Shakspeare and His Times

by François Guizot

"Although the Queen perceived herself nearly touched, and that Hamblet moved her to the quick, where she felt herself interested, nevertheless she forgot all disdain and wrath, which thereby she might as then have had, hearing herself so sharply chidden and reproved, to behold the gallant spirit of her son, and to think what she might hope, and the easier expect of his so great policy and wisdom. But on the one side, she durst not lift up her eyes to behold him, remembering her offense, and on the other side, she would gladly have embraced her son, in regard of the wise admonitions by him given unto her, which as then quenched the flames of unbridled desire that before had moved her. * * *

"After this, Fengon came to the court again, and determined that Hamblet should be sent into England. Now to bear him company were assigned two of Fengon's faithful ministers, bearing letters engraved in wood, that contained Hamblet's death, in such sort as he had advertised the King of England. But the subtle Danish prince, while his companions slept, having read the letters, and known his uncle's great treason, with the wicked and villainous minds of the two courtiers that led him to the slaughter erased out the letters that concerned his death, and instead thereof graved others, with commission to the King of England to hang his two companions. * * *

"Hamblet, while his father lived, had been instructed in that devilish art, whereby the wicked spirit abuseth mankind, and advertiseth him of things past. It toucheth not the matter herein to discover whether this prince, by reason of his over great melancholy, had received those impressions, divining that which never any but himself had before declared. * * *" [Footnote 23]

[Footnote 23: See "The Hystorie of Hamblet," in Payne Collier's "Shakspeare's Library," vol, i. London, 1843.]

It was evidently Hamlet who, in this narrative, struck and allured the imagination of Shakspeare. This young prince, mad from calculation, and perhaps slightly mad by nature; cunning and melancholy; burning to avenge the death of his father, and skillful in defending his own life; adored by the young girl sent to work his ruin; an object of dread, and yet of tenderness, to his guilty mother; and, until the moment of throwing off the mask, hidden and incomprehensible to both: this personage, full of passion, danger, and mystery, well versed in the occult sciences, and whom, perhaps, "by reason of his over great melancholy, the wicked spirit enabled to divine that which never any but himself had before declared;" what an admirable character was this for Shakspeare, that curious and deep-searching observer of the secret agitations of the human soul and destiny! Had he done nothing more than depict, with the bold outline and brilliant coloring of his pencil, this character and situation as delineated in the chronicle, he would assuredly have produced a masterpiece.

But Shakspeare did much more than this: under his treatment, Hamlet's madness becomes something altogether different from the obstinate premeditation or melancholy enthusiasm of a young prince of the Middle Ages, placed in a dangerous position, and engaged in a dark design; it is a grave moral condition, a great malady of soul which, at certain epochs and in certain states of society and of manners, diffuses itself among mankind, frequently attacks the most highly gifted and the noblest of our species, and afflicts them with a disturbance of mind which sometimes borders very closely upon madness. The world is full of evil, and of all kinds of evil. What sufferings, crimes, and fatal, although innocent errors! What general and private iniquities, both strikingly apparent and utterly unknown! What merits, either stifled or neglected, become lost to the public, and a burden to their possessors! What falsehood, and coldness, and levity, and ingratitude, and forgetfulness, abound in the relations and feelings of men! Life is so short, and yet so agitated—sometimes so burdensome, and sometimes so empty! The future is so obscure! so much darkness at the end of so many trials! In reference to those who only see this phase of the world and of human destiny, it is easy to understand why their mind becomes disturbed, why their heart fails them, and why a misanthropic melancholy becomes an habitual feeling which plunges them by turns into irritation or doubt—into ironical contempt or utter prostration.

This was assuredly not the disease of the times in which the chronicle represents Hamlet to have lived, nor indeed of the age in which Shakspeare himself flourished. The Middle Ages and the sixteenth century were epochs too active and too rude to give ready admittance to these bitter contemplations and unhealthy developments of human sensibility. They belong much rather to times of luxurious life, and of moral excitement at once keen and leisurely, when souls are roused from their repose, and deprived of every strong and obligatory occupation. It is then that arise these meditative discontents, these partial and irritated impressions, this entire forgetfulness of all that is good, this passionate susceptibility to all that is evil in the condition of man, and all this pedantic wrath of man against the laws and order of the universe.

That painful uneasiness and profound disturbance which are introduced into the soul by so gloomy and false an appreciation of things in general, and of man himself—which he never met with in his own time, or in those times with the history of which he was acquainted—Shakspeare devined, and constructed from them the figure and character of Hamlet. Read once again the four great monologues in which the Prince of Denmark abandons himself to the reflective expression of his inmost feelings; gather together from the whole play the passages in which he casually gives them utterance; seek out and sum up that which is manifest, and that which is hidden in all that he thinks and says, and you will every where recognize the presence of the moral malady which I have just described. Therein truly resides, much more than in his personal griefs and perils, the source of Hamlet's melancholy; in this consists his fixed idea and his madness.