Shakespeare's very success as a dramatic poet may have led him to a kind of dissatisfaction with his life that is reflected in Hamlet. A dramatic poet is the kind of person who can imagine what anyone can feel, and he begins to wonder, "What am I?" "What do I feel?" "Can I feel?" Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror - you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself.

-Auden, in Lectures on Shakespeare