One of the few books which Shakespeare is known to have
possessed was Florio's Montaigne, and he might well have transferred the
Frenchman's motto, _Que scais je_? to the front of his tragedy; nor can I
help fancying something more than accident in the fact that Hamlet has
been a student at Wittenberg, whence those new ideas went forth, of whose
results in unsettling men's faith, and consequently disqualifying them
for promptness in action, Shakespeare had been not only an eye-witness,
but which he must actually have experienced in himself.
One other objection let me touch upon here, especially as it has been
urged against Hamlet, and that is the introduction of low characters and
comic scenes in tragedy. Even Garrick, who had just assisted at the
Stratford Jubilee, where Shakespeare had been pronounced divine, was
induced by this absurd outcry for the proprieties of the tragic stage to
omit the grave-diggers' scene from Hamlet. Leaving apart the fact that
Shakespeare would not have been the representative poet he is, if he had
not given expression to this striking tendency of the Northern races,
which shows itself constantly, not only in their literature, but even in
their mythology and their architecture, the grave-diggers' scene always
impresses me as one of the most pathetic in the whole tragedy.
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