Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/71

56 at the same time assuring him that the Ambassadors from Norway are joyfully returned, and that he has found “the very cause of Hamlet's lunacy,” the King exclaims, “Oh speak of that, that I do long to hear;” thus bringing upon himself the retort courteous of the old man, that the news

respecting Hamlet should be kept to follow the pressing busi ness of the moment, as dessert fruit follows a feast.

From Polonius's exposition of Hamlet's madness, which in a manner so contrary to his own axiom, “that brevity is the soul of wit,” he dilates with such tediousness and empty flourishes of speech as to draw upon himself the rebuke of the Queen, “more matter with less art,” one would almost

think that Shakespeare had heard some lawyer full of his quiddets, quillets, and cases, endeavouring by the so phistry of abstract definitions, to damage the evidence of some medical man to whose experience the actual concrete facts of insanity were matters of familiar observation, but whose verbal expression had more pedantry than power. “I will be brief:

Your noble son is mad :

Mad call I it ; for, to define true madness, What is't, but to be nothing else but mad {"

In the following lines, the old man recognises madness to be a phenomenon, for which, like every other phenomenon, some cause or other must exist; and, moreover, that madness

is not in itself a distinct entity, something apart from the mind, but a defect in the mind. “Mad let us grant him then ; and now remains That we find out the cause of this effect ;

Or, rather say, the cause of this defect; For this effect, defective, comes by cause.” Hamlet's letter to Ophelia is a silly-enough rhapsody; of which, indeed, the writer appears conscious. an

It reads like

old letter antecedent to the events of the drama.

The spirit it breathes is scarcely consistent with the intense