{Footnote 1: One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has been kind enough to send me an article contributed to “Colbourn's Magazine” in 1873, in which he declares that “Shakespeare seems to have kept a sort of Hamlet notebook, full of Hamlet thoughts, of which 'To be or not to be' may be taken as the type. These he was burdened with. These did he cram into Hamlet as far as he could, and then he tossed the others indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies and histories, perfectly regardless of the character who uttered them.” Though Mr. Watts-Dunton sees that some of these “Hamlet thoughts” are to be found in Macbeth and Prospero and Claudio, he evidently lacks the key to Shakespeare's personality, or he would never have said that Shakespeare tossed these reflections “indiscriminately into other plays.” Nevertheless the statement itself is interesting, and deserves more notice than has been accorded to it.}
I now come to a point in the drama which at once demands and defies explanation. In the first scene of the third act the Duke, after listening to the terrible discussion between Isabella and Claudio, first of all tells Claudio that “Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt” Isabella, and then assures Claudio that to-morrow he must die. The explanation of these two falsehoods would be far to seek, unless we take it that they were invented simply in order to prolong our interest in the drama. But this assumption, though probable, does not increase our sympathy with the protagonist—the lies seem to be too carelessly uttered to be even characteristic—nor yet our admiration of the structure of a play that needs to be supported by such flimsy buttresses. Still this very carelessness of fact, as I have said, is Shakespearean; the philosophic dreamer paid little attention to the mere incidents of the story.
The talk between the Duke and Isabella follows. The form of the Duke's speech, with its touch of euphuistic conceit, is one which Hamlet-Shakespeare affects:
“The hand that hath made you fair hath made you
good: the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes
beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of
your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair.”
This Duke plays philosopher, too, in and out of season as Hamlet did: he says to Isabella:
“Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful,”
generalizing his praise even to a woman.
Again, when Pompey is arrested, he passes from the individual to the general, exclaiming:
“That we were all as some would seem to be,
Free from our faults, as from faults seeming free.”
Then follows the interesting talk with Lucio, who awakens the slightly pompous Duke to natural life with his contempt. When Lucio tells the Duke, who is disguised as a friar, that he (the Duke) was a notorious loose-liver—“he had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service”—the Duke merely denies the soft impeachment; but when Lucio tells him that the Duke is not wise, but “a very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow,” the Duke bursts out, “either this is envy in you, folly, or mistaking: ... Let him but be testimonied in his own bringings-forth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier,” which recalls Hamlet's “Friends, scholars, and soldiers,” and Ophelia's praise of Hamlet as “courtier, soldier, scholar.” Lucio goes off, and the Duke “moralizes” the incident in Hamlet's very accent: