We need dwell but little on Collin’s sketch of the “Vorgeschichte” of Hamlet, for it contributes nothing that is new. Hamlet was a characteristic “revenge tragedy” like the “Spanish Tragedy” and a whole host of others which had grown up in England under the influence, direct and indirect, of Seneca.  He points out in a very illuminating way how admirably the “tragedy of blood” fitted the times.  Nothing is more characteristic of the renaissance than an intense joy in living.  But exactly as the appetite for mere existence became keen, the tragedy of death gained in power.  The most passionate joy instinctively calls up the most terrible sorrow.  There is a sort of morbid caution here—­a feeling that in the moment of happiness it is well to harden oneself against the terrible reaction to come.  Conversely, the contemplation of suffering intensifies the joys of the moment.  At all events, in such a time, emotions become stronger, colors are brighter, and contrasts are more violent.  The “tragedy of blood,” therefore, was more than a learned imitation.  Its sound and fury met the need of men who lived and died intensely.

The primitive Hamlet was such a play.  Shakespeare took over, doubtless with little change, both fable and characters, but he gave to both a new spiritual content.  Hamlet’s revenge gained a new significance.  It is no longer a fight against the murderer of his father, but a battle against “a world out of joint.”  No wonder that a simple duty of blood revenge becomes a task beyond his powers.  He sees the world as a mass of faithlessness, and the weight of it crushes him and makes him sick at heart.  This is the tragedy of Hamlet—­his will is paralyzed and, with it, his passion for revenge.  He fights a double battle, against his uncle and against himself.  The conviction that Shakespeare, and not his predecessor, has given this turn to the tragedy is sustained by the other plays of the same period, Lear and Timon of Athens.  They exhibit three different stages of the same disease, a disease in which man’s natural love of fighting is turned against himself.

Collin denies that the tragedy of Hamlet is that of a contemplative soul who is called upon to solve great practical problems.  What right have we to assume that Hamlet is a weak, excessively reflective nature?  Hamlet is strong and regal, capable of great, concrete attainments.  But he can do nothing except by violent and eccentric starts; his will is paralyzed by a fatal sickness.  He suffers from a disease not so uncommon in modern literature—­the tendency to see things in the darkest light.  Is it far from the pessimism of Hamlet to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Tolstoi?  Great souls like Byron and Heine and Ibsen have seen life as Hamlet saw it, and they have struggled as he did, “like wounded warriors against the miseries of the times.”