[43]
A Shaksperean hero, with drawn sword, allows himself to be restrained
from action by the thought that, because 'it is heavy' with his own
murdered father, who is suffering in Purgatory, he (Hamlet) ought not
to kill the criminal now, but later on, when the latter is deeply
wading in sin--
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, ...
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As Hell, whereto it goes.
Hamlet has been called a philosopher whose energy has been paralysed
by too great a range of thought. For the sovereignty of human reason
this is a most dangerous premiss. Do we not owe to the full and free
use of that reason everything great which mankind has created?
History speaks of a thousand heroes (only think of Alexander, of Julius
Caesar, of Frederick the Great!) whose doings convince us that a strong
power of thought and action can go hand in hand, nay, that the latter
cannot be successful without the former.
But, on the other hand, there is a way of thinking with preconceived
supernatural conclusions--or rather, we must call it an absence of
thinking--when men allow themselves to be moved by the circumstances
of a traditional course of thought. Against such intellectual
slavery the great century of the Reformation rose. And the greatest
Humanist, Shakspere, scourges that slavery in the catharsis of his
powerful drama.
Questions of religion were not permitted to be treated on the stage.
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