In these two soliloquies, we have to some extent Shakespeare's own exposition of Hamlet's natural character, and the motives of his conduct.
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“The whole,” says Schlegel, “was intended to shew that a consideration which would exhaust all the relations and pos
sible consequences of a deed, to the very limits of human foresight, cripples the power of acting.” In this tragedy of thought, we have a highly sensitive, reflecting, self-introspec tive mind, weak and melancholic, sorrow-stricken and life
weary. In a manner so awful that it might shake the soundest mind, this man is called upon to take away the life of a king and a relative, for a crime of which there exists no actual
proof. Surely Hamlet is justified in pausing to weigh his motives and his evidence, in concluding not to act upon the sole dictation of a shadowy appearance, who may be the devil tempting his “weakness and his melancholy ;” of deciding to “have grounds more relative than this,” before he deliberately commits himself to an act of revenge which, even had the proof of his uncle's crime been conclusive and irrefragable, would have been repulsive to his inmost nature. Hamlet's indecision to act, and his over-readiness to reflect, are placed beyond the reach of critical discovery by his own analytical motive hunting, so eloquently expressed in the abstruse thinking in which he indulges. Anger and hatred against his uncle, self-contempt for his own irresolution, inconsistent as he feels
it with the courage of which he is conscious, disgust at his own angry excitement, and doubts of the testimony, upon which he is yet dissatisfied that he has not acted, present a state of intellectual and emotional conflict perfectly consistent with the character and the circumstances.
If Hamlet had had
as much faith in the Ghost as Macbeth had in the Weird Sisters,
he would have struck without needing further evidence. If he had been a man of action, whose firstlings of the heart are those of the hand, he would have struck in the earliest heat
