Shakspeare's Hamlet; An Attempt to Find the Key to a Great Moral Problem, by Methodical Analysis of the Play ... (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1848 edition. Excerpt: ...and adequately as in Hamlet: in Hamlet we see genius in itself, and not as it appears when its possessor is employing it in the accomplishment of some outward end; and this genius bursts forth with a sudden and prodigious expansion, into the regions of the pure intellect, as soon as its quiet course through its previous channel of the ordinary life of a brave, refined, and noble-minded prince-royal, was violently stopt up by the circumstances with which we are familiar. Hamlet now shows himself in that character which is properly--though not according to the popular appropriation of the word--called sceptical. Partly because he is cut off from all legitimate practical outlet for his intellectual energies, partly from the instinctive desire to turn away from the harrowing contemplation of himself and his circumstances, he puts himself into the attitude of a bystander, and looker-on, (nc irriKoc) in the midst of the bustling world around him. And like other such sceptics, he finds it more and more difficult to act, as his knowledge becomes more comprehensive and circular, --to take a part in the affairs of a worldof which he seems to see the whole: and like them too he throws a satirical tone into his observations on men, who, however inferior to him in intellect, are always reminding him that he is dreaming while they are acting. Leaving to others to decide on the wejght of Warburton's suggestion that it is Juvenal's Satires which Hamlet now comes reading, I would call attention to the fact that he is reading, and, as he says, a satirist, and that this is his resource when he has 'lost all his mirth, and foregone all custom of exercises.' In this scene, and throughout the subsequent prose dialogues, Hamlet shows this satirical turn...