Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

Hazlitt’s remark comes from his Shakespeare criticism, written in the early nineteenth century when Romantic-era critics were rethinking dramatic characters as psychologically “real” presences rather than mere theatrical contrivances. In his discussion of Hamlet, Hazlitt addresses a common objection: that Hamlet is only a fictional name and his eloquence merely the poet’s invention. Hazlitt counters by shifting the locus of reality from external fact to inward experience—arguing that what Shakespeare creates is a structure of thought and feeling that becomes actual in the act of reading or imaginative sympathy. The claim “It is we who are Hamlet” reflects Hazlitt’s broader critical method: literature matters because it awakens and articulates states of mind already latent in the audience.

The passage distinguishes between literal existence and imaginative reality. Hamlet, Hazlitt concedes, is a verbal invention—“idle coinage” of poetic imagination—yet the thoughts Shakespeare gives him are real insofar as they become thoughts in us. Literature, on this view, is not a second-rate imitation of life but a medium that produces genuine inner experience. The final claim—“It is we who are Hamlet”—suggests identification: Hamlet’s doubts, self-scrutiny, and moral hesitation are not confined to a fictional Dane but recur as recognizable patterns of consciousness in readers. Hazlitt thus anticipates later ideas about reader-response and the co-creation of meaning between text and audience.