We cannot fancy Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculating
at Wittenberg, but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and
Shakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through the play we
get the notion of a state of society in which a savage nature has
disguised itself in the externals of civilization, like a Maori deacon,
who has only to strip and he becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his
mouth watering for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the date
of Hamlet, the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies alive in
their houses, with as much of their family about them as might be to make
it comfortable. Shakespeare seems purposely to have dissociated his play
from history by changing nearly every name in the original legend. The
motive of the play--revenge as a religious duty--belongs only to a social
state in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative, but, with
infallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen, not untamed Nature,
as he found it in history, but the period of transition, a period in
which the times are always out of joint, and thus the irresolution which
has its root in Hamlet's own character is stimulated by the very
incompatibility of that legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the
past with the new culture and refinement of which he is the
representative.
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