But, in this instance, though
Shakespeare has given the Duke only a short part, he has made him
contradict himself with the charming ease that belongs peculiarly to
self-revealing. The Duke tells us:
"For such as I am all true lovers are,
--Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,
Save in the constant image of the creature
That is beloved."
The next moment he repeats this:
"For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,
Than women's are."
And the moment after he asserts:
"There is no woman's sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas! their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt!"
Hamlet contradicts himself, too: at one moment he declares that his soul
is immortal, and at the next is full of despair. But Hamlet is so
elaborate a portrait, built up of so many minute touches, that
self-contradiction is a part, and a necessary part, of his many-sided
complexity.
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