ABSTRACT
This chapter describes by assuming that Hamlet did not understand the nature of his inhibition: if he had understood it, it would not have been one. It focuses on writers to whom such phrases might seem to apply with greater aptness. But it is surely not going too far to feel with Jones that much of the stuff of Hamlet came from inspirations that took their origin in the deepest and darkest regions of Shakespeare's mind. No one would suggest at least that a writer needs to be able to supply a coherent psychological analysis, with terms complete, of the characters he creates: his business is rather to feel his characters very intensely. One wonders what Shakespeare himself thought of Hamlet's symptoms; and seeing that, when he had produced them, he could gain no glimmer of an idea of what they meant, why he did not become anxious about them.
