Patterns of analogy

Abstract

We turn now to some larger defining comparisons. First, with Laertes who seems to have accepted the fallen state of Denmark in a way that Hamlet is unable to do. His advice to Ophelia is what we could call realistic: things and people do not match our ideas of them. The state of the nation dictates the state of the individual, a man’s role in the state affects his character, so that a disjunction between seeming and being is inevitable in Elsinore:

For nature crescent does not grow alone In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes, The inward service of the mind and soul Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now, And now no soil or cautel doth besmirch The virtue of his will; but you must fear, His greatness weighed, his will is not his own.

[i.iii.11–17]

(The corollary of this realism, of course, is that Laertes tilts towards a quite unwarranted and prurient suspicion of Hamlet’s idealistic love for his sister.)