I will merely say that Shakespeare having decided in
the case of 'Macbeth' to adopt the machinery he found in Holinslied,
and in the case of 'Hamlet' the machinery he found in the old
'Hamlet,' seems to have set himself the task of realising the
situation of a man oscillating between the evidence of two worlds,
the physical and the spiritual--a man in each case unusually
sagacious, and in each case endowed with the instinct for 'making
assurance doubly sure'--the instinct which seems, from many passages
in his dramas, to have been a special characteristic of the poet's
own, such for instance as the words in _Pericles_:
For truth can never be confirm'd enough,
Though doubts did ever sleep.
Why is it that, in this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon
charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion
of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo
saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character
in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so
profoundly touched, the workings of his soul so thoroughly laid bare,
that we seem to know him more completely than we know our most intimate
friends.
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