ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Hamlet's melancholy which is the centre of the tragedy, and to omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make Shakespeare's story unintelligible. Melancholy accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be explained by nothing else. The first of these is Shakespeare apathy or lethargy. This melancholy is perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. The great ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and shared only by Goethe's Faust. The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is Shakespeare own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction.
