Hamlet to unpack his heart with words:
"O villains, vipers, damned without redemption!
Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man!
Snakes,"
and so forth.
But as soon as he learns that his friends are dead he breaks out in a
long lament for them which ranges over everything from worms to kings,
and in its melancholy pessimism is the prototype of those meditations
which Shakespeare has put in the mouth of nearly all his favourite
characters. Who is not reminded of Hamlet's great monologue when he
reads:
"For within the hollow crown,
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court: and there the antic sits
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh, which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin[1]
Bores through his castle wall, and--farewell, King!"
[Footnote 1: In Hamlet's famous soliloquy the pin is a "bodkin."]
Let us take another two lines of this soliloquy:
"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings."
In the second scene of the third act of "Titus Andronicus" we find Titus
saying to his daughter:
"I'll to thy closet; and go read with thee
Sad stories chanced in the times of old."
Again, in the "Comedy of Errors," AEgeon tells us that his life was
prolonged:
"To tell sad stories of my own mishaps."
The similarity of these passages shows that in the very spring of life
and heyday of the blood Shakespeare had in him a certain romantic
melancholy which was developed later by the disappointments of life into
the despairing of Macbeth and Lear.
When the Bishop calls upon Richard to act, the King's weathercock mind
veers round again, and he cries:
"This ague fit of fear is over-blown,
An easy task it is to win our own."
But when Scroop tells him that York has joined with Bolingbroke, he
believes him at once, gives up hope finally, and turns as if for comfort
|