The figure of Hamlet, as it at last shaped itself in Shakespeare's imagination and came to life in his drama, is one of the very few immortal figures of art and poetry, which, like Cervantes' Don Quixote, exactly its contemporary, and Goethe's Faust of two centuries later, present to generation after generation problems to brood over and enigmas to solve. If we compare the two great figures of Hamlet (1604) and Don Quixote (1605), we find Hamlet undoubtedly the more enigmatic and absorbing of the two. Don Quixote belongs to the past. He embodies the naïve spirit of chivalry which, having outlived its age, gives offence on all hands in a time of prosaic rationalism, and makes itself a laughing-stock through its importunate enthusiasms. He has the firm, easily-comprehensible contours of a caricature. Hamlet belongs to the future, to the modern age. He embodies the lofty and reflective spirit, standing isolated, with its severely exalted ideals, in corrupt or worthless surroundings, forced to conceal its inmost nature, yet everywhere arousing hostility. He has the unfathomable spirit and ever-changing physiognomy of genius. Goethe, in his celebrated exposition of Hamlet (Wilhelm Meister, Book iv. chap. 13), maintains that in this case a great deed is imposed upon a soul which is not strong enough for it:—
"There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered. A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away."
This interpretation is brilliant and thoughtful, but not entirely just. One can trace in it the spirit of the period of humanity, transforming in its own image a figure belonging to the Renaissance. Hamlet cannot really be called, without qualification, "lovely, pure, noble and most moral"—he who says to Ophelia the penetratingly true, unforgettable words, "I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me." The light of such a saying as this takes the colour out of Goethe's adjectives. It is true that Hamlet goes on to ascribe to himself evil qualities of which he is quite innocent; but he was doubtless sincere in the general tenor of his speech, to which all men of the better sort will subscribe. Hamlet is no model of virtue. He is not simply pure, noble, moral, &c., but is, or becomes, other things as well—wild, bitter, harsh, now tender, now coarse, wrought up to the verge of madness, callous, cruel. No doubt he is too weak for his task, or rather wholly unsuited to it; but he is by no means devoid of physical strength or power of action. He is no child of the period of humanity, moral and pure, but a child of the Renaissance, with its impulsive energy, its irrepressible fulness of life and its undaunted habit of looking death in the eyes.
Shakespeare at first conceived Hamlet as a youth. In the First Quarto he is quite young, probably nineteen. It accords with this age that he should be a student at Wittenberg; young men at that time began and ended their university course much earlier than in our days. It accords with this age that his mother should address him as "boy" ("How now, boy!" iii. 4—a phrase which is deleted in the next edition), and that the word "young" should be continually prefixed to his name, not merely to distinguish him from his father. The King, too, in the early edition (not in that of 1604) currently addresses him as "son Hamlet;" and finally his mother is still young enough to arouse—or at least to enable Claudius plausibly to pretend—the passion which has such terrible results. Hamlet's speech to his mother—
"At your age
The hey-day of the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment,"
does not occur in the 1603 edition. The decisive proof, however, of the fact that Hamlet at first appeared in Shakespeare's eyes much younger (eleven years, to be precise) than he afterwards made him, is to be found in the graveyard scene (v. I). In the older edition, the First Gravedigger says that the skull of the jester Yorick has lain a dozen years in the earth; in the edition of 1604 this is changed to twenty-three years. Here, too, it is explicitly indicated that Hamlet, who as a child knew Yorick, is now thirty years old; for the Gravedigger first states that he took to his trade on the very day on which Prince Hamlet was born, and a little later adds: "I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years." It accords with this that the Player-King now mentions thirty years as the time that has elapsed since his marriage with the Queen, and that Ophelia (iii. I) speaks of Hamlet as the "unmatch'd form of blown [i.e. mature] youth."
The process of thought in Shakespeare's mind is evident. At first it seemed to him as if the circumstances of the case demanded that Hamlet should be a youth; for thus the overwhelming effect produced upon him by his mother's prompt forgetfulness of his father and hasty marriage seemed most intelligible. He had been living far from the great world, in quiet Wittenberg, never doubting that life was in fact as harmonious as it is apt to appear in the eyes of a young prince. He believed in the realisation of ideals here on earth, imagined that intellectual nobility and fine feelings ruled the world, that justice reigned in public, faith and honour in private, life. He admired his great father, honoured his beautiful mother, passionately loved the charming Ophelia, thought nobly of humankind, and especially of women. From the moment he loses his father, and is forced to change his opinion of his mother, this serene view of life is darkened. If his mother has been able to forget his father and marry this man, what is woman worth? and what is life worth? At the very outset, then, when he has not even heard of his father's ghost, much less seen or held converse with it, sheer despair speaks in his monologue:
"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew:
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"
Hence, also, his naïve surprise that one may smile and smile and yet be a villain. He regards what has happened as a typical occurrence, a specimen of what the world really is. Hence his words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth." And those others: "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! ... in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world!" These words express his first bright view of life. But that has vanished, and the world is no longer anything to him but a "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." And man! What is this "quintessence of dust" to him? He has no pleasure in man or woman.
Hence arise his thoughts of suicide. The finer a young man's character, the stronger is his desire, on entering life, to see his ideals consummated in persons and circumstances. Hamlet suddenly realises that everything is entirely different from what he had imagined, and feels as if he must die because he cannot set it right.