Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be prose:
“There is a kind of confession in your looks.”
A little later the line:
“Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues,”
is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every reader on the track.
The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also characteristic of Shakespeare. But the four lines,
“My holy sir, none better knows than you
How I have ever loved the life removed,
And held in idle price to haunt assemblies,
Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep,”
are to me an intimate, personal confession; a fuller rendering indeed of Hamlet's “Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.” In any case it will be admitted that a dislike of assemblies and cost and witless bravery is peculiar in a reigning monarch, so peculiar indeed that it reminds me of the exiled Duke in “As You Like It,” or of Duke Prospero in “The Tempest” (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of any one in real life. A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and the “witless bravery” of court-life were, as we shall see, characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to old age.
In the first scene of the third act the Duke as a friar speaks to the condemned Claudio. He argues as Hamlet would argue, but with, I think, a more convinced hopelessness. The deepening scepticism would of itself force us to place “Measure for Measure” a little later than “Hamlet”:
“Reason thus with life:—
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art,
- - - - - - - -
The best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok'st, yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou'rt not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,
And what thou hast, forgett'st.
- - - - - - - -
What's in this,
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.”