Jaques says:
"Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine."
This is the view of early manhood which does not doubt its power to cure
all the evils which afflict mortality. Then comes the later, more
hopeless view, to which Brutus gives expression:
"Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this;
Brutus had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us."
And later still, and still more bitter, Hamlet's:
"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!"
But Shakespeare is a meliorist even in Hamlet, and believes that the
ailments of man can all be set right.
The likenesses between Brutus and Hamlet are so marked that even the
commentators have noticed them. Professor Dowden exaggerates the
similarities. "Both (dramas)," he writes, "are tragedies of thought
rather than of passion; both present in their chief characters the
spectacle of noble natures which fail through some weakness or
deficiency rather than through crime; upon Brutus as upon Hamlet a
burden is laid which he is not able to bear; neither Brutus nor Hamlet
is fitted for action, yet both are called to act in dangerous and
difficult affairs.
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