and even in the poems, which Hazlitt likens to ‘a couple of ice-houses . . . as hard, as glittering, and as cold,’ thought and reflection transcend emotion. From Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost to Prospero in The Tempest, Shakespeare elaborates the principle that thought is the very core of life and feeling but its outer husk. ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’[1] His two greatest figures, the two who are most truly representative of him, Hamlet and Falstaff, are men of thought, not men of feeling, and not men of action. So in their different ways are Ulysses and Brutus, Henry the Fifth and Iago. In Cleopatra he paints not the witchery that inflames the passions, but that which unhinges the intellect. It is the Serpent, not the Siren, that he sees, and Antony sums her up in the words:
Where Marlowe pictures human aspiration as resulting from the clash of unresting and irreconcilable emotions, and declares:
Still warring in our breasts for regiment . . .
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,’
Shakespeare views human character as the quiet consequence of the ‘godlike reason’ of the thinking animal:
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus’d.’[3]
It is again the thinking side of man that Hamlet
