On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor Dowden’s modification and amplification) is the most widely received view of Hamlet’s character.  And with it we come at last into close contact with the text of the play.  It not only answers, in some fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama, but it can be supported by Hamlet’s own words in his soliloquies—­such words, for example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or those about the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.  It is confirmed, also, by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other; and, further, by the occurrence of those words of the King to Laertes (IV. vii. 119 f.), which, if they are not in character, are all the more important as showing what was in Shakespeare’s mind at the time: 

                     that we would do
     We should do when we would; for this ‘would’ changes,
     And hath abatements and delays as many
     As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
     And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sigh
     That hurts by easing.

And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the description given by its adherents of Hamlet’s state of mind, as we see him in the last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true description.  The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding on the deed required.  When he acts, his action does not proceed from this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by an emergency in which he has no time to think.  And most of the reasons he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons, but unconscious excuses.

Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy.  And it fails not merely in this or that detail, but as a whole.  We feel that its Hamlet does not fully answer to our imaginative impression.  He is not nearly so inadequate to this impression as the sentimental Hamlet, but still we feel he is inferior to Shakespeare’s man and does him wrong.  And when we come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much unexplained.  I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a most important way.  And of this I proceed to speak.

Hamlet’s irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to the theory, the direct result of ’an almost enormous intellectual activity’ in the way of ’a calculating consideration which attempts to exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.’  And this again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction.  The theory describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself, on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will, deplorably weak, always procrastinating and