Hamlet Characters Analysis features noted Shakespeare
scholar William Hazlitt's famous critical essay about
the characters of Hamlet.
THIS is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our
youth, and whom we may be said almost to remember in
our after-years; he who made that famous soliloquy on
life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought
"this goodly frame, the earth, a steril promontory,
and this brave o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours"; whom "man
delighted not, nor woman neither"; he who talked
with the grave-diggers, and moralised on Yorick's skull;
the school-fellow of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at
Wittenberg; the friend of Horatio; the lover of Ophelia;
he that was mad and sent to England; the slow avenger
of his father's death; who lived at the court of Horwendillus
five hundred years before we were born, but all whose
thoughts we seem to know as well as we do our own, because
we have read them in Shakespeare.
Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the
idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they
not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their
reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.
This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that
of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy
through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever
has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection,
and thought himself "too much i' the sun";
whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious
mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the
world before him only a dull blank with nothing left
remarkable in it; whoever has known "the pangs
of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns
which patient merit of the unworthy takes"; he
who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling
to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted
and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange
things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil
hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action
have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe
seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness
of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who
goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to
a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation
of them—this is the true Hamlet.
We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly
know how to criticise it any more than we should know
how to describe our own faces.' But we must make such
observations as we can. It is the one of Shakespear's
plays that we think of the oftenest, because it abounds
most in striking reflec-tions on human life, and because
the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn
of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever
happens to him we apply to ourselves, because he applies
it so himself as a means of general reasoning. He is
a great moraliser; and what makes him worth attending
to is, that he moralises on his own feelings and experience.
He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished
by the greatest depth of passion, HAMLET is the most
remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied
development of character. Shakespear had more magnanimity
than any other poet, and he has shewn more of it in
this play than in any other. There is no attempt to
force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstances
to unfold. The attention is excited without effort,
the incidents succeed each other as matters of course,
the characters think and speak and act just as they
might do, if left entirely 'to themselves. There is
no set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations
are suggested by the passing scene—the gusts of passion
come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind.
The whole play is an exact transcript of what might
be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark,
at the remote period of time fixed upon, before the
modern refinements in morals and manners were heard
of. It would have been inter-esting enough to have been
admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a time,
to have heard and witnessed something of what was going
on. But here we are more than spectators. We have not
only "the outward pageants and the signs of grief";
but "we have that within which passes shew."
We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions
living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us
very fine versions and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespear,
together with his own comments, gives us the original
text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a very
great advantage.
The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It
is not a character marked by strength of will or even
of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment.
Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be:
but he is a young and princely novice, full of high
enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances,
questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings,
and forced from the natural bias of his disposition
by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable
of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities
on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to
reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and
again, where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting
his death. At other times, when he is most bound to
act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies
with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and finds
out some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness
again. For this reason he refuses to kill the King when
he is at his players, and by a refinement in malice,
which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of
resolution, defers his revenge to a more fatal opportunity,
when he shall be engaged in some act "that has
no relish of salvation in it."
"He kneels and prays,
And now I'll do't, and so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng'd: that would be scann'd.
He kill'd my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, send him to heaven.
Why this is reward, not revenge.
Up sword and know thou a more horrid time,
When he is drunk, asleep, or in a rage."
He is the prince of philosophical speculators; and
because he cannot have his revenge perfect, according
to the most refined idea his wish can form, he declines
it altogether. So he scruples to trust the suggestions
of the ghost, contrives the scene of the play to have
surer proof of his uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied
with this confirmation of his suspicions, and the success
of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he
is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with
it, and tries to reason himself out of it.
"How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To rust in us unus'd. Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event,—
A thought which quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward;—I do not know
Why yet I live to say, this thing's to do;
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do it. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. 'Tis not to be great
Never to stir without great argument;
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?—O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth."
Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on
his own infirmity only affords him another occasion
for indulging it. It is not from any want of attach-ment
to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet
is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge
his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the
crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than
to put them into imme-diate practice. His ruling passion
is to think, not to act: and any vague pretext that
flatters this propensity instantly diverts, him from
his previous purposes.
The moral perfection of this character has been called
in question, we think, by those who did not understand
it. It is more interesting than according to rules;
amiable, though not faultless. The ethical delineations
of "that noble and liberal casuist" (as Shakespear
has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured
quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either
from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments!
We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement
in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in
Hamlet. The neglect of punctilious exactness in his
behaviour either partakes of the "licence of the
time," or else belongs to the very excess of intellectual
refinement in the character, which makes the common
rules of life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose
upon him. He may be said to be amenable only to the
tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too much taken
up with the airy world of contemplation to lay as much
stress as he ought on the practical consequences of
things. His habitual principles of action are un-hinged
and out of joint with the time. His conduct to Ophelia
is quite natural in his circumstances. It is that of
assumed severity only. It is the effect of disappointed
hope, of bitter regrets, of affection suspended, not
obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around
him! Amidst the natural and preternatural horrors of
his situation, he might be excused in delicacy from
carrying on a. regular courtship. When "his father's
spirit was in arms," it was not a time for the
son to make love in. He could neither marry Ophelia,
nor wound her mind by explaining the cause of his alienation,
which he durst hardly trust himself to think of. It
would have taken him years to have come to a direct
explanation on the point. In the harassed state of his
mind, he could not have done much otherwise than he
did. His conduct does not con-tradict what he says when
he sees her funeral,
"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum."
Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful than the
Queen's apostrophe to Ophelia on throwing the flowers
into the grave.
—"Sweets to the sweet, farewell.
I hop'd thou should'st have been my Hamlet's wife:
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid,
And not have strew'd thy grave."
Shakespear was thoroughly a master of the mixed motives
of human character, and he here shews us the Queen,
who was so criminal in some respects, not without sensibility
and affection in other relations of life.—Ophelia is
a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt
upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower too soon faded! Her
love, her madness, her death, are described with the
truest touches of tenderness and pathos. It is a character
which nobody but Shakespear could have drawn in the
way that he has done, and to the conception of which
there is not even the smallest approach, except in some
of the old romantic ballads.1
Her brother, Laertes, is a character we do
1 In the account of her death,
a friend has pointed out an in-stance of the poet's
exact observation of nature:—
"There is a willow growing o'er a brook,
That shews its hoary leaves i' th' glassy stream."
The inside of the leaves of the willow, next the water,
is of a
whitish colour, and the reflection would therefore be
"hoary."
not like so well: he is too hot and choleric, and
somewhat rhodomontade. Polonius is a perfect character
in its kind; nor is there any foundation for the objections
which have been made to the consistency of this part.
It is said that he acts very foolishly and talks very
sensibly. There is no inconsistency in that. Again,
that he talks wisely at one time and foolishly at another;
that his advice to Laertes is very excellent, and his
advice to the King and Queen on the subject of Hamlet's
madness very ridiculous. But he gives the one as a father,
and is sincere in it; he gives the other as a mere courtier,
a busy-body, and is accordingly officious, garrulous,
and impertinent. In short, Shakespear has been accused
of incon-sistency in this and other characters, only
because he has kept up the distinction which there is
in nature, between the understandings and the moral
habits of men, between the absurdity of their ideas
and the absurdity of their motives. Polonius is not
a fool, but he makes himself so. His folly, whether
in his actions or speeches, comes under the head of
impropriety of intention.
We do not like to see our author's plays acted, and
least of all, HAMLET. There is no play that suffers
so much in being transferred to the stage. Hamlet himself
seems hardly capable of being acted. Mr. Kemble unavoidably
fails in this character from a want of ease and variety.'
The char-acter of Hamlet is made up of undulating lines;
it has the yielding flexibility of "a wave o' th'
sea." Mr. Kemble plays it like a man in armour,
with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one undeviating
straight line, which is as remote from the natural grace
and refined susceptibility of the character, as the
sharp angles and abrupt starts which Mr. Kean introduces
into the part. Mr. Kean's Hamlet is as much too splenetic
and rash as Mr. Kemble's is too deliberate and formal.
His manner is too strong and pointed. He throws a severity,
approaching to virulence, into the common observations
and answers. There is nothing of this in Hamlet. He
is, as it were, wrapped up in his reflections, and only
thinks aloud. There should therefore be no attempt to
impress what he says upon others by a studied exaggeration
of emphasis or manner; no talking at his hearers. There
should be as much of the gentleman and scholar as possible
infused into the part, and as little of the actor. A
pensive air of sadness should sit reluctantly upon his
brow, but no appearance of fixed and sullen gloom. He
is full of weakness and melancholy, but there is no
harshness in his nature. He is the most amiable of misanthropes.
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