Life & Wisdom Quote by Jones Very

A neat, almost surgical contrast: Macbeth is a man being crushed by physics; Hamlet is a man being haunted by metaphysics. Jones Very, a poet with a theologian’s ear, frames Shakespeare’s two most famous strugglers not as personality types but as different battlefields. Macbeth’s tragedy is that the world is stubbornly material: crowns have to be seized, bodies have to be disposed of, witnesses have to be managed. Even his guilt arrives as something bodily and immediate - sleeplessness, blood, noise in the night. He can’t think his way out because his problem is the chain reaction of acts.

Hamlet, in Very’s reading, is stalled by an afterlife problem. The ghost isn’t just plot machinery; it’s a jurisdictional crisis. If the next world is real and morally binding, then action isn’t merely strategic, it’s eternally consequential. Hamlet’s delay becomes less “indecision” than an ethical audit under supernatural lighting: what if the apparition is true, false, demonic, or misread? Macbeth fears exposure; Hamlet fears damnation.

The line also reveals a 19th-century sensibility: an era obsessed with conscience, salvation, and the unseen. Very’s intent is quietly polemical, nudging readers to see Shakespeare as staging two kinds of reality-testing. Macbeth tries to dominate the world and discovers it bites back. Hamlet tries to interpret the next world and discovers ambiguity is its most human curse.