“That we would do We should do when we would.”[147:1]
How, they say, can this sermon be preached if the chief illustration—the man by whom we are all to be warned—is exculpated from blame by illness?
They know little of tragedy—or at least of Shakespeare’s tragedy—who hold a view like this. What Shakespeare habitually does is to shew us a man, by nature fitted to be a hero of tragedy, with a fatal defect, the consequences of which are worked out in the play. Looked at from this point of view, the sentimental objection at once vanishes, and the second objection arises. It is a more serious one: Can a man suffering from melancholia—to put the thing in its most prosaic form—any more than a man suffering from any other form of insanity, be admitted as a tragic hero? The answer is that he can. And this partly because his exact state of mind is not determined, partly because it is a condition not generally recognised as one of disease, and tragedy has always to be considered from the point of view, not of the doctor, but of the author and the audience. As Dr. Bradley, who very ably sums up the question, says in his Lectures on Shakespearean Tragedy: “The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers—and thousands go about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree—is considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. . . . . Hamlet’s state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello, Antony or Macbeth.”[149:1]
Before we leave Hamlet, it should be emphasised that the state of mind of the hero is quite a subordinate question in the play itself. “It would be absurdly unjust to call ‘Hamlet’ a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study,” is Dr. Bradley’s way of putting it.[149:2] The significance of this is that we must not expect the indications of Hamlet’s disease to be developed to any degree, nor refuse to claim for it a place among our examples of “Melancholy True,” just because the author fails to introduce the hero to a physician![149:3]
[127:1] As Pate says in Brome’s “Northern Lass” (v., 1).