_Ib._--

"_Ham._ A little more than kin, and less than kind.

_King._ How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

_Ham._ Not so, my lord, I am too much i' the sun."

Hamlet opens his mouth with a playing on words, the complete absence of
which throughout characterises Macbeth. This playing on words may be
attributed to many causes or motives, as either to an exuberant activity
of mind, as in the higher comedy of Shakespeare generally;--or to an
imitation of it as a mere fashion, as if it were said--"Is not this better
than groaning?"--or to a contemptuous exultation in minds vulgarised and
overset by their success, as in the poetic instance of Milton's Devils in
the battle;--or it is the language of resentment, as is familiar to every
one who has witnessed the quarrels of the lower orders, where there is
invariably a profusion of punning invective, whence, perhaps, nicknames
have in a considerable degree sprung up;--or it is the language of
suppressed passion, and especially of a hardly smothered personal dislike.
The first and last of these combine in Hamlet's case; and I have little
doubt that Farmer is right in supposing the equivocation carried on in the
expression "too much i' the sun," or son.

_Ib._--

"_Ham._ Ay, madam, it is common."

Here observe Hamlet's delicacy to his mother, and how the suppression
prepares him for the overflow in the next speech, in which his character
is more developed by bringing forward his aversion to externals, and which
betrays his habit of brooding over the world within him, coupled with a
prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half embodyings of thought,
and are more than thought, and have an outness, a reality _sui generis_,
and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and
movements within. Note also Hamlet's silence to the long speech of the
king which follows, and his respectful, but general, answer to his mother.

_Ib._ Hamlet's first soliloquy:--

"O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!" &c.

This _taedium vitae_ is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet
mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which
necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just
coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the
result; but where the former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the
ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmovi