Something Touching the Lord Hamlet [pp. 29-41]

30 "SOME THING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." [Oct.,
about two centuries of commentary. Doubtless to that gentle
lady so did appear the princely lover, who chided her in brusque
speech, and with rough denials dismissed her from his presence.
But I cannot help thinking that the exegesis which credits Hamlet the Dane (as we have him in the First Folio) with madness,
indecision, a disjointed and diseased will, or other insignia of a
mind diseased, is drawn not so much from a desire to corroborate Ophelia as from a certain finical overstudy of the crude
"Hamblett" of Belleforest, or that earlier Saga of a rude and
formative literature, the "Amleth" of Saxo Grammaticus; if,
indeed, it be anything else than a supercilious and redundant
sapiency and show of profundity in the commentator himself.
That our average Shaksperean commentator is given to overmuch "letting of empty buckets into empty wells" is very familiar criticism. There are many commentaries to write and
very little to write about, and the temptation to archaeological
minutiae on the one hand, or aesthetic rhapsody on the other,
is perhaps too strong for resistance. But a ruthless sweeping
away of both alike will, I think, reveal the Hamlet that Shakspere himself wanted; and this Hamlet, I think, will turn out a
very different sort of person from the one the commentators
manufacture for us.
Prince Hamlet-as we have him in the First Folio-seems to
me a manly, punctilious, and rational gentleman, with a legally
balanced mind, conservative in method and tendency, with a lawyer's caution and respect for the conventional and established
order of things; above all, suspicious of intuitions, surmise, and
guess-work. Far from beinginfirm of purpose, like that whilom
Macbeth who let "I dare not wait upon I would"-who dared
not to think, much less to look upon what his own hands had
wrought-here was, it seems to me, a man whose deliberate
and solemn judgment, once committed to an act, was suffered
neither to relax nor hurry its due issue and performance. Surely
that was an impatient and impertinent ghost who came a second
time from his prison-house to complain of the "almost blunted
purpose" of such a man as this! He had taken a prince's word,
this ghost, that while memory held its sway his message should
be remembered, and should have rested in the assurance. For
the prince had weighed long and considered deeply before giving
his word or putting any reliance upon or believing in ghosts at all.
H-e is rather disposed, on the whole, to jeer at the very idea of
such things as unpent spirits, released from their confine, revisiting the glimpses of this moon; albeit in the days of Shakspere