Shakespeare's jealousy and excessive sensuality come to full light in
the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, when they are about to witness the
play before the king: he persists in talking smut to her, which she
pretends not to understand. The lewdness, we all feel, is out of place
in "Hamlet," horribly out of place when Hamlet is talking to Ophelia,
but Shakespeare's sensuality has been stung to ecstasy by Miss Fitton's
frailty, and he cannot but give it voice. As soon as Ophelia goes out of
her mind she, too, becomes coarse--all of which is but a witness to
Shakespeare's tortured animality. Yet Goethe can talk of Hamlet's "pure
and most moral nature." A goat is hardly less pure, though Hamlet was
moral enough in the high sense of the word.
There are one or two minor questions still to be considered, and the
chief of these is how far, even in this moment of disillusion, did our
Shakespeare see himself as he was? Hamlet says:
"I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more
offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.
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