Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of
the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as
our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is WE
who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that
of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his
own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the
clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself 'too much i' th'
sun'; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious
mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before
him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever
has known "the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or
the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes"; he who has
felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a
malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by
the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while
he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of
action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems
infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him
careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best
resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a
mock-presentation of them--this is the true Hamlet.
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