Of course it would be foolish, even in this event, to pretend that
Hamlet exhausts Shakespeare; art does little more than embroider the
fringe of the garment of life, and the most complex character in drama
or even in fiction is simple indeed when compared with even the simplest
of living men or women. Shakespeare included in himself Falstaff and
Cleopatra, beside the author of the sonnets, and knowledge drawn from
all these must be used to fill out and perhaps to modify the outlines
given in Hamlet before one can feel sure that the portrait is a
re-presentment of reality. But when this study is completed, it will be
seen that with many necessary limitations, Hamlet is indeed a revelation
of some of the most characteristic traits of Shakespeare.

To come to the point quickly, I will take Hamlet's character as analyzed
by Coleridge and Professor Dowden.

Coleridge says: "Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting
and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage,
skill, will or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking: and it
is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all
the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by mere
accident to effect his object." Again he says: "in Hamlet we see a
great, an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate
aversion to real action consequent upon it."

Professor Dowden's analysis is more careful but hardly as complete. He
calls Hamlet "the meditative son" of a strong-willed father, and adds,
"he has slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter of the
university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on
the things of life and death who has never formed a resolution or