'
In the English translation of the 'Hystorie of Hamblet,' from which
Shakspere took his subject, the art of dissembling is extolled, in
most naive language, as one specially useful towards great personages
not easily accessible to revenge. He who would exercise the arts of
dissembling (it is said there) must be able to 'kisse his hand whome
in hearte hee could wishe an hundredfoot depth under the earth, so hee
mighte never see him more, if it were not a thing _wholly to bee
disliked in a Christian, who by no meanes ought to have a bitter
gall, or desires infected with revenge_.'
We shall find later on that Hamlet's gall also claims its rights; all
the more so as he endeavours, by an unnatural and superstitious use of
dogmatism, to suppress and to drive away the 'excitements of the reason
and of the blood.' We have heard from Polonius that the Prince,
after his 'sadness,' fell into a 'fast.' And everything he says to
his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [16] about his frame of
mind, confirms us in the belief that he has remained faithful to the
intention declared in the first act--'Look you, I will go pray'--so
as to prepare himself, like many others, to contemplate passively
a world sinful from its very nature, and therefore not to be changed
and bettered.
This scene is, in the first quarto, a mere hasty sketch, but faintly
indicated.
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