We have already remarked upon the impression which the Essex family

tragedy must have made upon Shakespeare in his early youth, before he

had even left Stratford. All England was talking of the scandal: how

the Earl of Leicester, who was commonly suspected of having had Lord

Essex poisoned, immediately after his death had married his widow,

Lady Lettice, whose lover no one doubted that he had been during her

husband's lifetime. There is much in the character of King Claudius to

suggest that Shakespeare has here taken Leicester as his model. The

two have in common ambition, sensuality, an ingratiating conciliatory

manner, astute dissimulation, and complete unscrupulousness. On

the other hand, it is quite unreasonable to suppose, with Hermann

Conrad,[1] that Shakespeare had Essex in his eye in drawing Hamlet

himself.

Almost as near to Shakespeare's own day as the Essex-Leicester

catastrophe had been the similar events in the Royal Family of

Scotland. Mary Stuart's second husband, Lord Darnley, who bore the

title of King of Scotland, had been murdered in 1567 by her lover, the

daring and unscrupulous Bothwell, whom the Queen almost immediately

afterwards married. Her contemporaries had no doubt whatever of

Mary's complicity in the assassination, and her son James saw in his

mother and his stepfather his father's murderers. The leaders of the

Scottish rebellion displayed before the captive Queen a banner bearing

a representation of Darnley's corpse, with her son kneeling beside it

and calling to Heaven for vengeance. Darnley, like the murdered King in

_Hamlet_, was an unusually handsome, Bothwell an unusually repulsive

man.

James was brought up by his mother's enemies, and during her lifetime,

and after her death, was perpetually wavering between her adherents,

who had defended her legal rights, and her adversaries, who had driven

her from the country and placed James himself upon the throne. He made

one or two efforts, indeed, to soften Elizabeth's feelings towards

his mother, but refrained from all attempt to avenge her death. His

character was irresolute. He was learned and--what Hamlet is very far

from being--a superstitious pedant; but, like Hamlet, he was a lover

of the arts and sciences, and was especially interested in the art of

acting. Between 1599 and 1601 he entertained in Scotland a portion of

the company to which Shakespeare belonged; but it is uncertain whether

Shakespeare himself ever visited Scotland. There is little doubt, on

the other hand, that when, after Elizabeth's death in 1603, James made

his entrance into London, Shakespeare, richly habited in a uniform of

red cloth, walked in his train along with Burbage and a few others

of the leading players. Their company was henceforth known as "His

Majesty's Servants."

Although there is in all this no lack of parallels to Hamlet's

circumstances, it is, of course, as ridiculous to take James as to take

Essex for the actual model of Hamlet. Nothing could at that time have

been stupider or more tactless than to remind the heir-presumptive

to the throne, or the new King, of the deplorable circumstances of

his early history. This does not exclude the supposition, however,

that contemporary history supplied Shakespeare with certain outward

elements, which, in the moment of conception, contributed to the

picture bodied forth by the creative energy of his genius.

From this point of view, too, we must regard the piles of material

which well-meaning students bring to light, in the artless belief that

they have discovered the very stones of which Shakespeare constructed

his dramatic edifice. People do not distinguish between the possibility

that the poet may have unconsciously received a suggestion here and

there for details of his work, and the theory that he deliberately

intended an imaginative reproduction of definite historic events.

No work of imagination assuredly, and least of all such a work as

_Hamlet_, comes into existence in the way these theorists assume. It

springs from within, has its origin in an overmastering sensation

in the poet's soul, and then, in the process of growth, assimilates

certain impressions from without.

[1] _Preuss. Jahrbücher_, February 1895.

XII

_"HAMLET"--MONTAIGNE AND GIORDANO BRUNO--ANTECEDENTS IN ETHNOGRAPHY_

Along with motives from novel, drama, and history, impressions of

a philosophical and quasi-scientific order went to the making of

_Hamlet_: Of all Shakespeare's plays, this is the profoundest and most

contemplative; a philosophic atmosphere breathes around it. Naturally

enough, then, criticism has set about inquiring to what influences we

may ascribe these broodings over life and death and the mysteries of

existence.

Several students, such as Tschischwitz and König, have tried to make

out that Giordano Bruno exercised a preponderating influence upon

Shakespeare.[1] Passages suggesting a cycle in nature, such as Hamlet's

satirical outburst to the King about the dead Polonius (iv. 3), have

directed their thoughts to the Italian philosopher. In some cases they

have found or imagined a definite identity between sayings of Hamlet's

and of Bruno's--for instance, on determinism. Bruno has a passage in

which he emphasises the necessity by which everything is brought about:

"Whatever may be my pre-ordained eventide, when the change shall take

place, I await the day, I, who dwell in the night; but they await the

night who dwell in the daylight. All that is, is either here or there,

near or far off, now or after, soon or late." In the same spirit Hamlet

says (v. 2): "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now;

if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." Bruno says:

"Nothing is absolutely imperfect or evil; it only seems so in relation

to something else, and what is bad for one is good for another." In

_Hamlet_ (ii. 2), "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking

makes it so."

When once attention had been directed to Giordano Bruno, not only

his philosophical and more popular writings, but even his plays were

ransacked in search of passages that might have influenced Shakespeare.

Certain parallels and points of resemblance were indeed discovered,

very slight and trivial in themselves, but which theorists would not

believe to be fortuitous, since it was known that Giordano Bruno had

passed some time in England in Shakespeare's day, and had frequented

the society of the most distinguished men. As soon as the matter was

closely investigated, however, the probability of any direct influence

vanished almost to nothing.

Giordano Bruno remained on English ground from 1583 to 1585. Coming

from France, where he had instructed Henri III. in the Lullian art,

a mechanical, mnemotechnic method for the solution of all possible

scientific problems, he brought with him a letter of recommendation to

Mauvissière, the French Ambassador, in whose house he was received as

a friend of the family during the whole of his stay in London. He made

the acquaintance of many leading men of the time, such as Walsingham,

Leicester, Burghley, Sir Philip Sidney and his literary circle, but

soon went on to Oxford in order to lecture there and disseminate the

doctrines which lay nearest his heart. These were the Copernican

system in opposition to the Ptolemaic, which still held the field at

Oxford, and the theory that the same principle of life is diffused

through everything--atoms and organisms, plants, animals, human beings,

and the universe at large. He quarrelled with the Oxford scholars,

and held them up to ridicule and contempt in his dialogue _La Cena

de le Ceneri_, published soon after, in which he speaks in the most

disparaging terms of the coarseness of English manners. The dirtiness

of the London streets, for example, and the habit of letting one goblet

go round the table, from which every one drank, aroused his dislike and

scorn scarcely less than the rejection of Copernicus by the pedants of

the University.

At the very earliest, Shakespeare cannot have come to London until the

year of Bruno's departure from England, and can therefore scarcely have

met him. The philosopher exercised no influence upon the spiritual

life of the day in England. Not even Sir Philip Sidney was attracted

by his doctrine, and his name does not once occur in Greville's Life

of Sidney, although Greville had seen much of Bruno. Brunnhofer, who

has studied the question, points out, as showing how little trace Bruno

left behind him in England, that there is not in the Bodleian a single

contemporary manuscript or document of any kind which throws the least

light upon Bruno's stay in London or Oxford.[2] It has been maintained,

nevertheless, that Shakespeare must have read his philosophic writings

in Italian. It is, of course, possible; but there is nothing in

_Hamlet_ to prove it--nothing that cannot be fully accounted for

without assuming that he had the slightest acquaintance with them.

The only expression in Shakespeare which, probably by accident, has an

entirely pantheistic ring is "The prophetic soul of the wide world"

in Sonnet cvii.; the only passages containing an idea, not certainly

identical, but comparable with Bruno's doctrine of the metamorphosis of

natural forms are the cyclical Sonnets lix., cvi., cxxiii. If Giordano

Bruno really had anything to do with these passages, it must be because

Shakespeare had heard some talk about the great Italian's doctrine,

which may just at that time have been recalled to the recollection

of his English acquaintances by his death at the stake in Rome, on

February 17, 1600. If Shakespeare had studied his writings, he would,

among other things, have obtained some glimmering of the Copernican

system, of which he knows nothing. On the other hand, it is quite

conceivable that he may have picked up in conversation an approximate

and incomplete conception of Bruno's philosophy, and that this

conception may have given birth to the above-mentioned philosophical

reveries. All the passages in _Hamlet_ which have been attributed to

the influence of Bruno really stand in much closer relation to writers

under whose literary and philosophical influence we know beyond a doubt

that Shakespeare fell.

There is preserved in the British Museum a copy of Florio's translation

of Montaigne's Essays, folio, London, 1603, with Shakespeare's name

written on the fly-leaf. The signature is, I believe, a forgery; but

that Shakespeare had read Montaigne is clear beyond all doubt.

There are many evidences of the influence exerted by Montaigne's Essays

on English readers of that date. It was only natural that the book

should vividly impress the greatest men of the age; for there were not

at that time many such books as Montaigne's--none, perhaps, containing

so living a revelation, not merely of an author, but of a human being,

natural, many-sided, full of ability, rich in contradictions.

Outside of _Hamlet_, we trace Montaigne quite clearly in one passage in

Shakespeare, who must have had the Essays lying on his table while he

was writing _The Tempest_. Gonzalo says (ii. I)--

"I' the commonwealth I would by contrarie

Execute all things, for no kind of traffic

Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

And use of service, none; contract, succession,

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:

No occupation, all men idle, all;

And women too."

We find this speech almost word for word in Montaigne (Book i. chap.

30): "It is a nation that hath no kind of traffike, no knowledge of

letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of

politike superioritie; no vse of service, of riches or of povertie; no

contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle ... no

manuring of lands, no vse of wine, corn or metal."

Since it is thus proved beyond a doubt that Shakespeare was acquainted

with Montaigne's Essays, it is not improbable that the resemblance

between passages in that book and passages in _Hamlet_ are due to

something more than chance. When such passages occur in the First

Quarto (1603), we must assume either that Shakespeare knew the

French original, or that--as is likely enough--he may have had an

opportunity of reading Florio's translation before it was published. It

happened not infrequently in those days that a book was handed round

in manuscript among the author's private friends five or six years

before it was given to the public. Florio's close connection with the

household of Southampton renders it almost certain that Shakespeare

must have been acquainted with him; and his translation had been

entered in the Stationers' Register as ready for publication so early

as 1599.

Florio was born in 1545, of Italian parents, who, as Waldenses, had

been forced to leave their country. He had become to all intents and

purposes an Englishman, had studied and given lessons in Italian at

Oxford, had been some years in the service of the Earl of Southampton,

and was married to a sister of the poet Samuel Daniel. He dedicated

each separate book of his translation of Montaigne to two noble ladies.

Among them we find Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, Sidney's daughter;

Lady Penelope Rich, Essex's sister; and Lady Elizabeth Grey, renowned

for her beauty and learning. Each of these ladies was celebrated in a

sonnet.

Every one remembers those incomparably-worded passages in _Hamlet_

where the great brooder over life and death has expressed, in terms at

once harsh and moving, his sense of the ruthlessness of the destructive

forces of Nature, or what might be called the cynicism of the order of

things. Take for instance the following (v. I):--

"Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander,

till he find it stopping a bung-hole?... As thus: Alexander

died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust;

the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that

loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a

beer-barrel?

Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn'd to clay,

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:

O that that earth which kept the world in awe

Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!"

Hamlet's grisly jest upon the worms who are eating Polonius is a

variation on the same theme (iv. 3):--

"_Ham._ A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a

king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

"_King._ What dost thou mean by this?

"_Ham._ Nothing, but to show you how a king may go a

progress through the guts of a beggar."

An attempt has been made to attribute these passages to the influence

of Giordano Bruno; but, as Robert Beyersdorff has strikingly

demonstrated,[3] this theory assumes that Bruno's doctrine was an

atomistic materialism, whereas it was, in fact, pantheism, a perpetual

insistence upon the unity of God and Nature. The very atoms, in Bruno,

partake of spirit and life; it is not their mechanical conjunction

that produces life; no, they are monads. While cynicism is the keynote

of these utterances of Hamlet, enthusiasm is the keynote of Bruno's.

Three passages from Bruno's writings (_De la Causa_ and _La Cena de

le Ceneri_) have been cited as coinciding with Hamlet's words as to

the transformations of matter. But in the first Bruno is speaking

of the transformation of natural forms, and of the emanation of all

forms from the universal soul; in the second, he is insisting that

in all compound bodies there live numerous individuals who remain

immortal after the dissolution of the bodies; in the third, he treats

of the globe as a vast organism, which, just like animals and men, is

renewed by the transformation of matter. The whole resemblance, then,

between these passages and Hamlet's bitter outburst is that they treat

of transformations of form and matter in Nature. In spirit they are

radically different. Bruno maintains that even what seems to belong

entirely to the world of matter is permeated with soul; Hamlet, on

the contrary, asserts the wretchedness and transitoriness of human

existence.[4]

But precisely in these points Hamlet comes very near to Montaigne, who

has many expressions like those above quoted, and speaks of Sulla very

much as Hamlet speaks of Alexander and Cæsar.

On a close comparison of Shakespeare's expressions with Montaigne's,

their similarity is very striking. Hamlet, for example, says that

Polonius is at supper, not where he eats but where he is eaten. "A

certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your

only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat

ourselves for maggots: your fat king, and your lean beggar, is but

variable service; two dishes, but to one table: that's the end."

Compare Montaigne, Book ii. chap. 12:--

"He [man] need not a Whale, an Elephant, nor a Crocodile,

nor any such other wilde beast, of which one alone is of

power to defeat a great number of men: seely lice are able

to make Sulla give over his Dictatorship: The heart and life

of a mighty and triumphant Emperor, is but the break-fast of

a seely little Worm."

We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace to Bruno Hamlet's

utterance as to the relativity of all concepts. In reality it may

rather be traced to Montaigne. Hamlet, having remarked (ii. 2) that

"Denmark is a prison," Rosencrantz replies, "We think not so, my lord;"

whereupon Hamlet rejoins, "Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is

nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."[5] The passage

in Montaigne is almost identical (Book i. chap. 40):--

"If that which we call evill and torment, be neither torment

nor evill, but that our fancie only gives it that qualitie,

it is in us to change it."

We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace Hamlet's saying

about death, "If it be now, 'tis not to come," &c. to Bruno's words in

the dedication of his _Candelajo_: "Tutto quel ch'è o è qua o è là,

o vicino o lunghi, o adesso o poi, o presso o tardi." But the same

course of thought which leads Hamlet to the conclusion, "The readiness

is all," is found, with the same conclusion, in the nineteenth chapter

of Montaigne's first book: "That to Philosophie, is to learne how to

die"--a chapter which has inspired a great many of Hamlet's graveyard

cogitations.[6] Montaigne says of death:--

"Let us not forget how many waies our joyes or our feastings

be subject unto death, and by how many hold-fasts shee

threatens us and them.... It is uncertaine where death

looks for us; let us expect her everie where.... I am ever

prepared about that which I may be.... A man should ever be

ready booted to take his journey.... What matter is it when

it commeth, since it is unavoidable?"

Furthermore, we find striking points of resemblance between the

celebrated soliloquy, "To be or not to be," and the passage in

Montaigne (Book iii. chap. 12) where he reproduces the substance of

Socrates' Apology. Socrates, as we know, suggests several different

possibilities: death is either an "amendment" of our condition or

the annihilation of our being; but even in the latter case it is an

"amendment" to enter upon a long and peaceful night; for there is

nothing better in life than a deep, calm, dreamless sleep. Shakespeare

seems to have had no belief in an actual amelioration of our condition

at death; Hamlet does not even mention it as a possible contingency;

whereas the poet makes him dwell upon the thought of an endless sleep,

and on the possibility of horrible dreams. Now and then we seem to find

traces in _Hamlet_ of Plato's monologue, in the vesture given to it

by Montaigne. In the French text there is mention of the joy of being

free in another life from having to do with unjust and corrupt judges;

Hamlet speaks of freeing himself from "The oppressor's wrong, the

proud man's contumely." Some lines added in the edition of 1604 remind

us forcibly of a passage in Florio's translation. Florio reproduces

Montaigne's "Si c'est un anéantissement de notre être" by the phrase,

"If it be a consummation of one's being." Hamlet, using a word which

occurs in only two other places in Shakespeare, says, "A consummation

devoutly to be wished."

Many other small coincidences can be pointed out in the use of names

and turns of phrase, which do not, however, actually prove anything.

Where Montaigne is describing the anarchic condition of public affairs,

his words are rendered in Florio by the curiously poetic expression,

"All is out of frame." This bears a certain resemblance to the phrase

which Hamlet, already in the 1603 edition, employs to describe the

disorganisation which has followed his father's death, "The time is

out of joint." The coincience may be fortuitous, but as one among many

other points of resemblance it supports the conjecture that Shakespeare

had read the translation before it was published.[7].

For the rest, Rushton, in _Shakespeare's Euphuism_ (1871), and after

him Beyersdorff, have pointed out not a few parallels to _Hamlet_ in

Lily's _Euphues_, precisely at the points where critics have sought

to trace the much more improbable influence of Bruno. Beyersdorff

sometimes goes too far in trying to find in _Euphues_ the origin of

ideas which it would be an insult to suppose that Shakespeare needed

to borrow from such a source. But sometimes there is a real analogy.

It has been alleged that the King must have borrowed from Bruno's

philosophy the topics of consolation whereby (i. 2) he seeks to

convince Hamlet of the unreasonableness of "obstinate condolement"

over his father's death. As a matter of fact, the letter of Euphues

to Ferardo on his daughter's death contains precisely the same

arguments:--"Knowest thou not, Ferardo, that lyfe is the gifte of God,

deathe the due of Nature, as we receive the one as a benefitte, so must

we abide the other of necessitie," &c.

It has been suggested that where Hamlet (ii. 2) speaks of "the

satirical rogue" who, in the book he is reading, makes merry over

the decrepitude of old age, Shakespeare must have been alluding to a

passage in Bruno's _Spaccio_, where old men are described as those who

have "snow on their head and furrows in their brow." But if we insist

on identifying the "satirical rogue" with any actual author (a quite

unreasonable proceeding), Lily at once presents himself as answering to

the description. Again and again in _Euphues_, where old men give good

advice to the young, they appear with "hoary haire and watry eyes." And

Euphues repulses, quite in the manner of Hamlet, an old gentleman whose

moralising he regards as nothing more than the envy of decrepit age for

lusty youth, and whose intellect seems to him as tottering as his legs.

Finally, an attempt has been made to refer Hamlet's harsh sayings

to Ophelia, and his contemptuous utterances about women in general

("Frailty, thy name is woman," &c.), to a dialogue of Bruno's (_De la

Causa IV_.) in which the pedant Pollinnio appears as a woman-hater.

But the resemblance seems trifling enough when we find that in this

case woman is attacked in sound theological fashion as the source

of original sin and the cause of all our woe. Many expressions

in _Euphues_ lie infinitely nearer to Hamlet's. "What means your

lordship?" Ophelia asks (iii. I), and Hamlet replies, "That if you

be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your

beauty." Compare in _Euphues_ Ferardo's words to Lucilla: "For

oftentimes thy mother woulde saye, that thou haddest more beautie

then was convenient for one that shoulde bee honeste," and his

exclamation, "O Lucilla, Lucilla, woulde thou wert lesse fayre!"

Again, Hamlet rails against women's weakness, crying, "Wise men know

well enough what monsters you make of them;" and we find in _Euphues_

exactly similar outbursts: "I perceive they be rather woe vnto men,

by their falsehood, gelousie, inconstancie.... I see they will be

corasiues (corrosives)."[8] Beyersdorff, moreover, is no doubt right

in suggesting that the artificial style of _Euphues_ is apparent in

such speeches as this of Hamlet's: "For the power of beauty will sooner

transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty

can translate beauty into his likeness."

In _Hamlet_ and elsewhere in Shakespeare we come across traces of

a sort of atomistic-materialistic philosophy. In the last scene of

_Julius Cæsar_, Antony actually employs with regard to Brutus the

expression, "The elements so _mixd_ in him." In _Measure for Measure_

(iii. I) the Duke says to Claudio--

"Thou art not thyself;

For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains

That issue out of dust."

Hamlet says (i. 2)--

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and dissolve itself into a dew;"

and to Horatio (iii. 2)--

"Bless'd are those

Whose blood and judgment are so well _co-mingled._"

It has already been pointed out how far this atomism, if we can so

regard it, differs from Bruno's idealistic monadism. But in all

probability we have here only the expressions of the dominant belief of

Shakespeare's time, that all differences of temperament depended upon

the mixture of the juices or "humours." Shakespeare is on this point,

as on many others, more popular and less book-learned, more naïve and

less metaphysical, than book-learned commentators are willing to allow.

Writers like Montaigne and Lyly were no doubt constantly in

Shakespeare's hands while _Hamlet_ was taking shape within him. But

it would be absurd to suppose that he consulted them especially with

_Hamlet_ in view. He did consult authorities with regard to Hamlet, but

they were men, not books, and men, moreover, with whom he was in daily

intercourse. Hamlet being a Dane and his destiny being acted out in

distant Denmark--a name not yet so familiar in England as it was soon

to be, when, with the new King, a Danish princess came to the throne--

Shakespeare would naturally seize whatever opportunities lay in his

way of gathering intelligence as to the manners and customs of this

little-known country.

In the year 1585 a troupe of English players had appeared in the

courtyard of the Town-Hall of Elsinore. If we are justified in assuming

this troupe to have been the same which we find in the following year

established at the Danish Court, it numbered among its members three

persons who, at the time when Shakespeare was turning over in his

mind the idea of _Hamlet_, belonged to his company of actors, and

probably to his most intimate circle: namely, William Kemp, George

Bryan, and Thomas Pope. The first of these, the celebrated clown,

belonged to Shakespeare's company from 1594 till March 1602, when he

went over for six months to Henslow's company; the other two also

joined Shakespeare's company as early as 1594. It was evidently from

these comrades of his, and perhaps also from other English actors who,

under the management of Thomas Sackville, had performed at Copenhagen

in 1596 at the coronation of Christian IV., that Shakespeare gathered

information on several matters relating to Denmark.

First and foremost, he picked up some Danish names, which we find,

indeed, mutilated by the printers in the different texts of _Hamlet_,

but which are easily recognisable. The _Rossencraft_ of the First

Quarto has become _Rosencraus_ in the second, and _Rosincrane_ in

the Folio; it is clearly enough the name of the ancient Danish

family of _Rosenkrans_. Thus, too, we find in the three editions the

name _Gilderstone, Guyldensterne_, and _Guildensterne_, in which

we recognise the Danish _Gyldenstierne_; while the names given to

the ambassador, _Voltemar, Voltemand, Valtemand, Voltumand_, are so

many corruptions of the Danish _Valdemar_. The name _Gertrude_, too,

Shakespeare must have learned from his comrades as a Danish name; he

has substituted it for the _Geruth_ of the novel. In the Second Quarto

it is misprinted _Gertrad_.

It is evidently in consequence of what he had learnt from his comrades

that Shakespeare has transferred the action of _Hamlet_ from Jutland to

Elsinore, which they had visited and no doubt described to him. That is

how he comes to know of the Castle at Elsinore (finished about a score

of years earlier), though he does not mention the name of Kronborg.

The scene in which Polonius listens behind the arras, and in which

Hamlet, in reproaching the Queen, points to the portraits of the

late and of the present King, has even been regarded as proving that

Shakespeare knew something of the interior of the Castle. On the

stage, Hamlet is often made to wear a miniature portrait of his father

round his neck, and to hold it up before his mother; but the words

of the play prove incontestably that Shakespeare imagined life-sized

pictures hanging on the wall. Now we find a contemporary description

of a "great chamber" at Kronborg, written by an English traveller,

in which occurs this passage: "It is hanged with Tapistary of fresh

coloured silke without gold, wherein all the Danish kings are exprest

in antique habits, according to their severall times, with their armes

and inscriptions, containing all their conquests and victories."[9] It

is possible, then, though not very probable, that Shakespeare may have

heard of the arrangement of this room. When Polonius wanted to play the

eavesdropper, it was a matter of course that he should get behind the

arras; and it was easy to imagine that portraits of the kings would

hang on the walls of a royal castle, without the least knowledge that

this was actually the case at Kronborg.

It is probable, on the other hand, that Shakespeare made Hamlet study

at Wittenberg because he knew that many Danes went to this University,

which, being Lutheran, was not frequented by Englishmen. And it

is quite certain that when, in the first and fifth acts, he makes

trumpet-blasts and the firing of cannon accompany the healths which

are drunk, he must have known that this was a specially Danish custom,

and have tried to give his play local colour by introducing it. While

Hamlet and his friends (i. 4) are awaiting the appearance of the Ghost,

trumpets and cannon are heard "within." "What does this mean, my lord?"

Horatio asks; and Hamlet answers--

"The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse,

Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;

And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,

The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out

The triumph of his pledge."

Similarly, in the last scene of the play, the King says--

"Give me the cups;

And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,

The trumpet to the cannoneer without,

The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth,

'Now the king drinks to Hamlet!"

Shakespeare must even have been eager to display his knowledge of the

intemperate habits of the Danes, and the strange usages resulting

therefrom, for, as Schück has ingeniously remarked, in order to bring

in this piece of information, he has made Horatio, himself a Dane, ask

Hamlet whether it is the custom of the country to celebrate every toast

with this noise of trumpets and of ordnance. In answer to this question

Hamlet speaks of the custom as though he were addressing a foreigner,

and makes the profound remark that a single blemish will often mar

a nation's good report, no less than an individual's, and that its

character

"Shall in the general censure take corruption

From that particular fault."

It is evident that Denmark "took corruption" from its drinking usages

in the "censure" of the better sort of Englishmen. In a notebook kept

by "Maister William Segar, Garter King at Armes," we read under the

date July 14, 1603--

"That afternoone the King [of Denmark] went aboord the

English ship [which was lying off Elsinore], and had a

banket prepared for him vpon the vpper decks, which were

hung with an Awning of cloaths of Tissue; every health

reported sixe, eight, or ten shot of great Ordinance, so

that during the king's abode, the ship discharged 160 shot."

Of the same king's "solemne feast to the [English] embassadour," Segar

writes:--

"It were superfluous to tell you of all superfluities that

were vsed; and it would make a man sick to heare of their

drunken healths: vse hath brought it into a fashion, and

fashion made it a habit, which ill beseemes our nation to

imitate."[10]

The King here spoken of is Christian IV., then twenty-six years of age.

When he, three years afterwards, visited England, it seems as though

the Court, which had previously been very sober, justified the fears of

the worthy diarist by catching the infection of Danish intemperance.

Noble ladies as well as gentlemen took to over-indulgence in wine. The

Rev. H. Harington, in his _Nugæ Antiquæ_ (edit. 1779, ii. 126), prints

a letter from Sir John Harington to Mr. Secretary Barlow, giving a

very humorous description of the festivities in which the Danish King

took part. One day after dinner, he relates, "the representation of

Solomon his temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was made." But

alas! the lady who played the Queen, and who was to bring "precious

gifts to both their Majesties, forgetting the steppes arising to the

canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap, and fell

at his feet, though I rather think it was in his face. Much was the

hurry and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand to make all clean.

His Majesty then got up, and would dance with the Queen of Sheba;

but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to

an inner chamber, and laid on a bed of state; which was not a little

defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed upon his

garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices and other

good matters." The entertainment proceeded, but most of the "presenters

fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers." Now there entered

in gorgeous array Faith, Hope, and Charity. Hope "did assay" to speak,

but could not manage it, and withdrew, stammering excuses to the King;

Faith staggered after her; Charity alone succeeded in kneeling at the

King's feet, and when she returned to her sisters, she found them

lying very sick in the lower hall. Then Victory made her entrance in

bright armour, but did not triumph long, having to be led away a "silly

captive" and left to sleep upon the ante-chamber stairs. Last of all

came Peace, who "much contrary to her semblance, most rudely made war

with her olive branch upon" those who tried, from motives of propriety,

to get her out of the way.

Shakespeare, then, conceived intemperance in drinking, and

glorification of drunkenness as a polite and admirable accomplishment,

to be a Danish national vice. It is clear enough, however, that no

more here than elsewhere was it his main purpose to depict a foreign

people. It was not national peculiarities that interested him, but

the characteristics common to humanity; and he did not need to search

outside of England for the prototypes of his Polonius, his Horatio, his

Ophelia, and his Hamlet.

[1] Tschischwitz: _Shakespeare-Forschungen_; König:

_Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xi.

[2] Brunnhofer: _Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung und

Verhängniss._

[3] _Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare_, Oldenburg, 1889, p. 26.

[4] A comic analogy to Bruno's doctrine may be found in the

following lines of Hotspur's (Henry IV., Pt. I. iii. l):

"Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth

In strange eruptions: oft the teeming earth

Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd

By the imprisoning of unruly wind

Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,

Shakes the old beldam Earth, and topples down

Steeples and moss-grown towers."

But no one will seriously attribute this passage to the philosophical

influence of Giordano Bruno. Hotspur was quite capable of hitting upon

this image without any suggestion from Nola or Naples.

[5] This speech first occurs in the First Folio.

[6] This was first pointed out (about 1860) by Otto Ludwig.

See his _Shakespeare-Studien_, p. 373. The relation between Shakespeare

and Montaigne is dwelt upon in an ill-arranged book by G. F. Stedefeld:

_Hamlet, ein Tendenz-Drama_ (1871).

[7] Compare Jacob Feis, _Shakespeare and Montaigne_, pp.

64-130. Beyersdorff, _Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare_, p. 27 _et seq_.

[8] Beyersdorff, _op. cit._, p. 33. John Lyly, Evphves: _The

Anatomy of Wit_, ed. Landmann, pp. 72, 75.

[9] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1874, p.

513. Compare Schück, "Englische Komödianten in Skandinavien,"

_Skandinavisches Archiv_.

[10] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1874, p. 512.

XIII

_THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN HAMLET_

In trying to bring together, as we have done, a mass of historical,

dramatic, and fictional material, fragments of philosophy, and

ethnographical details, which Shakespeare utilised during his work upon

_Hamlet_, or which may, without his knowing it, have hovered in his

memory, we do not, of course, mean to imply that the initial impulse

to the work came to him from without. The piecing together of external

impressions, as we have already remarked, has never produced a work

of immortal poetry. In approaching the theme, Shakespeare obeyed a

fundamental instinct in his nature; and as he worked it out, everything

that stood in relation to it rushed together in his mind. He might

have said with Goethe: "After long labour in piling up fuel and straw,

I have often tried in vain to warm myself ... until at last the spark

catches all of a sudden, and the whole is wrapped in flame."

It is this flame which shines forth from _Hamlet_, shooting up so high

and glowing so red that to this day it fascinates all eyes.

Hamlet assumes madness in order to lull the suspicions of the man

who has murdered his father and wrongfully usurped his throne; but

under this mask of madness he gives evidence of rare intelligence,

deep feeling, peculiar subtlety, mordant satire, exalted irony, and

penetrating knowledge of human nature.

Here lay the point of attraction for Shakespeare. The indirect form of

expression had always allured him; it was the favourite method of his

clowns and humourists. Touchstone employs it, and it enters largely

into the immortal wit of Falstaff. We have seen how Jaques, in _As You

Like It_, envied those whose privilege it was to speak the truth under

the disguise of folly; we remember his sigh of longing for "as large a

charter as the wind to blow on whom he pleased." He it was who declared

motley the only wear; and in his melancholy and longing Shakespeare

disguised his own, exclaiming through his mouth--

"Invest me in my motley; give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through

Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world."

In _Hamlet_ Shakespeare put this motley coat on his own shoulders;

he seized the opportunity of making Hamlet, in the guise of apparent

madness, speak sharp and bitter truths in a way that would not soon

be forgotten. The task was a grateful one; for earnestness cuts the

deeper the more it sounds like jest or triviality; and wisdom appears

doubly wise when it is thrown out lightly under the mask of folly,

instead of pedantically asserting itself as the fruit of reflection and

experience. Difficult for any one else, to Shakespeare the enterprise

was merely alluring: it was, in fact, to do what no other poet had as

yet succeeded in doing--to draw a genius. Shakespeare had not far to

go for his model, and genius would seem doubly effective when it wore

the mask of madness, now speaking through that mouthpiece, and again

unmasking itself in impassioned monologues.

It cost Shakespeare no effort to transform himself into Hamlet. On

the contrary, in giving expression to Hamlet's spiritual life he was

enabled quite naturally to pour forth all that during the recent years

had filled his heart and seethed in his brain. He could let this

creation drink his inmost heart's blood; he could transfer to it the

throbbing of his own pulses. Behind its forehead he could hide his

melancholy; on its tongue he could lay his wit; its eyes he could cause

to glow and lighten with flashes of his own spirit.

It is true that Hamlet's outward fortunes were different enough from

his. He had not lost his father by assassination; his mother had not

degraded herself. But all these details were only outward signs and

symbols. He had lived through all of Hamlet's experience--all. Hamlet's

father had been murdered and his place usurped by his brother; that

is to say, the being whom he most reverenced and to whom he owed most

had been overpowered by malice and treachery, instantly forgotten and

shamelessly supplanted. How often had not Shakespeare himself seen

worthlessness strike greatness down and usurp its place! Hamlet's

mother had married her husband's murderer; in other words, that which

he had long honoured and loved and held sacred, sacred as is a mother

to her son, that on which he could not endure to see any stain, had

all of a sudden shown itself impure, besmirched, frivolous, perhaps

criminal. What a terrible impression must it have made upon Shakespeare

himself when he first discovered the unworthiness of that which he had

held in highest reverence, and when he first saw and realised that his

ideal had fallen from its pedestal into the mire.

The experience which shook Hamlet's nature was no other than that

which every nobly-disposed youth, on first seeing the world as it is,

concentrates in the words: "Alas! life is not what I thought it was."

The father's murder, the mother's possible complicity, and her indecent

haste in entering upon a new wedlock, were only symptoms in the young

man's eyes of the worthlessness of human nature and the injustice

of life--only the individual instances from which, by instinctive

generalisation, he inferred the dire disillusions and terrible

possibilities of existence--only the chance occasion for the sudden

vanishing of that rosy light in which everything had hitherto been

steeped for him, and in the absence of which the earth seemed to him a

sterile promontory, and the heavens a pestilent congregation of vapours.

Just such a crisis, bringing with it the "loss of all his mirth,"

Shakespeare himself had recently undergone. He had lost in the previous

year the protectors of his youth. The woman he loved, and to whom he

had looked up as to a being of a rarer, loftier order, had all of a

sudden proved to be a heartless, faithless wanton. The friend he loved,

worshipped, and adored had conspired against him with this woman,

laughed at him in her arms, betrayed his confidence, and treated him

with coldness and distance. Even the prospect of winning the poet's

wreath had been overcast for him. Truly he too had seen his illusions

vanish and his vision of the world fall to ruins.

In his first consternation he had been submissive, had stood

defenceless, had spoken words without a sting, had been all mildness

and melancholy. But this was not his whole, nor his inmost, nature.

In his heart of hearts he knew himself a power--a power! He was

incomparably armed, quick and keen of fence, full of wit and

indignation, the master of them all, and infinitely greater than his

fate. Burrow as they might, "it should go hard but he would delve one

yard below their mines." He had suffered many a humiliation; but the

revenge which was denied him in real life he could now take incognito

through Hamlet's bitter and scathing invectives.

He had seen high-born gentlemen play a princely part in the society of

artists, players, men whom public opinion undervalued and contemned.

Now he himself would be the high-born gentleman, would show how the

truly princely spirit bore itself towards the poor artists, and give

utterance to his own thoughts about art, and his conception of its

value and significance.

He merged himself in Hamlet; he felt as Hamlet did; he now and then so

mingled their identities that, in placing his own weightiest thoughts

in Hamlet's mouth, as in the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy,

he made him think, not as a prince, but as a subject, with all the

passionate bitterness of one who sees brutality and stupidity lording

it in high places. Thus it was that he made Hamlet say--

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

_The oppressors wrong, the proud man's contumely_,

The pangs of despis'd love, _the law's delay_,

_The insolence of office, and the spurns_

_That patient merit of the unworthy takes_,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?"

Every one can see that this is felt and thought from below upwards,

not from above downwards, and that the words are improbable, almost

impossible, in the mouth of the Prince. But they embody feelings and

thoughts to which Shakespeare had recently given expression in his own

name in Sonnet lxvi.:--

"Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry;--

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill:

Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone."

The bright view of life which had prevailed in his youth was

overclouded; he saw the strength of malignity, the power of stupidity,

unworthiness exalted, true desert elbowed aside. Existence turned its

seamy side towards him. Through what experiences had he not come! How

often, in the year that had just passed, must he have exclaimed, like

Hamlet in his first soliloquy, "Frailty, thy name is woman!" and how

much cause had he had to say, "Let her not walk i' the sun: conception

is a blessing; but not as your daughter may conceive." So far had

it gone with him that, finding everything "weary, stale, flat, and

unprofitable," he thought it monstrous that such an existence should be

handed on from generation to generation, and that ever new hordes of

miserable creatures should come into existence: "Get thee to a nunnery!

Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?"

The glimpse of high life which he had seen, his relations with the

Court, and the gossip from Whitehall and Greenwich which circulated

through the town, had proved to him the truth of the couplet--

"Cog, lie, flatter, and face

Four ways in Court to win men grace."

Sheer criminals such as Leicester and Claudius flourished and waxed fat

at Court.

What did men do at Court but truckle to the great? What throve except

wordy morality, mutual espionage, artificial wit, double-tongued

falsity, inveterate lack of principle, perpetual hypocrisy? What

were these great ones but flatterers and lipservers, always ready to

turn their coats according to the wind? And so Polonius and Osrick,

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, took shape in his imagination. They knew

how to bow and cringe; they were masters of elegant phrases; they were

members of the great guild of time-servers. "To be honest as this world

goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand."

And the Danish Court was only a picture in little of all Denmark--that

Denmark in whose state there was something rotten, and which was to

Hamlet a prison. "Then is the world one?" says Rosencrantz; and Hamlet

does not recoil from the conclusion: "A goodly one," he replies, "in

which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons." The Court-world of

_Hamlet_ was but an image of the world at large.

But if this is how matters stand, if a pure and princely nature is thus

placed in the world and thus surrounded, we are necessarily confronted

with the great and unanswerable questions: "How comes it?" and "Why

is it?" The problem of the relation of good and evil in this world,

an unsolved riddle, involves further problems as to the government

of the world, as to a righteous Providence, as to the relation

between the world and a God. And thought--Shakespeare's no less than

Hamlet's--beats at the locked door of the mystery.

XIV

_THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET_

Though there are in _Hamlet_ more direct utterances of the poet's

inmost spiritual life than in any of his earlier works, he has none

the less succeeded in thoroughly disengaging his hero's figure, and

making it an independent entity. What he gave him of his own nature was

its unfathomable depth; for the rest, he retained the situation and

the circumstances much as he found them in his authorities. It cannot

be denied that he thus involved himself in difficulties which he by

no means entirely overcame. The old legend, with its harsh outlines,

its mediæval order of ideas, its heathen groundwork under a varnish of

dogmatic Catholicism, its assumption of vengeance as the unquestionable

right, or rather duty, of the individual, did not very readily

harmonise with the rich life of thoughts, dreams, and feelings which

Shakespeare imparted to his hero. There arose a certain discrepancy

between the central figure and his surroundings. A Prince who is the

intellectual peer of Shakespeare himself, who knows and declares that

"no traveller returns" from beyond the grave, yet sees and holds

converse with a ghost. A royal youth of the Renaissance, who has gone

through a foreign university, whose chief bent is towards philosophic

brooding, who writes verses, who cultivates music, elocution, and

rapier-fencing, and proves himself an expert in dramatic criticism,

is at the same time pre-occupied with thoughts of personal and bloody

vengeance. Now and then, in the course of the drama, a rift seems to

open between the shell of the action and its kernel.

But Shakespeare, with his consummate instinct, managed to find an

advantage precisely in this discrepancy, and to turn it to account.

His Hamlet believes in the ghost and--doubts. He accepts the summons

to the deed of vengeance and--delays. Much of the originality of the

figure, and of the drama as a whole, springs almost inevitably from

this discrepancy between the mediæval character of the fable and its

Renaissance hero, who is so deep and many-sided that he has almost a

modern air.

The figure of Hamlet, as it at last shaped itself in Shakespeare's

imagination and came to life in his drama, is one of the very few

immortal figures of art and poetry, which, like Cervantes' Don Quixote,

exactly its contemporary, and Goethe's Faust of two centuries later,

present to generation after generation problems to brood over and

enigmas to solve. If we compare the two great figures of Hamlet (1604)

and Don Quixote (1605), we find Hamlet undoubtedly the more enigmatic

and absorbing of the two. Don Quixote belongs to the past. He embodies

the naïve spirit of chivalry which, having outlived its age, gives

offence on all hands in a time of prosaic rationalism, and makes itself

a laughing-stock through its importunate enthusiasms. He has the firm,

easily-comprehensible contours of a caricature. Hamlet belongs to

the future, to the modern age. He embodies the lofty and reflective

spirit, standing isolated, with its severely exalted ideals, in corrupt

or worthless surroundings, forced to conceal its inmost nature,

yet everywhere arousing hostility. He has the unfathomable spirit

and ever-changing physiognomy of genius. Goethe, in his celebrated

exposition of Hamlet (_Wilhelm Meister_, Book iv. chap. 13), maintains

that in this case a great deed is imposed upon a soul which is not

strong enough for it:--

"There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should

have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots

expand, the jar is shivered. A lovely, pure, noble, and most

moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a

hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must

not cast away."

This interpretation is brilliant and thoughtful, but not entirely just.

One can trace in it the spirit of the period of humanity, transforming

in its own image a figure belonging to the Renaissance. Hamlet cannot

really be called, without qualification, "lovely, pure, noble and most

moral"--he who says to Ophelia the penetratingly true, unforgettable

words, "I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of

such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me." The light

of such a saying as this takes the colour out of Goethe's adjectives.

It is true that Hamlet goes on to ascribe to himself evil qualities

of which he is quite innocent; but he was doubtless sincere in the

general tenor of his speech, to which all men of the better sort will

subscribe. Hamlet is no model of virtue. He is not simply pure, noble,

moral, &c., but is, or becomes, other things as well--wild, bitter,

harsh, now tender, now coarse, wrought up to the verge of madness,

callous, cruel. No doubt he is too weak for his task, or rather wholly

unsuited to it; but he is by no means devoid of physical strength or

power of action. He is no child of the period of humanity, moral and

pure, but a child of the Renaissance, with its impulsive energy, its

irrepressible fulness of life and its undaunted habit of looking death

in the eyes.

Shakespeare at first conceived Hamlet as a youth. In the First Quarto

he is quite young, probably nineteen. It accords with this age that

he should be a student at Wittenberg; young men at that time began

and ended their university course much earlier than in our days. It

accords with this age that his mother should address him as "boy" ("How

now, boy!" iii. 4--a phrase which is deleted in the next edition), and

that the word "young" should be continually prefixed to his name, not

merely to distinguish him from his father. The King, too, in the early

edition (not in that of 1604) currently addresses him as "son Hamlet;"

and finally his mother is still young enough to arouse--or at least

to enable Claudius plausibly to pretend--the passion which has such

terrible results. Hamlet's speech to his mother--

"At your age

The hey-day of the blood is tame, it's humble,

And waits upon the judgment,"

does not occur in the 1603 edition. The decisive proof, however, of

the fact that Hamlet at first appeared in Shakespeare's eyes much

younger (eleven years, to be precise) than he afterwards made him, is

to be found in the graveyard scene (v. I). In the older edition, the

First Gravedigger says that the skull of the jester Yorick has lain

a dozen years in the earth; in the edition of 1604 this is changed

to twenty-three years. Here, too, it is explicitly indicated that

Hamlet, who as a child knew Yorick, is now thirty years old; for the

Gravedigger first states that he took to his trade on the very day on

which Prince Hamlet was born, and a little later adds: "I have been

sexton here, man and boy, thirty years." It accords with this that the

Player-King now mentions thirty years as the time that has elapsed

since his marriage with the Queen, and that Ophelia (iii. I) speaks of

Hamlet as the "unmatch'd form of blown [_i.e._ mature] youth."

The process of thought in Shakespeare's mind is evident. At first it

seemed to him as if the circumstances of the case demanded that Hamlet

should be a youth; for thus the overwhelming effect produced upon him

by his mother's prompt forgetfulness of his father and hasty marriage

seemed most intelligible. He had been living far from the great world,

in quiet Wittenberg, never doubting that life was in fact as harmonious

as it is apt to appear in the eyes of a young prince. He believed in

the realisation of ideals here on earth, imagined that intellectual

nobility and fine feelings ruled the world, that justice reigned in

public, faith and honour in private, life. He admired his great father,

honoured his beautiful mother, passionately loved the charming Ophelia,

thought nobly of humankind, and especially of women. From the moment he

loses his father, and is forced to change his opinion of his mother,

this serene view of life is darkened. If his mother has been able to

forget his father and marry this man, what is woman worth? and what is

life worth? At the very outset, then, when he has not even heard of his

father's ghost, much less seen or held converse with it, sheer despair

speaks in his monologue:

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew:

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"

Hence, also, his naïve surprise that one may smile and smile and yet

be a villain. He regards what has happened as a typical occurrence, a

specimen of what the world really is. Hence his words to Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern: "I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost

all my mirth." And those others: "What a piece of work is a man! how

noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! ... in action, how like an

angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world!" These

words express his first bright view of life. But that has vanished,

and the world is no longer anything to him but a "foul and pestilent

congregation of vapours." And man! What is this "quintessence of dust"

to him? He has no pleasure in man or woman.

Hence arise his thoughts of suicide. The finer a young man's character,

the stronger is his desire, on entering life, to see his ideals

consummated in persons and circumstances. Hamlet suddenly realises that

everything is entirely different from what he had imagined, and feels

as if he must die because he cannot set it right.

He finds it very difficult to believe that the world is so bad;

therefore he is always seeking for new proofs of it; therefore, for

instance, he plans the performance of the play. His joy whenever he

tears the mask from baseness is simply the joy of realisation, with

deep sorrow in the background--abstract satisfaction produced by the

feeling that at last he understands the worthlessness of the world.

His divination was just--events confirm it. There is no cold-hearted

pessimism here. Hamlet's fire is never quenched; his wound never heals.

Laertes' poisoned blade gives the quietus to a still tortured soul.[1].

All this, though we can quite well imagine it of a man of thirty, is

more natural, more what we should expect, in one of nineteen. But as

Shakespeare worked on at his drama, and came to deposit in Hamlet's

mind, as in a treasury, more and more of his own life-wisdom, of his

own experience, and of his own keen and virile wit, he saw that early

youth was too slight a framework to support this intellectual weight,

and gave Hamlet the age of ripening manhood.[2]

Hamlet's faith and trust in humankind are shattered before the Ghost

appears to him. From the moment when his father's spirit communicates

to him a far more appalling insight into the facts of the situation,

his whole inner man is in wild revolt.

This is the cause of the leave-taking, the silent leave-taking, from

Ophelia, whom in letters he had called his soul's idol. His ideal of

womanhood no longer exists. Ophelia now belongs to those "trivial fond

records" which the sense of his great mission impels him to efface from

the tablets of his memory. There is no room in his soul for his task

and for her, passive and obedient to her father as she is. Confide

in her he cannot; she has shown how unequal she is to the exigencies

of the situation by refusing to receive his letters and visits. She

actually hands over his last letter to her father, which means that it

will be shown and read at court. At last, she even consents to play the

spy upon him. He no longer believes or can believe in any woman.

He intends to proceed at once to action, but too many thoughts crowd in

upon him. He broods over that horror which the Ghost has revealed to

him, and over the world in which such a thing could happen; he doubts

whether the apparition was really his father, or perhaps a deceptive,

malignant spirit; and, lastly, he has doubts of himself, of his ability

to upraise and restore what has been overthrown, of his fitness for the

vocation of avenger and judge. His doubt as to the trustworthiness of

the Ghost leads to the performance of the play within the play, which

proves the King's guilt. His feeling of his own unfitness for his task

leads to continued procrastination.

During the course of the play it is sufficiently proved that he is

not, in the main, incapable of action. He does not hesitate to stab

the eavesdropper behind the arras; without wavering and without pity

he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to certain death; he boards a

hostile ship; and, never having lost sight of his purpose, he takes

vengeance before he dies. But it is clear, none the less, that he has

a great inward obstacle to overcome before he proceeds to the decisive

act. Reflection hinders him; his "resolution is sicklied o'er with the

pale cast of thought," as he says in his soliloquy.

He has become to the popular mind the great type of the procrastinator

and dreamer; and far on into this century, hundreds of individuals, and

even whole races, have seen themselves reflected in him as in a mirror.

We must not forget, however, that this dramatic curiosity--a hero who

does not act--was, to a certain extent, demanded by the technique of

this particular drama. If Hamlet had killed the King directly after

receiving the Ghost's revelation, the play would have come to an end

with the first act. It was, therefore, absolutely necessary that delays

should arise.

Shakespeare is misunderstood when Hamlet is taken for that entirely

modern product--a mind diseased by morbid reflection, without capacity

for action. It is nothing less than a freak of ironic fate that _he_

should have become a sort of symbol of reflective sloth, this man who

has gunpowder in every nerve, and all the dynamite of genius in his

nature.

It was undeniably and indubitably Shakespeare's intention to give

distinctness to Hamlet's character by contrasting it with youthful

energy of action, unhesitatingly pursuing its aim.

While Hamlet is letting himself be shipped off to England, the young

Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, arrives with his soldiers, ready to risk

his life for a patch of ground that "hath in it no profit but the name.

To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it." Hamlet says to himself

(iv. 4):

"How all occasions do inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge!...

... I do not know

Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do.'"

And he despairs when he contrasts himself with Fortinbras, the delicate

and tender prince, who, at the head of his brave troops, dares death

and danger "even for an egg-shell":

"Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour's at the stake."

But with Hamlet it is a question of more than "honour," a conception

belonging to a sphere far below his. It is natural that he should feel

ashamed at the sight of Fortinbras marching off to the sound of drum

and trumpet at the head of his forces--he, who has not carried out, or

even laid, any plan; who, after having by means of the play satisfied

himself of the King's guilt, and at the same time betrayed his own

state of mind, is now writhing under the consciousness of impotence.

But the sole cause of this impotence is the paralysing grasp laid on

all his faculties by his new realisation of what life is, and the

broodings born of this realisation. Even his mission of vengeance

sinks into the background of his mind. Everything is at strife within

him--his duty to his father, his duty to his mother, reverence, horror

of crime, hatred, pity, fear of action, and fear of inaction. He feels,

even if he does not expressly say so, how little is gained by getting

rid of a single noxious animal. He himself is already so much more than

what he was at first--the youth chosen to execute a vendetta. He has

become the great sufferer, who jeers and mocks, and rebukes the world

that racks him. He is the cry of humanity, horror-struck at its own

visage.

There is no "general meaning" on the surface of _Hamlet_. Lucidity was

not the ideal Shakespeare had before him while he was producing this

tragedy, as it had been when he was composing _Richard III_. Here there

are plenty of riddles and self-contradictions; but not a little of the

attraction of the play depends on this very obscurity.

We all know that kind of well-written book which is blameless in form,

obvious in intention, and in which the characters stand out sharply

defined. We read it with pleasure; but when we have read it, we are

done with it. There is nothing to be read between the lines, no gulf

between this passage and that, no mystic twilight anywhere in it,

no shadows in which we can dream. And, again, there are other books

whose fundamental idea is capable of many interpretations, and affords

matter for much dispute, but whose significance lies less in what they

say to us than in what they lead us to imagine, to divine. They have

the peculiar faculty of setting thoughts and feelings in motion; more

thoughts than they themselves contain, and perhaps of a quite different

character. _Hamlet_ is such a book. As a piece of psychological

development, it lacks the lucidity of classical art; the hero's soul

has all the untranspicuousness and complexity of a real soul; but one

generation after another has thrown its imagination into the problem,

and has deposited in Hamlet's soul the sum of its experience.

To Hamlet life is half reality, half a dream. He sometimes resembles a

somnambulist, though he is often as wakeful as a spy. He has so much

presence of mind that he is never at a loss for the aptest retort,

and, along with it, such absence of mind that he lets go his fixed

determination in order to follow up some train of thought or thread

some dream-labyrinth. He appals, amuses, captivates, perplexes,

disquiets us. Few characters in fiction have so disquieted the world.

Although he is incessantly talking, he is solitary by nature. He

typifies, indeed, that solitude of soul which cannot impart itself.

"His name," says Victor Hugo, "is as the name on a woodcut cut of

Albert Dürer's: _Melancholia_. The bat flits over Hamlet's head; at

his feet sit Knowledge, with globe and compass, and Love, with an

hour-glass; while behind him, on the horizon, rests a giant sun, which

only serves to make the sky above him darker." But from another point

of view Hamlet's nature is that of the hurricane--a thing of wrath and

fury, and tempestuous scorn, strong enough to sweep the whole world

clean.

There is in him no less indignation than melancholy; in fact, his

melancholy is a result of his indignation. Sufferers and thinkers have

found in him a brother. Hence the extraordinary popularity of the

character, in spite of its being the reverse of obvious.

Audiences and readers feel with Hamlet and understand him; for all the

better-disposed among us make the discovery, when we go forth into

life as grown-up men and women, that it is not what we had imagined it

to be, but a thousandfold more terrible. Something is rotten in the

state of Denmark. Denmark is a prison, and the world is full of such

dungeons. A spectral voice says to us: "Horrible things have happened;

horrible things are happening every day. Be it your task to repair the

evil, to rearrange the course of things is for you to set it right."

But our arms fall powerless by our sides. Evil is too strong, too

cunning for us.

In _Hamlet_, the first philosophical drama of the modern era, we meet

for the first time the typical modern character, with its intense

feeling of the strife between the ideal and the actual world, with its

keen sense of the chasm between power and aspiration, and with that

complexity of nature which shows itself in wit without mirth, cruelty

combined with sensitiveness, frenzied impatience at war with inveterate

procrastination.

[1] See Hermann Türck: _Das psychologische Problem in der

Hamlet-Tragödie_. 1890.

[2] See E. Sullivan: "On Hamlet's Age." _New Shakspere Society's

Transactions_. 1880-86.

XV

_HAMLET AS A DRAMA_

Let us now look at _Hamlet_ as a drama; and, to get the full impression

of Shakespeare's greatness, let us first recall its purely theatrical,

materially visible side, that which dwells in the memory simply as

pantomime.[1].

The night-watch on the platform before the Castle of Elsinore, and the

appearance of the Ghost to the soldiers and officers there. Then, in

contrast to the splendidly-attired courtiers, the blackrobed figure of

the Prince, standing apart, a living image of grief, his countenance

bespeaking both soul and intellect, but with an expression which seems

to say that henceforth joy and he are strangers. Next, his meeting with

his father's spirit; the oath upon the sword, with the constant change

of place. Then his wild behaviour when, to hide his excitement, he

feigns madness. Then the play within the play; the sword-thrust through

the arras; the beautiful Ophelia with flowers and straw in her hair;

Hamlet with Yorick's skull in his hand; the struggle with Laertes in

Ophelia's grave, that grotesque but most significant episode. According

to the custom of the time, a dumb show foretold the poisoning in the

play, and this fight in the grave is the dumb show which foretells

the mortal combat that is soon to take place: both are presently to

be swallowed up by the grave in which they stand. Then follows the

fencing-scene, during the course of which the Queen dies by the poison

which the King destined for Hamlet, and Laertes by the stroke of the

poisoned sword also prepared for the Prince, who, with a last great

effort, kills the King, and then sinks down poisoned. This wholesale

"havock" arranged by the poet, a fourfold lying-in-state, has its gloom

broken by the triumphal march of young Fortinbras, which, in its turn,

soon changes to a funeral measure. The whole is as effective to the eye

as it is great and beautiful.

And now add to this ocular picturesqueness of the play the fascination

which it owes to the sympathy Shakespeare has made us feel for its

principal character, the impression he has given us of the agonies of

a strong and sensitive spirit surrounded by corruption and depravity.

Hamlet was by nature candid, enthusiastic, trustful, loving; the guile

of others forces him to take refuge in guile; the wickedness of others

drives him to distrust and hate; and the crime committed against his

murdered father calls upon him from the underworld for vengeance.

His indignation at the infamy around him is heartrending, his contempt

for it is stimulating.

By nature he is a thinker. He thinks not only when he is contemplating

and planning a course of action, but also from a passionate longing

for comprehension in the abstract. Though he is merely making use of

the players to unmask the murderer, he gives them apt and profound

advice with regard to the practice of their art. When Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern question him as to the reason of his melancholy, he

expounds to them in words of deep significance his rooted distaste for

life.

The feeling produced in him by any strong impression never finds

vent in straightforward, laconic words. His speeches never take the

direct, the shortest way to express his thoughts. They consist of

ingenious, far-fetched similes and witty conceits, apparently remote

from the matter in hand. Sarcastic and enigmatical phrases conceal his

emotions. This dissimulation is forced upon him by the very strength of

his feelings: in order not to betray himself, not to give way to the

pain he is suffering, he must smother it in fantastic and boisterous

ejaculations. Thus he shouts after having seen the apparition: "Hillo,

ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come!" Thus he apostrophises the Ghost: "Well

said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast?" And therefore, after

the play has made the King betray himself, he cries: "Ah, ha! Come,

some music! come, the recorders!" His feigned madness is only an

intentional exaggeration of this tendency.

The horrible secret that has been discovered to him has upset his

equilibrium. The show of madness enables him to find solace in

expressing indirectly what it tortures him to talk of directly, and

at the same time his seeming lunacy diverts attention from the real

reason of his deep melancholy. He does not altogether dissemble when

he talks so wildly; given his surroundings, these fantastic and daring

sarcasms are a natural enough mode of utterance for the wild agitation

produced by the horror that has entered into his life; "though this be

madness, yet there is method in't." But the almost frenzied excitement

into which he is so often thrown by the action of others subsides at

intervals, when he feels the need for mental concentration--a craving

which he satisfies in the solitary reflections forming his monologues.

When his passions are roused, he has difficulty in controlling them.

It is nervous over-excitement that finds vent when he bids Ophelia get

her to a nunnery, and it is in a fit of nervous frenzy that he stabs

Polonius. But his passion generally strikes inwards. Constrained as he

is, or thinks himself, to employ dissimulation and cunning, he is in a

fever of impatience, and is for ever reviling and scoffing at himself

for his inaction, as though it were due to indifference or cowardice.

Distrust, that new element in his character, makes him cautious;

he cannot act on impulse, nor even speak. "There's ne'er a villain

dwelling in all Denmark," he begins; "so great as the King" should be

the continuation; but fear of being betrayed by his comrades takes

possession of him, and he ends with, "but he's an arrant knave."

He is by nature open-hearted and warm, as we see him with Horatio; he

speaks to the sentinel on the platform as to a comrade; he is cordial,

at first, to old acquaintances like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and

he is frank, amiable, kind without condescension, to the troupe of

travelling players. But reticence has been suddenly forced upon him

by the bitterest, most agonising experiences; no sooner has he put

on a mask, so as not to be instantly found out, than he feels that

he is being spied upon; even his friends and the woman he loves are

on the side of his opponents; and though he believes his life to be

threatened, he feels that he must keep silent and wait.

His mask is often enough only of gauze; if only for the sake of the

spectators, Shakespeare had to make the madness transparent, that it

might not pall.

Read the witty repartees of Hamlet to Polonius (ii. 2), beginning with,

"What do you read, my lord?" "Words, words, words." In reality there

is no trace of madness in all these keenedged sayings, till Hamlet at

last, in order to annul their effect, concludes with the words, "For

yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go

backward."

Or take the long conversation (iii. 2) between Hamlet and Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern about the pipe he has sent for, and asks them to play

on. The whole is a parable as simple and direct as any in the New

Testament. And he points the moral with triumphant logic in poetic

form--

"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you would make of

me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops;

you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound

me from my lowest notes to the top of my compass: and there

is much music, excellent music in this little organ; yet

cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier

to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you

will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."

It is in order to account for such contemptuous and witty outbursts

that Hamlet says: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is

southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."

To outward difficulties are added inward hindrances, which he cannot

overcome. He reproaches himself passionately for this, as we have seen.

But these self-reproaches of Hamlet's do not represent Shakespeare's

view of his character or judgment of his action. They express the

impatience of his nature, his longing for reparation, his eagerness for

the triumph of the right; they do not imply his guilt.

The old doctrine of tragic guilt and punishment, which assumes that the

death at the end of a tragedy must always be in some way deserved, is

nothing but antiquated scholasticism, theology masking as æsthetics;

and it may be regarded as an instance of scientific progress that this

view of the matter, which was heretical only a generation since, is now

very generally accepted. Very different was the case when the author of

these lines, in his earliest published work, entered a protest against

such an intrusion of traditional morality into a sphere from which it

ought simply to be banished.[2]

Some critics have summarily disposed of the question of Hamlet's

possible guilt by the assertion that his madness was not only assumed,

but real. Brinsley Nicholson, for instance, in his essay "Was Hamlet

Mad?" (_New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1880-86), insists on

his morbid melancholy; his strange and incoherent talk after the

apparition of the Ghost; his lack of any sense of responsibility for

the deaths of Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, of which he was

either the direct or indirect cause; his fear of sending King Claudius

to heaven by killing him while he is praying; his brutality towards

Ophelia; his constant suspiciousness, &c., &c. But to see symptoms of

real insanity in all this is not only a crudity of interpretation,

but a misconception of Shakespeare's evident meaning. It is true that

Hamlet does not dissemble as systematically and coldly as Edgar in

the subsequent _King Lear_; but that is no reason why his state of

mental exaltation should be mistaken for derangement. He makes use of

insanity; he is not in its power.

Not that it proves really serviceable to him or facilitates his task of

vengeance; on the contrary, it impedes his action by tempting him from

the straight path into witty digressions and deviations. It is meant to

hide his secret; but after the performance of the play the King knows

it, and, though he keeps it up, the feigned madness is useless. It is

because his secret is betrayed that Hamlet now, in obedience to the

Ghost's command, endeavours to awaken his mother's sense of shame and

to detach her from the King. But having run Polonius through the body,

in the belief that he is killing his stepfather, he is put under guards

and sent away, and has still farther to postpone his revenge.

While many critics of this century, especially Germans, such as

Kreyssig, have contemned Hamlet as a "witty weakling", one German

writer has passionately denied that Shakespeare intended to represent

him as morbidly reflective. This critic, with much enthusiasm, with

fierce onslaughts upon many of his countrymen, but with a conception of

the play which debases its whole idea and belittles its significance,

has tried to prove that the hindrances Hamlet had to contend with were

purely external. I refer to the lectures on Hamlet delivered by the old

Hegelian, Karl Werder, in the University of Berlin between 1859 and

1872.[3] Their train of thought, in itself not unreasonable, may be

rendered thus:--

What is demanded of Hamlet? That he should kill the King immediately

after the Ghost has revealed his father's fate? Good. But how, after

this assassination, is he to justify his deed to the court and the

people, and ascend the throne? He can produce no proof whatever of

the truth of his accusation. A ghost has told him; that is all his

evidence. He himself is not the hereditary supreme judge of the land,

deprived of his throne by a usurper. The Queen is "jointress to this

warlike state." Denmark is an elective monarchy--and it is not till

the very end of the play that Hamlet speaks of the King as having

"popp'd in between the election and my hopes." In the eyes of all the

characters in the play, the existing state of the government is quite

normal. And is he to overturn it with a dagger-thrust? Will the Danish

people believe his tale of the apparition and the murder? And suppose

that, instead of having recourse to the dagger, he comes forward with a

public accusation, can there be any doubt that such a king and such a

court will speedily make away with him? For where in this court are the

elder Hamlet's adherents? We see none of them. It seems as though the

old hero-king had taken them all with him to the grave. What has become

of his generals and of his council? Did they die before him? Or was he

solitary in his greatness? Certain it is that Hamlet has no friend but

Horatio, and finds no supporters at the court.

As matters stand, the truth can be brought to light only by the royal

criminal's betraying himself. Hence Hamlet's perfectly logical, most

ingenious device for forcing him to do so. Hamlet's object is not to

take a purely material revenge for the crime, but to reinstate right

and justice in Denmark, to be judge and avenger in one. And this he

cannot be if he simply kills the king off-hand.

All this is acute, and in part correct; only it misstates the theme

of the play. Had Shakespeare had this outward difficulty in mind, he

would have made Hamlet expound, or at least allude to it. As a matter

of fact, Hamlet does nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he upbraids

himself for his inaction and sloth, thereby indicating clearly enough

that the great fundamental difficulty is an inward one, and that the

real scene of the tragedy lies in the hero's soul.

Hamlet himself is comparatively planless, but, as Goethe has profoundly

remarked, the play is not therefore without a plan. And where Hamlet

is most hesitating, where he tries to palliate his planlessness, there

the plan speaks loudest and clearest. Where, for example, Hamlet comes

upon the King at his prayers, and will not kill him, because he is not

to die "in the purging of his soul" but revelling in sinful debauch,

we hear Shakespeare's general idea in the words which, in the mouth of

the hero, sound like an evasion. Shakespeare, not Hamlet, reserves the

King for the death which in fact overtakes him just as he has poisoned

Laertes's blade, seasoned "a chalice" for Hamlet, out of cowardice

allowed the Queen to drain it, and been the efficient cause of both

Laertes's and Hamlet's fatal wounds. Hamlet thus actually attains his

declared object in allowing the King to live.

[1] K. Werder: _Vorlesungen über Hamlet_, p. 3 _et seq._

[2] Georg Brandes: _Æsthetiske Studier_. Essay "On the Concept: Tragic

Fate."

[3] Karl Werder: _Vorlesungen über Shakespeare's Hamlet_, 1875.

XVI

_HAMLET AND OPHELIA_

There is nothing more profoundly conceived in this play than the

Prince's relation to Ophelia. Hamlet is genius in love--genius with its

great demands and its highly unconventional conduct. He does not love

like Romeo, with a love that takes entire possession of his mind. He

has felt himself drawn to Ophelia while his father was still in life,

has sent her letters and gifts, and thinks of her with an infinite

tenderness; but she has not it in her to be his friend and confidant.

"Her whole essence," we read in Goethe, "is ripe, sweet sensuousness."

This is saying too much; it is only the songs she sings in her madness,

"in the innocence of madness," as Goethe himself strikingly says, that

indicate an undercurrent of sensual desire or sensual reminiscence;

her attitude towards the Prince is decorous, almost to severity. Their

relations to each other have been close--how close the play does not

tell.

There is nothing at all conclusive in the fact that Hamlet's manner to

Ophelia is extremely free, not only in the affecting scene in which

he orders her to a nunnery, but still more in their conversation

during the play, when his jesting speeches, as he asks to be allowed

to lay his head in her lap, are more than equivocal, and in one case

unequivocally loose. We have already seen (p. 48) that this is

no evidence against Ophelia's inexperience. Helena in _All's Well that

Ends Well_ is chastity itself, yet Parolles's conversation with her is

extremely--to our way of thinking impossibly--coarse. In the year 1602,

speeches like Hamlet's could be made without offence by a young prince

to a virtuous maid of honour.

Whilst English Shakespearians have come forward as Ophelia's champions,

several German critics (among others Tieck, Von Friesen, and Flathe)

have had no doubt that her relations with Hamlet were of the most

intimate. Shakespeare has intentionally left this undecided, and it is

difficult to see why his readers should not do the same.

Hamlet draws away from Ophelia from the moment when he feels himself

the appointed minister of a sacred revenge. In deep grief he bids her

farewell without a word, grasps her wrist, holds it at arm's length

from him, "peruses" her face as if he would draw it--then shakes her

arm gently, nods his head thrice, and departs with a "piteous" sigh.

If after this he shows himself hard, almost cruel, to her, it is

because she was weak and tried to deceive him. She is a soft, yielding

creature, with no power of resistance; a loving soul, but without the

passion which gives strength. She resembles Desdemona in the unwisdom

with which she acts towards her lover, but falls far short of her

in warmth and resoluteness of affection. She does not in the least

understand Hamlet's grief over his mother's conduct. She observes his

depression without divining its cause. When, after seeing the Ghost, he

approaches her in speechless agitation, she never guesses that anything

terrible has happened to him; and, in spite of her compassion for his

morbid state, she consents without demur to decoy him into talking to

her, while her father and the King spy upon their meeting. It is then

that he breaks out into all those famous speeches: "Are you honest?

Are you fair?" &c.; the secret meaning of them being: You are like my

mother! You too could have acted as she did!

Hamlet has not a thought for Ophelia in his excitement after the

killing of Polonius; but Shakespeare gives us indirectly to understand

that grief on her account overtook him afterwards--"he weeps for what

is done." Later he seems to forget her, and therefore his anger at

her brother's lamentations as she is placed in her grave, and his own

frenzied attempt to outdo the "emphasis" of Laertes's grief, seem

strange to us. But from his words we understand that she has been the

solace of his life, though she could not be its stay. She on her side

has been very fond of him, has loved him with unobtrusive tenderness.

It is with pain she has heard him speak of his love for her as a thing

of the past ("I did love you once"); with deep grief she has seen what

she takes to be the eclipse of his bright spirit in madness ("Oh, what

a noble mind is here o'erthrown!"); and at last the death of her father

by Hamlet's hand deprives her of her own reason. At one blow she has

lost both father and lover. In her madness she does not speak Hamlet's

name, nor show any trace of sorrow that it is he who has murdered her

father. Forgetfulness of this cruellest blow mitigates her calamity;

her hard fate condemns her to solitude; and this solitude is peopled

and alleviated by madness.

In depicting the relation between Faust and Gretchen, Goethe

appropriated and reproduced many features of the relation between

Hamlet and Ophelia. In both cases we have the tragic love-tie between

genius and tender girlhood. Faust kills Gretchen's mother as Hamlet

kills Ophelia's father. In _Faust_ also there is a duel between the

hero and his mistress's brother, in which the brother is killed. And

in both cases the young girl in her misery goes mad. It is clear

that Goethe actually had Ophelia in his thoughts, for he makes his

Mephistopheles sing a song to Gretchen which is a direct imitation,

almost a translation, of Ophelia's song about Saint Valentine's Day.[1]

There is, however, a more delicate poetry in Ophelia's madness than in

Gretchen's. Gretchen's intensifies the tragic impression of the young

girl's ruin; Ophelia's alleviates both her own and the spectator's

suffering.

Hamlet and Faust represent the genius of the Renaissance and the genius

of modern times; though Hamlet, in virtue of his creator's marvellous

power of rising above his time, covers the whole period between him and

us, and has a range of significance to which we, on the threshold of

the twentieth century, can foresee no limit.

Faust is probably the highest poetic expression of modern

humanity--striving, investigating, enjoying, and mastering at last

both itself and the world. He changes gradually under his creator's

hands into a great symbol; but in the second half of his life a

superabundance of allegoric traits veils his individual humanity. It

did not lie in Shakespeare's way to embody a being whose efforts, like

Faust's, were directed towards experience, knowledge, perception of

truth in general. Even when Shakespeare rises highest, he keeps nearer

the earth.

But none the less dear to us art thou, O Hamlet! and none the less

valued and understood by the men of to-day. We love thee like a

brother. Thy melancholy is ours, thy wrath is ours, thy contemptuous

wit avenges us on those who fill the earth with their empty noise

and are its masters. We know the depth of thy suffering when wrong

and hypocrisy triumph, and oh! thy still deeper suffering on feeling

that that nerve in thee is severed which should lead from thought to

victorious action. To us, too, the voices of the mighty dead have

spoken from the under-world. We, too, have seen our mother wrap the

purple robe of power round the murderer of "the majesty of buried

Denmark." We, too, have been betrayed by the friends of our youth; for

us, too, have swords been dipped in poison. How well do we know that

graveyard mood in which disgust and sorrow for all earthly things seize

upon the soul. The breath from open graves has set us, too, dreaming

with a skull in our hands!

[1]

OPHELIA.

"To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,

All in the morning betime,

And I a maid at your window,

To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes

And dupp'd the chamber-door;

Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more."

MEPHISTOFELES.

"Was machst Du mir

Vor Liebchens Thür

Kathrinchen, hier

Bei frühem Tagesblicke?

Lass, lass es sein!

Er lässt dich ein

Als Mädchen ein

Als Mädchen nicht zurücke."

XVII

_HAMLET'S INFLUENCE ON LATER TIMES_

If we to-day can feel with Hamlet, it is certainly no wonder that the

play was immensely popular in its own day. It is easy to understand

its charm for the cultivated youth of the period; but it would be

surprising, if we did not realise the alertness of the Renaissance

and its wonderful receptivity for the highest culture, to find that

_Hamlet_ was in as great favour with the lower ranks of society as with

the higher. A remarkable proof of this tragedy's and of Shakespeare's

popularity in the years immediately following its appearance, is

afforded by some memoranda in a log-book kept by a certain Captain

Keeling, of the ship _Dragon_, which, in September 1607, lay off Sierra

Leone in company with another English vessel, the _Hector_ (Captain

Hawkins), both bound for India. They run as follows:--

"September 5 [At "Serra Leona"]. I sent the interpreter,

according to his desier, abord the Hector, whear he brooke

fast, and after came abord mee, wher we gave the tragedie of

Hamlett.

"[Sept.] 30. Captain Hawkins dined with me, wher my

companions acted Kinge Richard the Second.

"31. I envited Captain Hawkins to a ffishe dinner, and had

Hamlet acted abord me: wch I permitt to keepe my

people from idlenes and unlawfull games, or sleepe."

Who could have imagined that _Hamlet_, three years after its

publication, would be so well-known and so dear to English sailors

that they could act it for their own amusement at a moment's notice!

Could there be a stronger proof of its universal popularity? It is

a true picture of the culture of the Renaissance, this tragedy of

the Prince of Denmark acted by common English sailors off the west

coast of Africa. It is a pity that Shakespeare himself, in all human

probability, never knew of it.

Hamlet's ever-increasing significance as time rolls on is proportionate

to his significance in his own day. A great deal in the poetry of

the nineteenth century owes its origin to him. Goethe interpreted

and remodelled him in _Wilhelm Meister_, and this remodelled Hamlet

resembles Faust. The trio, Faust, Gretchen, Valentin, in Goethe's drama

answers to the trio, Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes. Faust transplanted into

English soil produced Byron's Manfred, a true though far-off descendant

of the Danish Prince. In Germany, again, the Byronic development

assumed a new and Hamlet-like (or rather Yorick-like) form in Heine's

bitter and fantastic wit, in his hatreds and caprices and intellectual

superiority. Borne is the first to interpret Hamlet as the German

of his day, always moving in a circle and never able to act. But he

feels the mystery of the play, and says aptly and beautifully, "Over

the picture hangs a veil of gauze. We want to lift it to examine the

painting more closely, but find that the veil itself is painted."

In France, the men of Alfred de Musset's generation, whom he has

portrayed in his _Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle_, remind us in

many ways of Hamlet--nervous, inflammable as gunpowder, broken-winged,

with no sphere of action commensurate with their desires, and with no

power Of action in the sphere which lay open to them. And Lorenzaccio,

perhaps Musset's finest male character, is the French Hamlet--practised

in dissimulation, procrastinating, witty, gentle to women yet wounding

them with cruel words, morbidly desirous to atone for the emptiness

of his evil life by one great deed, and acting too late, uselessly,

desperately.

Hamlet, who centuries before had been young England, and was to

Musset, for a time, young France, became in the 'forties, as Borne

had foretold, the accepted type of Germany. "Hamlet is Germany," sang

Freiligrath.[1]

Kindred political conditions determined that the figure of Hamlet

should at the same period, and twenty years later to a still greater

extent, dominate Russian literature. Its influence can be traced from

Pushkin and Gogol to Gontscharoff and Tolstoi, and it actually pervades

the whole life-work of Turgueneff. But in this case Hamlet's vocation

of vengeance is overlooked; the whole stress is laid on the general

discrepancy between reflection and power of action.

In the development of Polish literature, too, during this century,

there came a time when the poets were inclined to say: "We are Hamlet;

Hamlet is Poland." We find marked traits of his character towards

the middle of the century in all the imaginative spirits of Poland:

in Mickiewicz, in Slowacki, in Krasinski. From their youth they had

stood in his position. Their world was out of joint, and was to be

set right by their weak arms. High-born and noble-minded, they feel,

like Hamlet, all the inward fire and outward impotence of their youth;

the conditions that surround them are to them one great horror; they

are disposed at one and the same time to dreaming and to action, to

over-much reflection and to recklessness.

Like Hamlet, they have seen their mother, the land that gave them

birth, profaned by passing under the power of a royal robber and

murderer. The court to which at times they are offered access strikes

them with terror, as the court of Claudius struck terror to the

Danish Prince, as the court in Krasinski's _Temptation_ (a symbolic

representation of the court of St. Petersburg) strikes terror to the

young hero of the poem. These kinsmen of Hamlet are, like him, cruel

to their Ophelia, and forsake her when she loves them best; like him,

they allow themselves to be sent far away to foreign lands; and when

they speak they dissemble like him--clothe their meaning in similes and

allegories. What Hamlet says of himself applies to them: "Yet have I

something in me dangerous." Their peculiarly Polish characteristic is

that what enervates and impedes them is not their reflective but their

poetic bias. Reflection is what ruins the German of this type; wild

dissipation the Frenchman; indolence, self-mockery, and self-despair

the Russian; but it is imagination that leads the Pole astray and

tempts him to live apart from real life.

The Hamlet character presents a multitude of different aspects.

Hamlet is the doubter; he is the man whom over-scrupulousness or

over-deliberation condemns to inactivity; he is the creature of pure

intelligence, who sometimes acts nervously, and is sometimes too

nervous to act at all; and, lastly, he is the avenger, the man who

dissembles that his revenge may be the more effectual. Each of these

aspects is developed by the poets of Poland. There is a touch of

Hamlet in several of Mickiewicz's creations--in Wallenrod, in Gustave,

in Conrad, in Robak. Gustave speaks the language of philosophic

aberration; Conrad is possessed by the spirit of philosophic brooding;

Wallenrod and Robak dissemble or disguise themselves for the sake of

revenge, and the latter, like Hamlet, kills the father of the woman he

loves. In Slowacki's work the Hamlet-type takes a much more prominent

place. His Kordjan is a Hamlet who follows his vocation of avenger,

but has not the strength for it. The Polish tendency to fantasticating

interposes between him and his projected tyrannicide. And while

Slowacki gives us the radical Hamlet type, so we find the corresponding

conservative Hamlet in Krasinski. The hero of Krasinski's _Undivine

Comedy_ has more than one trait in common with the Prince of Denmark.

He has Hamlet's sensitiveness and power of imagination. He is addicted

to monologues and cultivates the drama. He has an extremely tender

conscience, but can commit most cruel actions. He is punished for the

excessive irritability of his character by the insanity of his wife,

very much as Hamlet, by his feigned madness, leads to the real madness

of Ophelia. But this Hamlet is consumed by a more modern doubt than

that which besets his Renaissance prototype. Hamlet doubts whether the

spirit on whose behest he is acting is more than an empty phantasm.

When Count Henry shuts himself up in "the castle of the Holy Trinity,"

he is not sure that the Holy Trinity itself is more than a figment of

the brain.

In other words: nearly two centuries and a half after the figure of

Hamlet was conceived in Shakespeare's imagination, we find it living

in English and French literature, and reappearing as a dominant type

in German and two Slavonic languages. And now, three hundred years

after his creation, Hamlet is still the confidant and friend of sad

and thoughtful souls in every land. There is something unique in this.

With such piercing vision has Shakespeare searched out the depths of

his own, and at the same time of all human, nature, and so boldly and

surely has he depicted the outward semblance of what he saw, that,

centuries later, men of every country and of every race have felt their

own being moulded like wax in his hand, and have seen themselves in his

poetry as in a mirror.

[1]

"Deutschland ist Hamlet! Ernst und stumm

In seinen Thoren jede Nacht

Geht die begrabne Freiheit um,

Und winkt den Männern auf der Wacht.

Da steht die Hohe, blank bewehrt,

Und sagt dem Zaudrer, der noch zweifelt:

'Sei mir ein Rächer, zieh dein Schwert!

Man hat mir Gift in's Ohr geträufelt.'"

XVIII

_HAMLET AS A CRITIC_

Along with so much else, _Hamlet_ gives us what we should scarcely have

expected--an insight into Shakespeare's own ideas of his art as poet

and actor, and into the condition and relations of his theatre in the

years 1602-3.

If we read attentively the Prince's words to the players, we see

clearly why it is always the sweetness, the mellifluousness of

Shakespeare's art that his contemporaries emphasise. To us he may

seem audacious, harrowingly pathetic, a transgressor of all bounds;

in comparison with contemporary artists--not only with the specially

violent and bombastic writers, like the youthful Marlowe, but with all

of them--he is self-controlled, temperate, delicate, beauty-loving as

Raphael himself. Hamlet says to the players--

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you,

trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of

your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my

lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus;

but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and

(as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire

and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O! it

offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated

fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the

ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable

of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows, and noise: I would

have such a fellow whipped for o'er-doing--Termagant; it

out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

"I _Play_. I warrant your honour.

"_Ham_. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion

be your tutor."

Here ought logically to follow a warning against the dangers of

excessive softness and sweetness. But it does not come. He continues--

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with

this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty

of nature; _for anything so overdone is from the purpose

of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and

is, to hold, as't were, the mirror up to nature; to show

virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very

age and body of the time, his form and pressure._ Now, this

overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful

laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of

the which one must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole

theatre of others. O! there be players, that I have seen

play,--and heard others praise, and that highly,--not to

speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of

Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have

so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought that some of

nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well,

they imitated humanity so abominably.

"I _Play._ I hope we have reformed that indifferently with

us.

"_Ham_. O! reform it altogether."

Thus, although it appears to be Hamlet's wish to caution equally

against too much wildness and too much tameness, his warning against

tameness is of the briefest, and he almost immediately resumes his

homily against exaggeration, bellowing, what we should now call ranting

declamation. It is not the danger of tameness, but of violence, that is

uppermost in Shakespeare's mind.

As already pointed out, it is not merely his own general effort as a

dramatist which Shakespeare here formulates; he lays down a regular

definition of dramatic art and its aim. It is noteworthy that this

definition is identical with that which Cervantes, almost at the same

time, places into the mouth of the priest in _Don Quixote_. "Comedy,"

he says, "should be as Tullius enjoins, a mirror of human life, a

pattern of manners, a presentation of the truth."

Shakespeare and Cervantes, who shed lustre on the same age and

died within a few days of each other, never heard of each other's

existence; but, led by the spirit of their time, both borrowed from

Cicero their fundamental conception of dramatic art. Cervantes says so

openly; Shakespeare, who did not wish his Hamlet to pose as a scholar,

indicates it in the words, "Whose end, both _at the first_ and now,

_was_, and is."

And as Shakespeare here, by the mouth of Hamlet, has expressed his own

idea of his art's unalterable nature and aim, he has also for once

given vent to his passing artistic anxieties, his dissatisfaction

with the position of his theatre at the moment. We have already (p.

106) noticed the poet's complaint of the harm done to his company at

this time by the rivalry of the troupe of choir-boys from St. Paul's

Cathedral playing at the Blackfriars Theatre. It is in Hamlet's

dialogue with Rosencrantz that this complaint occurs. There is a

bitterness about the wording of it, as though the company had for

the time been totally worsted. This was no doubt largely due to the

circumstance that its most popular member, its clown, the famous

Kemp, had just left it (in 1602), and gone over to Henslow's troupe.

Kemp had from the beginning played all the chief low-comedy parts

in Shakespeare's dramas--Peter and Balthasar in _Romeo and Juliet_,

Shallow in _Henry IV.,_ Lancelot in _The Merchant of Venice_, Dogberry

in _Much Ado About Nothing_, Touchstone in _As You Like It_. Now that

he had gone over to the enemy, his loss was deeply felt.

The above-mentioned little book, dedicated to Mary Fitton, gives us a

most interesting glimpse into the English life of that age. The most

important duty of the clown was not to appear in the play itself, but

to sing and dance his jig at the end of it, even after a tragedy, in

order to soften the painful impression. The common spectator never went

home without having seen this afterpiece, which must have resembled the

comic "turns" of our variety-shows. Kemp's jig of _The Kitchen-Stuff

Woman_, for instance, was a screaming farrago of rude verses, some

spoken, others sung, of good and bad witticisms, of extravagant acting

and dancing. It is of such a performance that Hamlet is thinking when

he says of Polonius: "He's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he

sleeps."

As the acknowledged master of his time in the art of comic dancing,

Kemp was immoderately loved and admired. He paid professional visits to

all the German and Italian courts, and was even summoned to dance his

Morrice Dance before the Emperor Rudolf himself at Augsburg. It was in

his youth that he undertook the nine days' dance from London to Norwich

which he describes in his book.

He started at seven o'clock in the morning from in front of the Lord

Mayor's house, and half London was astir to see the beginning of the

great exploit. His suite consisted of his "taberer," his servant, and

an "overseer" or umpire to see that everything was performed according

to promise. The journey was almost as trying to the "taberer" as to

Kemp, for he had his drum hanging over his left arm and held his

flageolet in his left hand while he beat the drum with his right. Kemp

himself, on this occasion, contributed nothing to the music except the

sound of the bells which were attached to his gaiters.

He reached Romford on the first day, but was so exhausted that he had

to rest for two days. The people of Stratford-Langton, between London

and Romford, had got up a bear-baiting show in his honour, knowing "how

well he loved the sport"; but the crowd which had gathered to see him

was so great that he himself only succeeded in hearing the bear roar

and the dogs howl. On the second day he strained his hip, but cured

the strain by dancing. At Burntwood such a crowd had gathered to see

him that he could scarcely make his way to the tavern. There, as he

relates, two cut-purses were caught in the act, who had followed with

the crowd from London. They declared that they had laid a wager upon

the dance, but Kemp recognised one of them as a noted thief whom he had

seen tied to a post in the theatre. Next day he reached Chelmsford, but

here the crowd which had accompanied him from London had dwindled away

to a couple of hundred people.

In Norwich the city waits received him in the open market-place with an

official concert in the presence of thousands. He was the guest of the

town and entertained at its expense, received handsome presents from

the mayor, and was admitted to the Guild of Merchant Venturers, being

thereby assured a share in their yearly income, to the amount of forty

shillings. The very buskins in which he had performed his dance were

nailed to the wall in the Norwich Guild Hall and preserved in perpetual

memory of the exploit.

So popular an artist as this must of course have felt himself at least

Shakespeare's equal. He certainly assumed the right to address one of

her Majesty's Maids-of-Honour with no slight familiarity. The tone in

which he dedicates this catchpenny performance to Mrs. Fitton offers

a remarkable contrast to the profoundly respectful tone in which

professional authors couch their dedications to their noble patrons or

patronesses:--

"In the waine of my little wit I am forst to desire your

protection, else every Ballad-singer will proclaime me

bankrupt of honesty.... To shew my duety to your honourable

selfe, whose favours (among other bountifull friends) make

me (dispight this sad world) iudge my hert Corke and my

heeles feathers, so that me thinkes I could fly to Rome (at

least hop to Rome, as the old Prouerb is) with a Morter on

my head."

His description of the _Nine Daies Wonder_, with its arrogant

dedication, has shown us how conceited he must have been. Hamlet

lets us see that he had frequently annoyed Shakespeare by the

irrepressible freedom of his "gags" and interpolations. From the text

of the plays of an earlier period which have come down to us, we can

understand that the clowns were in those days as free to do what

they pleased with their parts as the Italian actors in the _Commedia

dell' Arte_. Shakespeare's rich and perfect art left no room for such

improvisations. Now that Kemp was gone, the poet sent the following

shaft after him from the lips of Hamlet:--

"And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is

set down for them: for there be of them that will themselves

laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh

too: though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the

play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows

a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it."

This reproof is, however, as the reader sees, couched in quite general

terms; wherefore it was allowed to stand when Kemp returned to the

company. But a far sharper and much more personal attack, which

appears in the edition of 1603, was expunged in the following editions

(and consequently from our text of the play), as being no longer in

place after the return of the wanderer. It speaks of a clown whose

witticisms are so popular that they are noted down by the gentlemen who

frequent the theatre. A whole series of extremely poor specimens of

his burlesque sallies is given--mere circus-clown drolleries--and then

Hamlet disposes of the wretched buffoon by remarking that he "cannot

make a jest unless by chance, as a blind man catcheth a hare."

It is notorious that an artist will more easily forgive an attack on

himself than warm praise of a rival in the same line. There can be

very little doubt that Shakespeare, in making Hamlet praise the dead

Yorick, had in view the lamented Tarlton, Kemp's amiable and famous

predecessor. If there had been no purpose to serve by making the

skull that of a jester, it might quite as well have belonged to some

old servant of Hamlet's. But if Shakespeare, in his first years of

theatrical life, had known Tarlton personally, and Kemp's objectionable

behaviour vividly recalled by contrast his predecessor's charming

whimsicality, it was natural enough that he should combine with the

attack on Kemp a warm eulogy of the great jester.[1]

Tarlton was buried on the 3rd of September 1588. This date accords with

the statement in the first quarto that Yorick has lain in the earth

for a dozen years. Not till we have these facts before us can we fully

understand the following strong outburst of feeling:--

"Alas, poor Yorick!--I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of

infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me

on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my

imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those

lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your

gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of

merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?"

Alas, poor Yorick! Hamlet's heartfelt lament will keep his memory alive

when his Owlglass jests recorded in print are utterly forgotten.[2]

His fooling was equally admired by the populace, the court, and the

theatrical public. He is said to have told Elizabeth more truths

than all her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better than all her

physicians.

Shakespeare, in _Hamlet_, has not only spoken his mind freely on

theatrical matters; he has also eulogised the distinguished actor after

his death, and given a great example of the courteous and becoming

treatment of able actors during their lives. His Prince of Denmark

stands far above the vulgar prejudice against them. And, lastly,

Shakespeare has glorified that dramatic art which was the business

and pleasure of his life, by making the play the effective means of

bringing the truth to light and furthering the ends of justice. The

acting of the drama of Gonzago's death is the hinge on which the tragedy

turns. From the moment when the King betrays himself by stopping the

performance, Hamlet knows all that he wants to know.

When James ascended the throne, _Hamlet_ received, as it were, a new

actuality, from the fact that his queen, Anne, was a Danish princess.

At the splendid festival held on the occasion of the triumphal

procession of King James, Queen Anne, and Prince Henry Frederick,

from the Tower through the city, "the Danish March" was brilliantly

performed, out of compliment to the Queen, by a band consisting of nine

trumpeters and a kettle-drum, stationed on a scaffolding at the side

of St. Mildred's Church. How this march went we do not know; but there

can be little doubt that from that time it was played in the second

scene of the fifth act of _Hamlet_, where music of trumpets and drums

is prescribed, and where, in our days, at the Théâtre-Français, they

naïvely play, "Kong Christian stod ved höjen Mast."[3]

[1] Compare _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1880-86, p. 60.

[2] _Tarlton's Jests and News out of Purgatory._ Edited by J. O.

Halliwell. London, 1844.

[3] The Danish national song of to-day, written by Ewald, and the music

composed by Hartmann, 1778.

XIX

_ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL--ATTACKS ON PURITANISM_

The fortunes of the company having declined by reason of the

competition complained of in _Hamlet_, it became necessary to

intersperse a few comedies among the sombre tragedies on which alone

Shakespeare's mind was now bent.

Comedies, therefore, had to be produced. But the disposition of mind

in which Shakespeare had created _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ had long

deserted him; and infinitely remote, though so near in point of time,

was the mood in which he had produced _As You Like It_.

Still the thing had to be done. He took one of his old sketches in hand

again, the play called _Love's Labour's Won_, which has already been

noticed (p. 47). Its original form we do not exactly know; all

we can do is to pick out the rhymed and youthfully frivolous passages

as having doubtless belonged to the earlier play, to whose title there

is probably a reference in Helena's words in the concluding scene:--

"This is done.

Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?"

It is clear that Shakespeare in his young days took hold of the subject

with the purpose of making a comedy out of it. But now it did not turn

out a comedy; the time was past when Shakespeare's chief strength lay

in his humour. We could quite well imagine his subsequent tragedies to

have been written by his Hamlet, if Hamlet had had life before him; and

in the same way we could imagine this and the following play, _Measure

for Measure_, to have been written by his Jaques.

We find many indications in _All's Well that Ends Well_-- most, as was

natural, in the first two acts--of Shakespeare's having come straight

from _Hamlet_. In the very first scene, the Countess chides Helena for

the immoderate grief with which she mourns her father: it is wrong to

let oneself be so overwhelmed. Just so the King speaks to Hamlet of the

"obstinate condolement" to which he gives himself up. The Countess's

advice to her son, when he is setting off for France, reminds us

strongly of the advice Polonius gives to Laertes in exactly the same

situation. She says, for instance:--

"Thy blood and virtue

Contend for empire in thee; and thy goodness

Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few,

Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy

Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend

Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,

But never tax'd for speech."

Compare with these injunctions those of Polonius:--

"Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in,

Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice."

Notice also in this comedy the numerous sallies against court life

and courtiers, which are quite in the spirit of _Hamlet_. The scene

in which Polonius changes his opinion according as Hamlet thinks the

cloud like a camel, a weasel, or a whale, and that in which Osric, who

"did comply with his dug before he sucked it," reels off his elegant

speeches, seem actually to be commented on in general terms when the

Clown (ii. 2) thus discourses about the court:--

"Truly, madam, if God have lent a man any manners, he may

easily put it off at court: he that cannot make a leg, put

off's cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg,

hands, lip, nor cap; and, indeed, such a fellow, to say

precisely, were not for the court."

Now and again, too, we come upon expressions which recall well-known

speeches of Hamlet's. For instance, when Helena (ii. 3) says to the

First Lord:

"Thanks, sir; all the rest is mute,"

we are reminded of Hamlet's ever-memorable last words:

"The rest is silence."

Among other more external touches, which likewise point clearly to the

period 1602-1603, may be mentioned the many subtle, cautious sallies

against Puritanism which are interwoven in the play. They express the

bitter contempt for demonstrative piety which filled Shakespeare's mind

just at that time.

_Hamlet_ itself had treated of a hypocrite on the largest scale.

Notice, too, the stinging reference to existing conditions in Act iii.