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Chapter Four  Saying Not Quite “Everything Just as It Is”: Shakespeare on Life’s Way Since the first decade of the twentieth century, when the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding (1843–1931) characterized him as a “descendant” of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the Scottish theologian Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848–1921) called him “the great and melancholy Dane in whom Hamlet was mastered by Christ,”1 much has been written about the connections between Kierkegaard and Shakespeare.2 With Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Kierkegaard is said to have had in common not only his melancholy and his use of indirect communication to accomplish his hidden mission, but also a “special relation” and “fellowship of fate”: for example , “each one had a tragic relationship to the woman he loved because his life in the service of the idea claimed him completely.”3 André Bellesort , writing for a Parisian journal the year World War I broke out, called Kierkegaard the Prince Hamlet of Danish literature and “one of the most beautiful representatives of Hamletism in the countries of the north.”4 Forty years later, the Spanish author Salvador de Madariaga weighed in with an article entitled “Noch Einmal—Kierkegaard und Hamlet: War Hamlet melancholisch?” (“Once Again—Kierkegaard and Hamlet: Was Hamlet Melancholy?”).5 A more recent scholar adds that Kierkegaard, as a famed soliloquist like Hamlet, shared what Vigilius Haufniensis called the prince’s disposition of “inclosing reserve [Indesluttethed ]” or “shut-upness”; that Kierkegaard must have identified with Hamlet’s being “neither a religious hero nor an esthetic (tragic) hero but something in between . . . A hybrid creature. In short an estheticreligious mess”; and that the legacies of their heavenly father and their deceased, curse-ridden, ghostly father were, in both men’s cases, “diabolically intermixed,” making “their language, and their lives, a process of inevitable and ineluctable deconstruction.”6 183 Of course, Kierkegaard’s perception of Hamlet did not develop in a historical-cultural vacuum. R. A. Foakes, regarding Either/Or’s second part, views Judge William’s analysis of the aesthetic refusal to choose and to act as crystallizing a dominant mid-nineteenth-century German view of Hamlet.7 The term “Hamletism” had been established by the 1840s, accruing a range of interconnected meanings, all based on “an image of Hamlet as well-intentioned but ineffectual, full of talk but unable to achieve anything, addicted to melancholy, and sickened by the world around him—in short, the Hamlet of the first and third soliloquies.”8 Therefore the identification of Kierkegaard with Hamlet makes somewhat remarkable his concurrent sense of affinity with Don Quixote, a figure commonly regarded as Hamlet’s antithesis. Five years after Kierkegaard’s death, the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev delivered his influential lecture in St. Petersburg, “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860), which defines the two heroes’ personalities as basic “types” incarnating “the two elementary and opposite manifestations of the human nature, the dual extremes upon which it revolves.” Submitting that “all humanity belongs to one or the other of these two types,” he favors Don Quixote as the self-sacrificing man of faith, over the earthly, egoistic, introspective Hamlet, “the spirit of negation.” The Manchegan knight epitomizes trust, fearlessness, humility, courage, enthusiasm, unflagging will, and service to a lofty idea, qualities that make him a moral giant who dwarfs the analytical, skeptical, ironic, and indecisive Danish prince. Whereas the world’s Hamlets tend to be “useless and doomed to practical inaction inasmuch as they are paralyzed by their gifts,” the Don Quixotes, like Christ, prove “useful to humanity,” becoming “leaders of men . . . because they know and can see only a single point on the horizon, often even when it is actually not at all what it appears to their eyes.”9 Turgenev’s judgment of Don Quixote is in harmony with Kierkegaard ’s. Yet Kierkegaard, who was unknown in Russia, would surely have objected to the Russian’s disdain for Hamlet. Kierkegaard was the only writer before Turgenev to compare Don Quixote to Christ, and yet his sympathetic construal of Hamlet’s “inclosing reserve” could serve as a counter-assessment to Turgenev’s harsh moral devaluation of the prince. While there is no evidence that Kierkegaard knew of Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poems,10 he owned editions of a Danish translation and two German translations of Shakespeare’s complete plays, including the version he employed the most: the famous 1839–41 edition of the so-called Schlegel-Tieck translation, comprised of renderings by August Wilhelm Schlegel, with revisions and...

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