Hamlet (Vol. 59) | R.A. Foakes (essay date 1973)
R.A. Foakes (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: “The Art of Cruelty: Hamlet and Vindice,” in Aspects of Hamlet: Articles Reprinted from Shakespeare Survey, edited by Kenneth Muir and Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 28-38.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1973, Foakes compares Hamlet to Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy, contending that “it is the strength of Hamlet, not his weakness … that he cannot kill, that he fails to carry out his revenge.”]
Hamlet admits to cruelty only when he is about to encounter his mother in the Closet scene, and then he seeks to qualify the term
O heart, lose not thy nature, let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom, Let me be cruel not unnatural.
(iii, ii, 396-8)
The cruelty he seeks to permit himself is to be kept under a restraint, not let loose with the tyrannical savagery of which Nero served as a type. So again, at the end of...
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