In his famous speech, "I have lately, but I know not why, lost all my cheerfulness [...]" (II.ii.280), Hamlet illustrates an Elizabethan fusion of medieval and humanist ideas, perhaps lost to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but not to EMW Tillyard. Tillyard, in The Elizabethan World Picture, says that "what is true of Hamlet about man is essentially true of Elizabethan modes of thought in general" (4). This claim is unprovable, but reading Shakespeare's Hamlet in light of Tillyard provides at best an explanation of Elizabethan thought and at worst an interesting perspective. Such a reading shows that Hamlet is not content to pontificate on the state of man and the universe, but that he manipulates this orthodox view in order to deceive those who defend it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayHamlet goes out of his way to demonstrate his depression to his two classmates. "'I [...] have lost all my cheerfulness, given up all habit of exercise'" (Ii.ii.280-1) he tells them, a sure sign of the depressive side of melancholy. It goes “heavily” (II.ii.281) with his temperament, another warning, for melancholy is associated with earth, the lowest and heaviest element (62, 69). “‘[T]he earth seems to me a barren promontory’” (II.ii.282-3), he adds, a practically subversive statement. “[T]he world and its contents had been created for man [...] [its] great variety and ingenuity were indeed testimonies to the marvelous power of the creator” (Tillyard, 80), and the ungrateful Hamlet calls the planet "barren." He is fully aware of the implications of his speech; he calls the world a “good body” (II.ii.282), an incongruous description given his supposed state of mind. His next statement follows the same pattern: "this most excellent canopy, the air [...] appears [...] like a congregation of fetid and pestilential vapors" (II.ii.283-6). Hamlet sees normal air as corrupt and marshy, but he also confuses it with the “hanging firmament” (II.ii.284). The firmament is the sphere of fixed stars; hence Hamlet speaks not only of the sublunary air, but also of the ether, a better kind of air, clear and pure, and in doing so he calls the substance of heaven itself "pestilent" (Tillyard , 39). Yet he describes the air as “brave,” “excellent,” “majestic,” and “tormented with golden fire” (II.ii.283-5). Hamlet makes an abrupt transition from describing the cosmos to characterizing humanity, going directly from "the congregation of noisome and pestilential vapors" to "'What work is this man!' » » (II.ii.286). This movement makes more sense if it is considered as a correspondence from the macrocosm to the microcosm; Hamlet does not choose humanity as an arbitrarily important object on which to assert his worldview (Tillyard, 91). Hamlet calls man "like an angel...the paragon of animals" (II.ii.288-9), prompting Tillyard to assert that this statement "is in the purest medieval tradition...to what man looked like in his prelapsarian state [...] between the angels and the beasts” (4-5). The Quarto punctuation, although Tillyard does not use it when quoting the speech, attributes the quality of "apprehension" to the angels, which corresponds to Tillyard's characterization of the angels as "bound to man by a community of understanding” (28); the Folio aligns angels with “action,” thus referring to angels, God’s messengers and errand boys (Tillyard, 41). Regardless, Hamlet is full of praise for the man, calling him "noble in reason" (II.ii.286-7), a quality which is indeed the most, 70).