Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 175
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The o’pressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of offi ce, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
(III.i.64–70)Here Hamlet touches a set of thoughts that might actually be uni-
versal, so superbly does he evoke the reasons to terminate this sad
life. And it is not the only time that Hamlet approaches what Johnson
called “just repre sen ta tions of general nature.”
What is in it for me? That is the central question that most
Shakespeare characters (and most of us) ask most of the time, if not
all of it. Hamlet sometimes asks what is in it for us all, now and for-
ever. On occasion, other Shakespeare characters burst into untram-
meled thought. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of and our
little lives are rounded by a sleep.” W. H. Auden says that, in the
middle period of Shakespeare’s work, utterances of vari ous char-
acters can stand alone. “The soliloquies in Hamlet as well as other
plays of this period are detachable both from the character and the
plays. In earlier as well as later works they are more integrated.
The ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy in Hamlet is a clear example of a
speech that can be separated from both the character and the play, as
are the speeches of Ulysses on time in Troilus and Cressida, the King
on honor in All’s Well T hat End s Well and the Duke on death in Mea-
sure for Mea sure” (Auden, 159–160). Auden seems entirely right,
though Ulysses’ refl ections are the victim of some dramatic irony,
since he moves from them to some very un- disinterested plotting.
Shakespeare’s commitment to something like pure contemplation
comes and it goes, but most of the time, it is well in abeyance.