Finally, Hamlet’s melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or ‘lethargy.’ We are bound to consider the evidence which the text supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions, as one possible cause of his inaction, his ‘thinking too precisely on the event,’ he mentions another, ‘bestial oblivion’; and the thing against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy (IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for him here and always is god-like), but this bestial oblivion or ‘dullness,’ this ‘letting all sleep,’ this allowing of heaven-sent reason to ‘fust unused’:
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.[1]
So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being ‘a dull and muddy-mettled rascal,’ who ‘peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of his cause,’ dully indifferent to his cause.[2] So, when the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being tardy and lapsed in time; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being almost blunted, and bids him not to forget (cf. ‘oblivion'). And so, what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of
- ↑ Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.
- ↑ Cf. Measure for Measure, IV. iv. 23, ‘This deed . . . makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.'
And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
Anon, as patient as the female dove,
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping,
may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see further Note G.
