Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/123

108 poignant ills that flesh is heir to. His demeanour to Ophelia, when he first puts on his antic disposition, and which she so graphically describes, not less than his own avowal at her grave, that “twenty thousand brothers could not make up his sum of love,” point to the existence, not of “trivial fond records,” but of a passion for her, both deep and constant ; a passion thrust rudely into the background indeed, but not extinguished, or even weakened, by the more urgent emotions of revenge for his father, of shame for his mother, of scorn and hatred for his uncle.

The character of Hamlet

would have been incomplete if the element of love had been forgotten in its composition. Harshly as he may seem to treat his mistress, this element adds a warm sienna tint to

the portraiture, without which it would have been not only cold and hard, but less true to the nature of the melancholy sensitive being delineated. There is little trace of ambition in his character; for, although he makes the King's having stepped between the election and his hopes one of the list of his injuries, his com

ments upon the manner in which this was done savour rather of contempt for his uncle's ignoble means of success, for the manner in which he filched the crown, and was “a cutpurse of the empire and the rule,” rather than of any profound disappointment that the election had not fallen upon himself. Indeed, this character has been painted in dimensions far exceeding those of the sceptred rulers of the earth. Ambition would have dwarfed him to the type of a class; he stands forth the mighty poetical type of the race. It is this universal humanity of the character which lies at the root of its wonderful reality and familiarity. Hamlet seems known to us like an old friend.

“This is that Hamlet

the Dane,” says Hazlitt, “whom we read of in our youth, and whom we seem almost to remember in our after years.”

“Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle