executed a deed. This long course of thinking apart from action has
destroyed Hamlet's very capacity for belief.... In presence of the
spirit he is himself 'a spirit,' and believes in the immortality of the
soul. When left to his private thoughts he wavers uncertainly to and
fro; death is a sleep; a sleep, it may be, troubled with dreams.... He
is incapable of certitude.... After his fashion (that of one who
relieves himself by speech rather than by deeds) he unpacks his heart in
words."

Now what other personage is there in Shakespeare who shows these traits
or some of them? He should be bookish and irresolute, a lover of thought
and not of action, of melancholy temper too, and prone to unpack his
heart with words. Almost every one who has followed the argument thus
far will be inclined to think of Romeo. Hazlitt declared that "Romeo is
Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and
sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the
other. Both are absent and self-involved; both live out of themselves in
a world of imagination." Much of this is true and affords a noteworthy
example of Hazlitt's occasional insight into character, yet for reasons
that will appear later it is not possible to insist, as Hazlitt does,
upon the identity of Romeo and Hamlet. The most that can be said is that
Romeo is a younger brother of Hamlet, whose character is much less
mature and less complex than that of the student-prince. Moreover, the
characterization in Romeo--the mere drawing and painting--is very
inferior to that put to use in Hamlet. Romeo is half hidden from us in
the rose-mist of passion, and after he is banished from Juliet's arms we
only see him for a moment as he rushes madly by into never-ending night,
and all the while Shakespeare is thinking more of the poetry of the
theme than of his hero's character. Romeo is crude and immature when
compared with a profound psychological study like Hamlet. In "Hamlet"