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The Problematic Relation between Reason and Emotion in Hamlet
Eric Levy
Hamlet opens on a stccumb to "compulsive ardour" (). Through reference to "the bloat King" (), Hamlet censures Claudius' gluttony. Through the epithet, "bawdy villain" (), Hamlet deplores the King's lust. Indeed, Hamlet censures himself for succumbing, in the graveyard, to the irascible passion of anger: "But sure the bravery of his grief did put me / Into a tow'ring passion" (-79). Ironically, in reacting to Laertes' excessive display of grief, Hamlet confronts a passion or emotion with which, through his own melancholy, he himself has been intimately associated, and whose influence on reason he recognizes, as when speculating whether the Ghost is "the devil" (): "... and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / As he is very potent with such spirits, / Abuses me to damn me" (-99).
The emphasis in Hamlet on the control or moderation of emotion by reason is so insistent that many critics have addressed it. A seminal study is undertaken by Lily Bess Campbell in Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, Slaves of Passion. John S. Wilks, in a masterful examination of conscience, explores "the subsidence in Hamlet of virulent passion," and notes "his accession to a renewed temperance" achieved through "chastened self-control" (139, 140). Very re