"I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape
And bid me hold my peace,"
or in his cry when Horatio clings to him,
"Unhand me, gentlemen;
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;
I say, away!"
On none of these occasions do we find any sign of that paralysis of doubt which has so frequently been imputed to him. On the contrary, not once is there any sort of failure in moral or physical courage except only in the matter of the revenge. In the second place, as will later be expounded, Hamlet's attitude is never that of a man who feels himself not equal to the task, but rather that of a man who for some reason cannot bring himself to perform his plain duty. The whole picture is not, as Goethe depicted, that of a gentle soul crushed beneath a colossal task, but that of a strong man tortured by some mysterious inhibition.
Already in 1827 a protest was raised by Hermes[1] against Goethe's interpretation, and since then a number of hypotheses have been put forward in which Hamlet's temperamental deficiencies are made to play a very subordinate part. The second view here discussed goes in fact to the opposite extreme, and finds in the difficulty of the task itself the sole reason for the non- performance of it. This view was first hinted by Fletcher,[2] and was independently developed by Klein[3] and Werder.[4] It maintains that the extrinsic difficulties inherent in the task were so stupendous as to have deterred any one, however determined. To do this it is necessary to conceive the task in a different light from that in which it usually is conceived. As a development largely of the Hegelian teachings on the subject of abstract justice, Klein, and to a lesser extent Werder, contended that the essence of Hamlet's revenge consisted not merely in slaying the murderer, but of convicting him of his crime in the eyes of the nation. The argument, then, runs as follows: The nature of Claudius' crime was so frightful and so unnatural as to render it incredible unless supported by a very considerable body of evidence. If Hamlet had simply slain his uncle, and then proclaimed, without a shred of supporting evidence, that he had done it to avenge a fratricide, the nation would infallibly have cried out upon him, not only
- ↑ Hermes: Ueber Shakespeare's Hamlet und seine Beurteiler, 1827.
- ↑ Fletcher: Westminster Review, Sept., 1845.
- ↑ Klein: Emil Devrient's Hamlet. Berliner Modenspiegel, eine Zeitschrift für die elegante Weit, 1846, Nr. 23, 24.
- ↑ Werder: Vorlesungen über Shakespeare's Hamlet, 1875. Translated by E. Wilder, 1907, under the title of "The Heart of Hamlet's Mystery."
