While Hamlet is letting himself be shipped off to England, the young Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, arrives with his soldiers, ready to risk his life for a patch of ground that "hath in it no profit but the name. To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it." Hamlet says to himself (iv. 4):
"How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! ...
... I do not know
Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do.'"
And he despairs when he contrasts himself with Fortinbras, the delicate and tender prince, who, at the head of his brave troops, dares death and danger "even for an egg-shell":
"Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake."
But with Hamlet it is a question of more than "honour," a conception belonging to a sphere far below his. It is natural that he should feel ashamed at the sight of Fortinbras marching off to the sound of drum and trumpet at the head of his forces—he, who has not carried out, or even laid, any plan; who, after having by means of the play satisfied himself of the King's guilt, and at the same time betrayed his own state of mind, is now writhing under the consciousness of impotence. But the sole cause of this impotence is the paralysing grasp laid on all his faculties by his new realisation of what life is, and the broodings born of this realisation. Even his mission of vengeance sinks into the background of his mind. Everything is at strife within him—his duty to his father, his duty to his mother, reverence, horror of crime, hatred, pity, fear of action, and fear of inaction. He feels, even if he does not expressly say so, how little is gained by getting rid of a single noxious animal. He himself is already so much more than what he was at first—the youth chosen to execute a vendetta. He has become the great sufferer, who jeers and mocks, and rebukes the world that racks him. He is the cry of humanity, horror-struck at its own visage.
There is no "general meaning" on the surface of Hamlet. Lucidity was not the ideal Shakespeare had before him while he was producing this tragedy, as it had been when he was composing Richard III. Here there are plenty of riddles and self-contradictions; but not a little of the attraction of the play depends on this very obscurity.
We all know that kind of well-written book which is blameless in form, obvious in intention, and in which the characters stand out sharply defined. We read it with pleasure; but when we have read it, we are done with it. There is nothing to be read between the lines, no gulf between this passage and that, no mystic twilight anywhere in it, no shadows in which we can dream. And, again, there are other books whose fundamental idea is capable of many interpretations, and affords matter for much dispute, but whose significance lies less in what they say to us than in what they lead us to imagine, to divine. They have the peculiar faculty of setting thoughts and feelings in motion; more thoughts than they themselves contain, and perhaps of a quite different character. Hamlet is such a book. As a piece of psychological development, it lacks the lucidity of classical art; the hero's soul has all the untranspicuousness and complexity of a real soul; but one generation after another has thrown its imagination into the problem, and has deposited in Hamlet's soul the sum of its experience.
To Hamlet life is half reality, half a dream. He sometimes resembles a somnambulist, though he is often as wakeful as a spy. He has so much presence of mind that he is never at a loss for the aptest retort, and, along with it, such absence of mind that he lets go his fixed determination in order to follow up some train of thought or thread some dream-labyrinth. He appals, amuses, captivates, perplexes, disquiets us. Few characters in fiction have so disquieted the world. Although he is incessantly talking, he is solitary by nature. He typifies, indeed, that solitude of soul which cannot impart itself.
"His name," says Victor Hugo, "is as the name on a woodcut cut of Albert Dürer's: Melancholia. The bat flits over Hamlet's head; at his feet sit Knowledge, with globe and compass, and Love, with an hour-glass; while behind him, on the horizon, rests a giant sun, which only serves to make the sky above him darker." But from another point of view Hamlet's nature is that of the hurricane—a thing of wrath and fury, and tempestuous scorn, strong enough to sweep the whole world clean.
There is in him no less indignation than melancholy; in fact, his melancholy is a result of his indignation. Sufferers and thinkers have found in him a brother. Hence the extraordinary popularity of the character, in spite of its being the reverse of obvious.