Audiences and readers feel with Hamlet and understand him; for all the better-disposed among us make the discovery, when we go forth into life as grown-up men and women, that it is not what we had imagined it to be, but a thousandfold more terrible. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Denmark is a prison, and the world is full of such dungeons. A spectral voice says to us: "Horrible things have happened; horrible things are happening every day. Be it your task to repair the evil, to rearrange the course of things. The world is out of joint; it is for you to set it right." But our arms fall powerless by our sides. Evil is too strong, too cunning for us.
In Hamlet, the first philosophical drama of the modern era, we meet for the first time the typical modern character, with its intense feeling of the strife between the ideal and the actual world, with its keen sense of the chasm between power and aspiration, and with that complexity of nature which shows itself in wit without mirth, cruelty combined with sensitiveness, frenzied impatience at war with inveterate procrastination.
[1] See Hermann Türck: Das psychologische Problem in der Hamlet-Tragödie. 1890.
[2] See E. Sullivan: "On Hamlet's Age." New Shakspere Society's Transactions. 1880-86.
[XV]
HAMLET AS A DRAMA
Let us now look at Hamlet as a drama; and, to get the full impression of Shakespeare's greatness, let us first recall its purely theatrical, materially visible side, that which dwells in the memory simply as pantomime.[1].