for friendship, his brilliant wit, his love of field sportsà his moods of profound melancholy, his touch of insanity, his dangerous impetuosityà his brutality and callousness towards women.
If this is a description of the Earl of Essex, it is equally a description of ShakespeareÆs character, Hamlet. Indeed, Hamlet acts with many of the same behaviors that Dover Wilson (1964) attributes to Essex. For example, Dover Wilson (1964) contends that Essex once rashly ran into Queen ElizabethÆs bedroom exactly as Hamlet did when confronting Queen Gertrude about his fatherÆs death and her overly hasty marriage to his uncle and her brother-in-law. Dover Wilson (1964, p. 105) states that ôHamlet, unable to accomplish his design, a design long premeditated, necessary for him, for his motherÆs honor, for the whole state of Denmark, and yet always ready to act upon impulseà simply acts as Essex would have lived had he lived at Elsinore.ö
In brief, Dover Wilson (1964) believes that HamletÆs mystery is literally the mystery of the
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