In an essay written in 1860, the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev compared the two most famous fictional characters of the western world: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cervantes’s Don Quixote.28 These contrasting personalities represented ‘the fundamental forces of all that exists’.29 Hamlet, educated and sensitive, is the epitome of the man who thinks so much that he cannot act. He is inward-looking, selfish even, and utterly sceptical of everything around him. Don Quixote, on the other hand, credulously believes the simplest of ideals and, motivated by selflessness, acts to achieve them. Hamlet was
...more
