Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is ironic that while Victor Hugo finds Hamlet incapable of action because he is too much the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley finds him to be too much the philosopher.

The character of Hamlet, as I take it, represents the profound philosopher; or, rather, the errors to which a contemplative and ideal mind is liable...  - Mary Shelley (?), "Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet" in The Romantics on Shakespeare, Penguin, London, 1992. p.342.

He confuses his external body with his inner self, as if he were nothing but a spirit...  - p. 344.

Always his profound meditations seem without beginning or end, while he wanders in a wilderness of thought, and enterprises of great moment, while he is declaiming with the player, or tracing the dust of imperial Caesar to a bunghole, or flattering his own weakness with proving to himself the shallowness of all the actions and the actors of life, become "sicklied o'er with this pale cast, and lose the name of action." Whenever he does any thing, he seems astonished at himself, and calls it rashness.  - p.347.

While there were subtle articulations of the nature of Hamlet's internal struggle with action, the range of positions was limited. To an outsider, the fascination of the Romantics with these small differences amounted to little more that the recitation of what had already become a litany of predictable pieties about Hamlet. In her account of Shelley's discussion of Hamlet with Lord Byron, Mary Shelley ends with a note of comment on what had already become the banality of this line of thinking.

'It appears, therefore, that Hamlet is, in itself, a complete and reasonable whole, composed in an harmonious proportion of difference and similitude, into one expressive unity.'

Shelley, as he finished, looked up, and found Lord Byron fast asleep.

  - Mary Shelley (?), "Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet" in The Romantics on Shakespeare, Penguin, London, 1992. p.349.