“Hath found
The head and source of all your son's distemper,” she replies— “I doubt it is no other but the main ;
His father's death, and our o'erhasty marriage,” Hamlet now for the first time appears in his feigned character. The feint is so close to nature, and there is underlying it withal so undeniable a substratum of morbid feeling, that in spite of ourselves, in opposition to our full knowledge, that in his
antic disposition Hamlet is putting on a part, we cannot from the first dispossess ourselves of the idea, that a mind fallen,
if not from the sovereignty of reason, at least from the balance of its faculties, is presented to us; so much is
undirection of mind blended with pregnant sense and apprehen sion, both however perverted from the obvious line of sane thought; so much is the universal and caustic irony tinged with melancholic self-depreciation, and that longing for death which in itself alone constitutes a form of mental disease.
In
the various forms of partial insanity, it is a question of intri cate science to distinguish between the portions of a man's
conduct which result from the sound operations of mind, and those which result from disease.
Hamlet's own assertion, “I
am but mad north-north-west : when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a hand-saw,” is pregnant with a psycho logical truth which has often engaged the most skilful and laborious investigation, both of medical men and of lawyers. It has often been a question of life or death, of wealth or poverty, whether a criminal act was done, or a civil one per formed, by a half-madman, when the mental wind was in the north-west of disease, or blowing from the sanatory south. That in his actual unfeigned mental condition, Hamlet is
far from being in a healthy state of mind, he is himself keenly conscious, and acknowledges it to himself in his soliloquy upon the players:
