“With purpose to be dress’d in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,”[144:1]
to the true victim of his sorrow, holding, against his will (like Constance in “King John”)
“The eternal spirit . . .
In the vile prison of afflicted breath,”[144:2]
the melancholiac has great dramatic possibilities, of which, for the most part, the fullest advantage is taken.
This seems to be the most convenient place to discuss the question of the real (as distinguished from the assumed) mental condition
of Hamlet. That it is an abnormal condition most careful readers of the play will not question. How otherwise can we explain his habitual inaction, his sudden fits of energy, his violence to those whom he loves, his strange self-questionings, and his even stranger apathy to those things which should most move him? The whole question of the cause of Hamlet’s procrastination depends on our estimate of his mental state. Goethe’s description of Hamlet as “a beautiful, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which makes the hero,” is clearly at variance with facts, and the estimates of both Coleridge and Dowden largely ignore the practical side of the character of Hamlet. Only by recognising what the play certainly tells us, that the melancholy of Hamlet is really a disease, can we obtain anything like a reasonable explanation of his strange movements. After all, he is not the one-sided, unequally-developed weakling that certain school editions of Shakespeare would have us suppose. He is, without any doubt, a man of practical ability, capable of prompt, energetic action, skilled in all manly exercises. Intellectually, his “noble mind” compels the greatest regard, he has studied long at the University and possesses besides such qualities as would serve him admirably as ruler of Denmark. Fortinbras says of him that
Had he been put on, to have proved most royally.”[146:1]