Let me be your servant;
Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood;
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility;
Or, compare the violent outburst against drunkenness in Hamlet Act 1, Sc. 4, and the stern warning against the same vice in Othello, where, indeed, Cassius' weakness for strong drink is the immediate occasion of the tragic complication. In like manner, Shakespeare moralizes against lawless love in the Merry Wives, in Troilus and Cressida, in Hamlet, in Lear.
On the other hand, Shakespeare never allows artistic scruples to stand in the way of exalting simple, domestic virtues. Simple conjugal fidelity is one of the glories of Hamlet's illustrious father and of the stern, old Roman, Coriolanus; the young prince, Malcolm, is as chaste and innocent as the young barbarians of whom Tacitus tells.
In a final section, Collin connects this view of Hamlet which he has developed in his essay on Hamlet and the Sonnets, with the theory of human civilization which his book so suggestively advances.
The great tragedies from Hamlet to Timon of Athens are not autobiographical in the sense that they are reflections of Shakespeare's own concrete experience. They are not the record of a bitter personal pessimism. In the years when they were written Shakespeare was contented and prosperous. He restored the fortunes of his family and he was hailed as a master of English without a peer. It is therefore a priori quite unlikely that the tragic atmosphere of this period should go back to purely personal disappointments. The case is more likely this: Shakespeare had grown in power of sympathy with his fellows and his time. He had become sensitive to the needs and sorrows of the society about him. He could put himself in the place of those who are sick in mind and heart. And in consequence of this he could preach to this generation the simple gospel of right living and show to them the psychic weakness whence comes all human sorrow.
And through this expansion of his ethical consciousness what had he gained? Not merely a fine insight as in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, an insight which enables him to treat with comprehending sympathy even great criminals and traitors, but a high serenity and steady poise which enables him to write the romances of his last years—Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. He had come to feel that human life, after all, with its storms, is a little thing, a dream and a fata morgana, which soon must give place to a permanent reality:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
In 1904 Collin wrote in Nordisk Tidskrift för Vetenskap, Konst och Industri[II.23]** a most suggestive article on Hamlet. He again dismisses the widely accepted theory of a period of gloom and increasing pessimism as baseless. The long line of tragedies cannot be used to prove this. They are the expression of a great poet's desire to strengthen mankind in the battle of life.