time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events
presented in the Second Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we
suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the
command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the
command, 'Do not forget.'[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not
accidents.

The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. '_Why_,' he
asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be
cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the
event? And does _that_ again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me
sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have _cause,
and will, and strength, and means_, to act?' A man irresolute merely
because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel
this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience secretly
condemned the act which his explicit consciousness approved; but we have
seen that there is no sufficient evidence to justify us in conceiving
Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man stimulated for the moment
to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and, because for the moment
he is free from it, unable to understand the paralysing pressure which
it exerts at other times.

I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the
psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to
omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make
Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view
is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight