Sheer criminals such as Leicester and Claudius flourished and waxed fat at Court.
What did men do at Court but truckle to the great? What throve except wordy morality, mutual espionage, artificial wit, double-tongued falsity, inveterate lack of principle, perpetual hypocrisy? What were these great ones but flatterers and lipservers, always ready to turn their coats according to the wind? And so Polonius and Osrick, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, took shape in his imagination. They knew how to bow and cringe; they were masters of elegant phrases; they were members of the great guild of time-servers. "To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand."
And the Danish Court was only a picture in little of all Denmark—that Denmark in whose state there was something rotten, and which was to Hamlet a prison. "Then is the world one?" says Rosencrantz; and Hamlet does not recoil from the conclusion: "A goodly one," he replies, "in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons." The Court-world of Hamlet was but an image of the world at large.
But if this is how matters stand, if a pure and princely nature is thus placed in the world and thus surrounded, we are necessarily confronted with the great and unanswerable questions: "How comes it?" and "Why is it?" The problem of the relation of good and evil in this world, an unsolved riddle, involves further problems as to the government of the world, as to a righteous Providence, as to the relation between the world and a God. And thought—Shakespeare's no less than Hamlet's—beats at the locked door of the mystery.
[XIV]
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET
Though there are in Hamlet more direct utterances of the poet's inmost spiritual life than in any of his earlier works, he has none the less succeeded in thoroughly disengaging his hero's figure, and making it an independent entity. What he gave him of his own nature was its unfathomable depth; for the rest, he retained the situation and the circumstances much as he found them in his authorities. It cannot be denied that he thus involved himself in difficulties which he by no means entirely overcame. The old legend, with its harsh outlines, its mediæval order of ideas, its heathen groundwork under a varnish of dogmatic Catholicism, its assumption of vengeance as the unquestionable right, or rather duty, of the individual, did not very readily harmonise with the rich life of thoughts, dreams, and feelings which Shakespeare imparted to his hero. There arose a certain discrepancy between the central figure and his surroundings. A Prince who is the intellectual peer of Shakespeare himself, who knows and declares that "no traveller returns" from beyond the grave, yet sees and holds converse with a ghost. A royal youth of the Renaissance, who has gone through a foreign university, whose chief bent is towards philosophic brooding, who writes verses, who cultivates music, elocution, and rapier-fencing, and proves himself an expert in dramatic criticism, is at the same time pre-occupied with thoughts of personal and bloody vengeance. Now and then, in the course of the drama, a rift seems to open between the shell of the action and its kernel.
But Shakespeare, with his consummate instinct, managed to find an advantage precisely in this discrepancy, and to turn it to account. His Hamlet believes in the ghost and—doubts. He accepts the summons to the deed of vengeance and—delays. Much of the originality of the figure, and of the drama as a whole, springs almost inevitably from this discrepancy between the mediæval character of the fable and its Renaissance hero, who is so deep and many-sided that he has almost a modern air.