II. The Position of the Soliloquy “to be or not to be” in Hamlet

Extract

Among the points of superiority which distinguish the plays of Shakespeare from those of most Elizabethan dramatists, none is more obvious and more easily demonstrable than the firmly built plan, the clear construction which sets in strong relief a dominant dramatic idea. In the poet's mature tragedies, this dominant idea is always a development of what Professor Dowden calls “the fatality of character.” The protagonist is hurried to the catastrophe, not so much by the irresistible force of external events, as by some defect, or some enfeebling excess in his own spiritual constitution. From the analogy of the other plays, therefore, we should expect in Hamlet to find little or no emphasis laid upon external hindrances to the execution of the prescribed revenge, but rather the accentuation of a purely subjective hesitancy inherent in the emotional and intellectual habits of the man himself.