Thus, Hamlet, when his mind is once in a questionable state, can be permitted to make, with impunity, profane suggestions as to certain possible royal progresses, and the changes to which the dust of a Cæsar might be liable, without being reminded out of the play, that to follow out these suggestions 'would be' indeed, 'to consider too curiously,' and that most extraordinary humour of his enables him also to relieve his mind of many other suggestions, 'which reason and sanity,' in his time, could not have been 'so prosperously delivered of.'
For what is it that men can set up as a test of sanity in any age, but their own common beliefs and sentiments. And what surer proof of the king's madness,—what more pathetic indication of its midsummer height could be given, than those startling propositions which the poet here puts into his mouth, so opposed to the opinions and sentiments, not of kings only, but of the world at large; what madder thing could a poet think of than those political axioms which he introduces under cover of these suggestions,—which would lay the axe at the root of the common beliefs and sentiments on which the social structure then rested. How could he better show that this poor king's wits had, indeed, 'turned;' how could he better prove that he was, indeed, past praying for, than by putting into his mouth those bitter satires on the state, those satires on the 'one only man' power itself,—those wild revolutionary proposals, 'hark! in thine ear,—change places. Softly, in thine ear,— which is the JUSTICE, and which is THE THIEF?' 'Take that of me who have the power to seal the accuser's lips. None does offend. I say none. I'll able 'em. Look when I stare, see how the subject quakes.' These laws have failed, you see. They shelter the most frightful depths of wrong. That Bench has failed, you see; and that Chair, with all its adjunct divinity. Come here and look down with me from this pinnacle, into these abysses. Look at that wretch there, in the form of man. Fetch him up in his blanket, and set him at the Council Table with his elf locks and begrimed visage and inhuman gibberish. Perhaps, he will be able to make some suggestion there; and those five fiends that are talking in him at once, would like, perhaps, to have a hearing there. Make him 'one of your hundred.' You are of 'the commission,' let him bench with you. Nay, change places, let him try your cause, and tell us which is the justice, which is the thief, which is the sapient Sir, and which is the Bedlamite. Surely, the man who authorizes these suggestions must be, indeed, 'far gone,' whether he be 'a king or a yeoman.' And mad indeed he is. Writhing under the insufficiency and incompetency of these pretentious, but, in fact, ignorant and usurping institutions, his heart of hearts racked and crushed with their failure, the victim of this social empiricism, cries out in his anguish, under that safe disguise of the Robes that hide all: 'Take these away at least,—that will be something gained. Let us have no more of this mockery. None does offend—none—I say none.' Let us go back to the innocent instinctive brutish state, and have done with this vain disastrous struggle of nature after the human form, and its dignity, and perfection. Let us talk no more of law and justice and humanity and DIVINITY forsooth, divinity and the celestial graces, that divinity which is the end and perfection of the human form.—Is not womanhood itself, and the Angel of it fallen—degenerate?—That is the humour of it.—That is the meaning of the savage edicts, in which this human victim of the inhuman state, the subject of a social state which has failed in some way of the human end, undertakes to utter through the king's lips, his sense of the failure. For the Poet at whose command he speaks, is the true scientific historian of nature and art, and the rude and struggling advances of the human nature towards its ideal type, though they fall never so short, are none of them omitted in his note-book. He knows better than any other, what gain the imperfect civilization he searches and satirizes and lays bare here, has made, with all its imperfections, on the spontaneities and aids of the individual, unaccommodated man: he knows all the value of the accumulations of ages; he is the very philosopher who has put forth all his wisdom to guard the state from the shock of those convulsions, that to his prescient eye, were threatening then to lay all flat.
'O let him pass!' is the Poet's word, when the loving friends seek to detain a little longer, the soul on whom this cruel time has done its work,—its elected sufferer.
'O let him pass! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world,
Stretch him out longer.'
[Tired with all these, he cries in his own behalf.]
'Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.
Thou seest how this world goes. I see it feelingly.'
Albany. The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak WHAT WE FEEL, not what we ought to say, The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
It needs but a point, a point which the Poet could not well put in,—one of those points which he speaks of elsewhere so significantly, to make the unmeaning line with which this great social Tragedy concludes, a sufficiently fitting conclusion to it; considering, at least, the pressure under which it was written; and the author has himself called our attention to that, as we see, even in this little jingle of rhymes, put in apparently, only for professional purposes, and merely to get the curtain down decently. It is a point, which it takes the key of the play—Lord Bacon's key, of 'Times,' to put in. It wants but a comma, but then it must be a comma in the right place, to make English of it. Plain English, unvarnished English, but poetic in its fact, as any prophecy that Merlin was to make.
'The oldest hath borne most, we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.'
There were boys 'in England then a-bed;' nay, some of them might have been present that day, for aught we know, on which one of the Managers of the Surrey Theatre, the owner of the wardrobe and stage-properties, and himself an actor, brought out with appropriate decorations and dresses, for the benefit of his audience on the Bankside, this little ebullition of his genius;—there were boys present then, perhaps, whose names would become immortal with the fulfilment of that prophecy;—there was one at Whitehall, when it was brought out there, whose name would be for ever linked with it. 'We that are young,—the oldest hath borne most. We that are young shall never see so much' [I see it feelingly],
'Shall never see so much, nor live so long.'
So.