disposition’ as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the suspicion he is forced to feel. (d) It accounts no less for the painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises, and to the feelings even of those whom he loves.  These are frequent symptoms of such melancholy, and (e) they sometimes alternate, as they do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite fruitless emotion.  It is to these last (of which a part of the soliloquy, ‘O what a rogue,’ gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as ‘lapsed in passion,’ and it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not ’passion’s slave.’[49]

Finally, Hamlet’s melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be explained by nothing else.  The first of these is his apathy or ‘lethargy.’  We are bound to consider the evidence which the text supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it.  When Hamlet mentions, as one possible cause of his inaction, his ’thinking too precisely on the event,’ he mentions another, ‘bestial oblivion’; and the thing against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy (IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for him here and always is god-like), but this bestial oblivion or ‘dullness,’ this ‘letting all sleep,’ this allowing of heaven-sent reason to ‘fust unused’: 

                            What is a man,
     If his chief good and market of his time
     Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.[50]

So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being ’a dull and muddy-mettled rascal,’ who ’peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of his cause,’ dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being tardy and lapsed in time; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being almost blunted, and bids him not to forget (cf. ’oblivion’).  And so, what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of purpose or of love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic, brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not thinking of it at all, but for the time literally forgets it.  It seems to me we are driven to think of Hamlet chiefly thus during the long time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events presented in the Second Act.  The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the command, ‘Remember me,’ and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the command, ’Do not forget.’[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not accidents.