Certainly there
were then, even as there are now, besides the logical thinkers, also
a considerable number of inconsistent persons who believed in
supernaturally revealed messages, and who, nevertheless, now and then,
felt contradictory thoughts rising within themselves. Why should the
great master, who exhausted in his dramatic personages almost all
types of human nature, not have put such a character also on the stage?
To the poet, whose object it was to show 'to the very age and body of
time his form and pressure' (this passage is wanting in the first
quarto), the presentation of such a psychological problem of
contradictory thoughts must have been of far greater attraction than
an anticipatory description of a metaphysician aching under the heavy
burden of his philosophic speculations. The latter is the character
attributed, by some, to Hamlet. But we think that such an utterly
strange modern creature would have been altogether incomprehensible
to the energetic English mind of this period.
In the course of the drama, Shakspere makes it sufficiently clear that
the thoughts by which Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution is sicklied
o'er,' have come from the narrow cells of a superstitious Christianity,
not from the free use of his reason. According to Montaigne, however,
we ought to 'use our reason only for strengthening our belief.'
Hamlet, with Purgatory and Hell, into which he has cast a glance,
before his eyes, would fain fly, like Montaigne, from them.
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