Hamlet. It waves me still. 
Go on; I’ll follow thee.

Marcellus. You shall not go, my lord.

Hamlet. Hold off your hands.

Horatio. Be ruled; you shall not go.

Hamlet. My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve. 
Still am I called.  Unhand me, gentlemen.
By heaven I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me.

Would any other character in Shakespeare have used those words?  And, again, where is Hamlet more Hamlet than when he accompanies with a pun the furious action by which he compels his enemy to drink the ’poison tempered by himself’?

Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damn’d Dane,
Drink off this potion.  Is thy union here? 
Follow my mother.

The ‘union’ was the pearl which Claudius professed to throw into the cup, and in place of which (as Hamlet supposes) he dropped poison in.  But the ‘union’ is also that incestuous marriage which must not be broken by his remaining alive now that his partner is dead.  What rage there is in the words, and what a strange lightning of the mind!

Much of Hamlet’s play with words and ideas is imaginatively humorous.  That of Richard II. is fanciful, but rarely, if ever, humorous.  Antony has touches of humour, and Richard III. has more; but Hamlet, we may safely assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a humorist, his humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement.  Some of his quips are, of course, poor enough, and many are not distinctive.  Those of his retorts which strike one as perfectly individual do so, I think, chiefly because they suddenly reveal the misery and bitterness below the surface; as when, to Rosencrantz’s message from his mother, ’She desires to speak with you in her closet, ere you go to bed,’ he answers, ’We shall obey, were she ten times our mother’; or as when he replies to Polonius’s invitation, ‘Will you walk out of the air, my lord?’ with words that suddenly turn one cold, ‘Into my grave.’  Otherwise, what we justly call Hamlet’s characteristic humour is not his exclusive property, but appears in passages spoken by persons as different as Mercutio, Falstaff and Rosalind.  The truth probably is that it was the kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in some other traits of the poet’s greatest creation, we come into close contact with Shakespeare the man.

3

The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the interpretation of every word and deed of the character.  Even if at some point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right, he must still choose one or the other.  The mere critic is not obliged to do this.  Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is of importance, he ought to say so.