits, but to his "better breath"! And the Queenmother, watching him anxiously during the passage-at-arms with Laertes, makes the exclamation which we have taken as the keynote of our theory, "He's fat and scant of breath." And then, with instinctive maternal tenderness calls to him, "Here, Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brow"; which he not heeding, she repeats, "Come, let me wipe thy face."

Can we not see the perspiration trickling over the broad, heavy cheeks as we read these lines? It was surely from experience that he spoke of "sweating and grunting under a weary life."

That he is consciously represented as feeling the impediment of the weight of his own flesh is clearly discerned by the frequent references to it. A gaunt, thin, wiry, or even an ordinary muscular man, would not be apt to describe his flesh as "too solid," or to enumerate as one of the serious ills of humanity "the grunting and sweating under