Aylwin by Theodore Watts-Dunton
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page 12 of 651 (01%)
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you did. That paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the
evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can possibly understand better than I. Several critics have asked me to explain these words. Of course, however, the question is much too big and much too important to discuss here. I will merely say that Shakespeare having decided in the case of 'Macbeth' to adopt the machinery he found in Holinslied, and in the case of 'Hamlet' the machinery he found in the old 'Hamlet,' seems to have set himself the task of realising the situation of a man oscillating between the evidence of two worlds, the physical and the spiritual--a man in each case unusually sagacious, and in each case endowed with the instinct for 'making assurance doubly sure'--the instinct which seems, from many passages in his dramas, to have been a special characteristic of the poet's own, such for instance as the words in _Pericles_: For truth can never be confirm'd enough, Though doubts did ever sleep. Why is it that, in this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so profoundly touched, the workings of his soul so thoroughly laid bare, that we seem to know him more completely than we know our most intimate friends. It is because the sea which washes between personality and personality is here, for once, rolled away, and we and this Hamlet |
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