Every shade of capacity and ingenuity has been expended on the consideration and explanation of Hamlet's mental traits, but unfortunately with an essential factor left out. Not one, of all the numerous writers who have essayed to enlighten the world on the meaning and intent of this "consummate flower" of the poetic insight, has thought to inquire whether the body was not that "unknown quantity" which confounded Schlegel, and which Goethe thought he had found in the lines—
That ever I was born to set it right!"—
that is, that the Prince was overborne by the too great pressure of an Herculean task with which he was conscious he had not the ability to cope. But that there was really no insufficiency of mental power appears patent at every forward movement of the play. He perceives the situation clearly, argues about it rationally, notes all the circumstances, and acknowledges his own duty in the premises; but he does not do the thing which he sets before himself to perform.
Why? Because "he's fat and scant of breath"—in other words, is weighted down with a non-executive or lymphatic temperament.
Painters, as well as actors, have done much to foist a false Hamlet upon the public imagination. He has habitually been represented by both as possessing a nervous, bilious, saturnine temperament, for which there is no warrant in the poet's description of him. Artists have portrayed him as fleshless and dark-hued. Fechter, the sole exception, did indeed remember his nationality to the extent of introducing the novelty of a flaxen wig, which was barely tolerated by the audience, so counter to the truth was the ill-taught popular fancy. But who has yet dared, on canvas or on the stage, to present a true Shakespearean Hamlet "grunting and sweating under his weary load of life"?—so fat really as to need that "napkin" which the queen offers him to wipe the perspiration from his brow.[1]
Yet is this "fat" the keynote and solution of the "mystery of Hamlet."
Remembering that he was fat and scant of breath, we can readily understand many things which are otherwise certainly perplexing; particularly the inconsistency between his thoughts and desires and his chronic inaction. He would represent in modern life those persons whose cerebral developments are put down at maximum figures by the expert phrenologist, and who exhibit to admiring friends their large brain-power as thus indicated, but who never do anything to confirm the diagnosis. Again, why? because they lack the energizing temperament without which the brain is but a dumb mass of latent possibilities.
- ↑ Profuse perspiration is a recognized symptom of one form of heart-disease—endocarditis.
