Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/76

Rh moment thrown aside. The noble and generous native nature is nowhere made more manifest than in his reception

of these friends of his youth, men to whom he once adhered, neighbours to his youth and humour. Until his keen eye discovers that they have been sent for, and are mean in struments, if not spies, in the hands of the king, he throws off all dissimulation with them, greeting them with right

(hearty and cheerful welcome. Yet, how soon his melancholy A peers through the real but transient cheerfulness.

The world

is a prison, “in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons; Denmark being one of the worst.” If it is not so to his friend, yet is it so to him, from thinking it so, for “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so : to him it is a prison.” The real prison, then, is his own mind, as, in the contrary mental state, a prison is no prison, for “Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage.” Hamlet feels that he could possess perfect independence of circumstance, if the mind were free.

“Ros. Why, then your ambition makes it one ; ’tis too narrow for your mind. Ham. Oh God. I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreams.”

The spies sound him further on the subject of ambition, thinking that disappointment at losing the succession to the CrOWn

may be

the true cause of his morbid state.

In this

intention they decry ambition : “it is but a shadow's shadow.” Hamlet replies logically enough, that if ambition is but a shadow, something beyond ambition must be the substance from

which it is thrown. If ambition represented by a King is a shadow, the antitype of ambition represented by a beggar must be the opposite of the shadow, that is the substance. “Then are our beggars, bodies; and our monarchs, and