Patrick,'
by his faith, by God's wounds, by His blood, by His body, by the
Cross, and so forth. [6]
Stubbs, in his 'Anatomy of Abuses' (1583), [7] lays stress, among other
characteristics of the Papists, upon their terrible inclination to
swearing: 'in so muche, as if they speake but three or fower words,
yet must thei needes be interlaced with a bloudie othe or two, to the
great dishonour of God and offence of the hearers.'
An overwhelming grief and mistrust in his own nature filled Hamlet's
bold imagination with the desire of receiving a complete mandate
for his mission from the hands of superior powers. So he enters the
realm of mysticism, where mind wields no authority, and where no
sound fruit of human reason can ripen.
Between the first and the second act there is an interval of a few
months. The poet gives us no other clue to the condition and the
doings of his hero than that, in the words of Polonius, [8] he 'fell
into sadness; then into a fast; thence to a watch; thence into a
weakness,' and so forth. We may therefore assume that he has followed
his inclination to go to pray; that he tries by fasting, watching,
and chastising, as so many before him, to find his way in the dreamland
which he has entered following the Ghost; sincerely striving to remain
true to his resolution to 'wipe from the table of his memory all
pressures past.'
A new passage in the monologue of Hamlet, after the Ghost has left him,
is this:--
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter; yes, by Heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
We next hear about the Prince from Ophelia after the interval which, as
mentioned above, lies between the first and the second act.
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