Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/101

86 this agony of awe that he feels himself so unnerved, that he entreats his father not to look upon him, lest he should be

thus rendered incapable of all action, and only live to weep. During the brief space of the Ghost's second appearance, Hamlet's extremity of fear can scarcely be overrated. Still it is the fear of awe, not that of horror which petrifies Macbeth in the banquet scene. Moreover, in Hamlet the reaction tends to tears, in Macbeth it is to rage.

There is something exquisitely touching in the regard which the poor Ghost shews towards the frail partner of his earthly state. The former injunction

“Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught.” had scarcely been obeyed ; and now the entreaty “O, step between her and her fighting soul,” is a fine touch of the warrior heart, whose rough and simple silouhette is thrown upon the page in those two lines of unsurpassable descriptive terseness. “So frowned he once, when in an angry parle He smote the sleded Polack on the ice.”

The Ghost, indeed, is a character as never ghost was before, So far from being a neutral it, a thing, the buried majesty of Denmark is highly personal in his simple Sclavonic majesty. Though he instigates revenge in the old viking, rather than in that of the Christian spirit, though he protests against the luxury and damned incest which defiled his royal bed, yet is he nobly pitiful to the wretched woman, through whose frailty the transgression arises. After the intercession of the Ghost, Hamlet's manner to his mother entirely changes. In his former reference to the incest, he makes her a full partner of the crime. In his subsequent one he represents the King as the tempter, and supposes her future conduct as that of “a queen fair, sober, wise;” and to the end of the piece he gives her his affection and confidence.

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