What should such
fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us."
All this is mere rhetoric, and full of clever self-excusing. Hamlet is
not very revengeful or very ambitious; he is weakly-irresolute, and
excessively sensual, with all the faults that accompany these frailties.
Even at this moment, when he must know that he is not very revengeful,
that forgiveness were easier to him, Shakespeare will pose to himself,
and call himself revengeful: he is such an idealist that he absolutely
refuses to see himself as he is. In later dramas we shall find that he
grows to deeper self-knowledge. Hamlet is but the half-way house to
complete understanding.
Fortunately we have each of us an infallible touchstone by which we can
judge of our love of truth. Any of us, man or woman, would rather be
accused of a mental than a physical shortcoming. Do we see our bodily
imperfections as they are? Can we describe ourselves pitilessly with
snub nose, or coarse beak, bandy legs or thin shanks; gross paunch or
sedgy beard? Shakespeare in Hamlet can hardly bear even to suggest his
physical imperfections.
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