Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/98

Rh “Rashly, And praised be rashness for it, let us know, Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, When our dear plots do pall; and that should teach us, There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.” The comments of Hamlet upon the death of Polonius, if they had been calmly spoken by a man holding the even tenour of his way through life, would have deserved the moralist's reprobation quite as much as his speech over the praying King. To us they tell of that groundwork of unsound emotion upon which the almost superhuman intellectual activity of the character is founded. In Hamlet's life-weary, melancholy state, with his attention fixed elsewhere, such

an event as the death of Polonius would have a very different effect to that which it would have had upon so sensitive and noble a mind, if its condition were healthy. His attention at the time is concentrated upon one train of ideas, his feelings are pre-occupied, his sympathies somewhat indurated to the sufferings of others, and his comments upon them are likely, therefore, to appear unfeeling.

The Queen indeed, with affectionate invention, represents to the King the very opposite view. She says “he weeps for what he's done;” his natural grief shewing itself pure in his very madness, like a precious ore in a base mineral, silver in lead ore. It is, however, not thus that Hamlet is repre sented “to draw toward an end" with the father of his

mistress, and to deposit the carrion.

The ideas which almost exclude the wrong he has done Polonius from Hamlet's thoughts, now become expressed with a vehemence inconsistent with sound mind.

The manner in

which he dallies with the idea of his mother's incest, using

images of the grossest kind—the blighting comparison of that mildewed ear, his uncle, with his warrior father—the vehe ment denunciation of his uncle—“a murderer and a villain, 2 G