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 The problem of "Hamlet, 
 
 3 1924 013 138 437 
 
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THE PROBLEM 
 
 OF 
 
 "HAMLET" 
 
THE PROBLEM 
 
 OF 
 
 "HAMLET" 
 
 BY 
 
 J. M. ROBERTSON 
 
 Author of " Shakespeare and Chapman,' 
 "The Baconian Heresy," etc. 
 
 LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD 
 RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.G. 1 
 
First published in igig 
 
 {Ali rights rtserHtd) 
 
For some years, as a result of a lifetime rather largely 
 devoted to Shakespeare study, the author has been 
 engaged on a work on " The Canon of Shakespeare," 
 designed to deal with all the problems coraing under 
 that title. In 1905 he preluded the undertaking with 
 a volume entitled " Did Shakespeare write Titus Andro- 
 Kicus ? " which, rewritten and greatly expanded, he 
 hopes shortly to reissue as a practical introduction to 
 the study of the entire " Canon." The whole ground, 
 it is hoped, need not be covered on the same scale ; and 
 a number of, the more problematic plays have been dealt 
 with in sections of moderate length. The complete 
 work, however — ^if the author should live to complete 
 it — ^wiU inevitably be a bulky one ; and he hopes, before 
 putting it in a final form, to have the benefit of expert 
 criticism of at least a number of the sections. 
 
 It is proposed, accordingly, to issue some of them ' 
 separately. This course has already l?een begun by 
 the publication of the volume Shakespeare and Chap- 
 man (1917), which sets forth the most revolutionary 
 of the critical inferences to which the author has thus 
 far been led, and which involves a fresh consideration 
 of the origins of a number of the Plays. One of those 
 there- referred to has since been fully discussed in the 
 
8 PREFACE 
 
 paper on " The Problem of The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor," published for the Shakespeare Association 
 (Chatto & Windus), The present volume, which reviews 
 and attempts to resolve the most interesting and the 
 most extensive debate relating to any of them, is sub- 
 mitted as an illustration of what is claimed to be the 
 proper method of investigating all, for the given purpose. 
 Only since my MS. was put in the hands of the 
 printer have I received Mr. J. Dover Wilson's 
 interesting and valuable contributions to the inquiry 
 entitled " The Copy for ' Hamlet,' 1603, and the 
 ■ Hamlet ' Transcript, 1593 " (A. Moring, Ltd., 1918). 
 Coinciding, I think, in the main with my view, that 
 investigation opens up several correlative questions ; and 
 I have thought it weU to await the further inquiry 
 promised by Mr. Wilson before attempting to connect 
 his results with mine. 
 
 March 1919. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preface ..... 
 
 I. The .(Esthetic Problem 
 § I. Subjective Theories 
 § 2. Objective Theories 
 § 3. Theory of Defect in the Dramatist 
 § 4. The Growth of the Play 
 
 PAGE 
 
 7 
 
 II 
 II 
 19 
 23 
 30 
 
 II. The Documentary Problem . 
 
 § I. The Pre-Shakespearean Play 
 § 2. The Old German Version 
 
 33 
 33 
 42 
 
 III. / Kyd's Probable Construction 
 § I. Superfluous Survivals . 
 § 2. Was Kyd's "Hamlet" a Doul?le Play? 
 § 3. Irrelevant Scenes 
 
 49 
 49 
 
 52 
 57 
 
 IV. Shakespeare's Work of Transmutation 
 § I. Old Action : New Psychosis . 
 § 2. The Infusion of Pessimism 
 § 3. The Upshot 
 
 64 
 64 
 
 71 
 74 
 
 Index 
 
 87 
 
THE PROBLEM OF ^•HAMLET'' 
 
 THE AESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 § 1. Subjective Theories. 
 
 There is no better illustration of the need for a study 
 of the genesis of the Shakespeare Plays than the endless 
 discussion of the aesthetic problem of Hamlet. It 
 has continued for two centuries, latterly with the con- 
 stant preoccupation of finding a formula which shall 
 reduce the play to aesthetic consistency ; and every 
 solution in turn does but ignore some of the data which 
 moftved the others. All ahke are inconclusive, because 
 all ignore in effect, even when they make mention of 
 it, the essential f^ct that Shakespeare's Hamlet is an 
 adaptation of an older play, which laid down the main 
 action, embodying a counter-sense which the adaptation 
 could not transmute. To constate the successive theses 
 is to make this clear. 
 
 The formula put by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister's 
 Lehrjahre — that the tragedy is one of an overwhelming 
 task laid upon a spirit incapable of it ' — ^is, to begin 
 
 1 " To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant to present a great deed 
 laid upon a soul that is not capable o:f it. . . . Here is an oak-tree planted 
 in a costly vase that should have nurtured only lovely flowers : the roots 
 expand ; the vase is shattered." — Lehrjahre, B. iv, Cap. xiii, end. Cp. 
 
 Cap. iii. 
 
 n 
 
12 THE ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 with, an imperfect substitute for that put by Henry 
 Mackenzie in his essay in the Edinburgh Mirror (No. 99) 
 in 1780.1 Already in Mackenzie's day it was common 
 ground that " Of all the characters of Shakespeare, that 
 of Hamlet has beea generally thoi^ht the most difficult 
 to be reduced to any fixed or settled principle " ; and 
 Mackenzie set himself " to inquire whether any leading 
 idea can be found, upon which these apparent contra- 
 dictions may be reconciled." He found it in " an 
 extreme sensibility of mind, apt to be strongly impressed 
 by its situation, and overpowered by the feeUngs which 
 that situation excites." The terrible circumstances un- 
 hinged those " principles of action which in a happier 
 situation would have jdelded a happy life." Hamlet's 
 character is thus " often variable and uncertain," and 
 the suggestion is offered that " this is the very character 
 which Shakespeare meant to allot to him." " Findiog 
 such a character in real life, of a person endowed with 
 feelings so delicate as to border on weakness, with sensi- 
 bihty too exquisite to allow of determined action, "•he 
 " has placed it where it could be best exhibited, in scenes 
 of wonder; of terror, of imagination." 
 
 This " subjective " theorem, which best of all provides 
 for the various contingencies, anticipates and transcends 
 both that of Goethe,* which might be the formula of a 
 hundred tragedies, and that of Schlegel and Coleridge — 
 
 ' Professor Herford, in his paper on " Recent Contributiona to 
 Shakespeare Criticism " in the Book of Homage (p. 182), while noting 
 that Goethe's criticism is misleading and in some of its implications 
 quite wrong, pronounces that it " vj^uajly started the HamZet prob- 
 lem." This, as we shall see, holds only for Goethe's own age. The 
 discussion goes back to Gildon at least. 
 
 > As Hermann Turck remarks ' (Das psyckaln^ische Probfem in der 
 Hfn^et-Tragodie,, 1894, p. 8), Goethe's view of Hamlet is an account 
 of bis own Werther, whom X%ck describes almost in Mackenzie's, for- 
 mula as a nature " yielding to every impression." 
 
SUBJECTIVE THEORIES 13 
 
 that Hamlet is the victim of an excess of the reflective 
 faculty, "^hjdr'ufifits him for actron._The answer to 
 both of these was given in 1828 by Coleridge's son 
 Hartley,' who pointed out that " feebleness of mind, 
 the fragility of a china vase, lack of power and energy, 
 are not the Characteristics of Hamlet. So far from it, 
 he is represented as fearless, almost above the strength 
 of humanity. He does not ' set his life at a pin's fee '." 
 Hartley in turn proffered the formula that "it is not 
 the weight and magnitude, the danger and difficulty 
 of the deed imposed as a duty, that weighs upon his 
 soul and enervates the sinews of his moral being, but 
 the preternatural contradiction involved in the duty 
 itself, the irregular means through which the duty is 
 promulgated and known." In short, Shakespeare's purr 
 pose was " to show the evil and confusion which must 
 be introduced into the moral world by a sensible 
 communication between natural and supernatural 
 beings." * 
 
 This thesis, which is confuted by the Tempest and 
 the Dr^am, has never made any avoWed converts ; but 
 the denial of Hamlet's alleged weakness of nature has i 
 often been repeated, and must many times have been 
 made by independent English students before and after 
 Hartley Coleridge, as it was by Ulrici (as he supposed, 
 for the first time) in 1839, and after him by many other 
 Germans,3 down to our own day. Nevertheless, the 
 
 I In the essay On the Character of Hamlet, in Blackwood's Magazine, 
 reprinted in Essays and Marginalia, 1851, i. 151 sq. 
 
 » Essay on Shakespeare a Tory and a Gentleman, vol. cited, p. 144. 
 
 3 See bis Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, Eng. trans. 1876, j. 483, note. 
 Goethe's thesis is now almost uhtversally given up. Gervinus, how- 
 ever, in 1850 could still write : "- Since this riddle has been solved by 
 Geethe in his Wilhelm Meister, it is scarcely to be conceived that it ever 
 was one." — Shakespeare CpmntffnUiries, Eng. trans, i. 109. 
 
14 THE ESTHETIC PEOBLBM 
 
 kindred doctrine tha t Hamlet del aygd his action because 
 he -eeuld -not make-im his mind has continued to appear 
 in critical literature, and still has many adherents. 
 Lowell, taking it over from Coleridge, held it as a fixed 
 dogma,, and imposed it in his eloquent essay Shakespeare 
 Once More, in some respects the most influential study 
 of Shakespeare in its generation. Lowell alludes to the 
 old story from which the play derives, and he must have 
 known that the critics inferred a pre-Shakespearean 
 play ; but he confidently proceeds on the assumption 
 that Shakespeare's conception of Hamlet's character 
 " was the ovum out of which the whole organism was 
 hatched," finding even that, " Hamlet seems the natural 
 result of the mixture of the father and mother in this 
 temperament, the resolution and persistence of the one, 
 like sound timber worm-holed and made shaky, as it 
 were, by the other's infirmity of will and discontinuity 
 of purpose." 
 
 Thus is assigned to the victim of heredity both reso- 
 lution and irresolution ; while the " temperament," 
 with an " imagination in overplus " that has no heredity, 
 determines the action all the same. Hamlet, accord- 
 ingly, is duly scolded through many pages, with no 
 attempt to face either conflicting data or conflicting 
 theories. So strange an anomaly as the occurrence of 
 the "To be " soliloquy after the ghost scene is merely 
 turned to the account of the indictment : "He doubts 
 the immortality of the soul after seeing his father's 
 spirit " — a flat misrepresentation. What Hamlet does 
 is to say that " no traveller returns "■ — which constitutes 
 an anomaly in the construction of the play, not in Hamlet's 
 " character." 
 All the while, Lowell does not beUeve that Shakespeare 
 
SUBJECTIVE THEOEIES 15 
 
 wrote this or any of his plays with a " didactic purpose." 
 The implication would seem to be that the dramatist 
 left that to his readers, simply providing a hero who 
 could be scolded, as never was hero before, by literary 
 persons conscious of their own consummate fitness for 
 killing a guilty uncle at a moment's notice, " If we 
 must draw a moral from Hamlet," writes Lowell, " it 
 would seem to be that Will is Fate, and that. Will once 
 abdicating, the inevitable successor is the regency of 
 Chance. Had Ha mlet acted i nstead of iT ni«^"g T^"'" g""^ 
 it would b ^ to act, the king might have been the on ly 
 vtettm". Xstt ls, all th^ _m ain..,ajCtQ cs.„in th e . stnry. fir-T)--^ 
 the "TofTOJteias sacrifice of his irresolution." With a 
 fine uncorisCitTOSrressrthe Trititriiasr-fweviewd^ : 
 
 " With what perfect tact and judgment Shakespeare, 
 in the advice to the players, makes him an exquisite 
 critic ! " And yet«>,s»fe§g5gue3it exquisite critics, as we 
 see, are quite confidentii/that they have escaped the 
 " great vice of character " they assign to Shakespeare's 
 prince. No one thinks it necessary to vituperate Macbeth 
 for slajdng Duncan, or Othello for murdering Desdemona ; 
 still less is Desdemona denounced for prevaricating about 
 her handkerchief and thereby entailing her own and 
 Othello's death ; but for not killing Claudius either at~7 
 the start or in the praying scene, Hamlet has been the / i 
 theme of a hundred denunciations by zealous moralists./ 
 It would be odd if Shakespeare, who, says Lowell, " never 
 acted without unerring judgment," had deliberately 
 planned for that. 
 
 At this point we may fitly pause to note the singular 
 unanimity, preserved down to our own day, with which 
 the critics of all schools have taken for granted that Hamlet 
 does in a remarkable way delay his revenge. To judge 
 
 n 
 
16 THE ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 their language, he procrastinates to a degree that 
 (Kafls for an explanation ; and the, burden of their testi- 
 mony is either that no explanation is given or that it 
 lies in his character, temperament, or mood. And all 
 the while, unless we decide that Hamlet's duty, after 
 hearing the Ghost's tale, is to proceed instantly to slay 
 ^ the king, there has been as Uttle delay as might well 
 be ! IMssdely as reg ards the in terval between Acts I 
 andvj[lthat a charge can be laid. ThereTSar been time 
 for the journey of the ambassadors from Denmark to 
 Norway and back, and for Polonius to think of sending 
 Reynaldo to inquire about Laertes' doings in Paris. 
 But it is not upon this interval, or upon Hamlet's 
 quiescence therein, that the stress of criticism has fallen, 
 though it is only in this period, of which we see nothing, 
 that Hamlet can be said to have ^own any sensitive 
 recoil from the act of vengeance. The latest critic to 
 revive that charge, Professor W. F. Trench, after sternly 
 censuring Hamlet for being " unable to decide upon a 
 course of action " and for " resolving to let himself go " 
 after the Ghost scene,** expressly pronounces » that 
 " at the end of Act II, Fate is still well disposed to 
 Hamlet." That is to say, there has been no deadly 
 delay up to the point at which Hamlet, retrospec- 
 tively hesitating to believe in the Ghost, plans the 
 court play. 
 
 On that view, the " procrastination " of Hamlet re- 
 solves itself into the single abstention from slajdng the 
 king while he prays. Having made up his mind that 
 the hero's sole faculty is to talk and " preach," the critic 
 scornfully comments that when Haftilet resheathes his 
 
 I Shakespeare's Hamlet : A New Commentary, 1913, p. 87. 
 > li. p. 127. 
 
SUBJECTIVE THEORIES 17 
 
 sword he has " caught sight of and grasped an excuse 
 for' procrastinating once more ; " ' which must mean 
 either that Hamlet ought to have killed the king at the 
 pjay a few minutes before, or that his previous delay 
 had after all been unpardonable. At once we are moved 
 to put the two questions whether king-kilUng is supposed 
 to be usually accompUshed with the extreme promptitude 
 here insisted on ; and whether any stage^character but 
 Hamlet has ever been subjected to such a rigour of 
 criticism. ./^^nd_ifj_further, we do but ask ourselves what 
 kind of a moral andwhat kind oi an sestfistttr'^fect 
 would have been secnredjo^dESanaiBtis^-Btebfemg:; t^ king 
 in ffie^lback while he knelt at prayer, we may be. led to 
 question, yet, fijither whether the rnoral efficiency of 
 Hamlet is not after all rather higher than that of his 
 casns_Qr& _.. — ^^^^_-~-~™3««»« ™- . _^__ ,....--■■ 
 
 Save for that one episode, wherein, whatever be sup- 
 posed to be the real motive, procrastination is simple 
 decency, the choice to kill manfully at another time 
 rather than to stab in the back, there is no further 
 " delay " on Hamlet's part, the action proceeding breath- 
 lessly up to his deportation, to be resumed on his return, 
 whereafter he can be accused of procrastination only 
 by those who argue that he ought at the very outset 
 to have proved his manhood by raising the mob as did 
 Laertes, the type of headlong precipitation. CoioMdered 
 from the standpoint of practical politics, even of assas- 
 sination politics, Hamlet's " delay " is negligible ; while 
 his faculty for voUtion and action would seem to be 
 sufficiently proved by his murderously prompt disposal 
 of Polonius and the two courtiers, and his boarding of 
 the pirate ship. . 
 
 • Id, p. 171, 
 2 
 
18 THE iESTHBTIC PROBLEM 
 
 But one thing must be said for the critics. Shakespeare 
 himself has in a manner given them their warrant, by 
 the two vivid soliloquies in which he makes Hamlet 
 impeach himself. And this the dramatist has done 
 partly 6n a cue from the old play, partly in virtue of 
 his own idiosyncrasy of idealistic disregard of time. 
 Under circumstances which we shall discuss later, he 
 took up the old play which he has transmuted, and finding 
 in it an action that to his time-<^scounting sense was 
 one of unexplained delay (being so felt by Hamlet himself 
 on the second visitation of the Ghost in the old play), 
 elaborated that aspect qf the hero as he did every other. 
 In all likelihood he was responding to an impression of 
 the theatre which chimed with his idiosyncrasy — revealed 
 in the impossible treatment of time - in Othello and 
 Measure for Measure, to name no others.' That 
 Hamlet " shilly-shaUied " was in all Ukelihood the verdict 
 of the audiences before the critics made it their theme; 
 because the " two hours' traffic of the stage" psycholo* 
 gically predisposes us to an exigence which in reading 
 a novel we should not think of practising. So much 
 must happe^ in so short a space that normal standards 
 of criticism of conduct are cast aside ; and inasmuch 
 as Shakespeare in his adaptation assented to this, treating 
 Hamlet as one who inexplicably procrastinated, the 
 Utigation set up by the critics must be allowed to proceed. 
 But, in the interest aUke of Shakespeare and of critical 
 science, it must be logically conducted to the end ; and 
 this, as we have seen and shall see further, has not been 
 
 I Whether this telescoping of time is specially a result of the dramatist's 
 adaptation of other men's work is a problem which calls for separate 
 treatment. It has al^ to be asked whether the academic insistence 
 on the " unities " moved him to evade the proper indications of time- 
 interval. 
 
OBJECTIVE THEORIES 19 
 
 done. What has been achieved is but a series of con- 
 flicting propositions, all professing to sum up the case 
 without facing all the facts'. 
 
 § 2. Objective Theories. 
 
 After the rebuttal of the Goethean formula of tempera- 
 mental incompetence,' the next step was to frame a 
 formula of objective hindrances which delayed Hamlet's 
 revenge. In 1845, George Fletcher, in an article in 
 the Westminster Review,^ dwelt on the overpowering 
 force of the obstacles^ and made an allusion to the 
 " preternatural embarrassment of the most horrible kind 
 superadded," which points back to Hartley Coleridge. 
 In 1846 J. L. Klein, the German historian of modern 
 drama, set forth in the Berliner Modenspiegel the 
 thesis that Hamlet was barred from action by the manner 
 of the cri me and the nature of his knowled ge of it. .Mdiich 
 could not be,jjgeigd_^ as evidence to justify an jLS§asKi1> / 
 ation Of^the guilty king. Another German, Levinstein, 
 is eitfed a§™pt£tttHg-thesame view before Werder. Pro- 
 fessor Karl Werder, in turn, independently framed an4' 
 expounded the same thesis in his lectures on Hamlet 
 at the BerHn University in 1859-60, and again in 1871-2.3 
 
 I Lowell, having plumped for the formula of Schlegel and Coleridge, 
 naturally joined in deprecating that of Goethe, observing that he " seems 
 to have considered the character too much from one side," but does not 
 argue the point at all well. Hamlet, he remarks, " Was hardly a senti- 
 mentalist " like Werther. On Goethe's side it might be rephed that 
 Lowell makes him very truly a sentimentalist, in that he lives in 
 sentiment and is finally determined to action by " chance." 
 
 » Reprinted in Studies of Shakespeare in 1847. Furness does not 
 note this essay in his Variorum edition ; and Rolfe, who cites it in his 
 1903 ed. of Hamlet and in his introduction to Miss Wilder's translation 
 of Werder (Putnams, 1907), does not mention Hartley Coleridge. 
 
 3 Lectures published in full in the Preussische JahrbUcher, 1873-4, 
 and reprinted in book form, 1875 and 1893. 
 
20 THE ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 Even as the champions of the subjective theory, im- 
 pressed by the evidence of Hamlet's procrastination, 
 ignored that of his faculty • for prompt and vigorous 
 action, so the champions of the objective theory, im- 
 pressed by that evidence, dwelt on the insurmountable 
 difficulties of Harfllet's task, and ignored his own self- 
 accusations. Werder, whose prolix and declamatory 
 handling of a fairly plausible thesis reveals its inadequacy 
 to a considerate reader, seems to have made many con- 
 verts, including Furness, Hudson, Corson and Rolfe,i 
 all of whom, like him, took for granted the thoroughly 
 planned character of the play, though they admitted 
 minor perplexities. But it is precisely on the view of 
 a thorough plan that their thesis most completely breaks 
 down, l^jn Shakespeare's view Hamlet was faced by 
 insuperable difficulties of circumstance, it was Shake- 
 speare's plain business to let us see as much. And 
 this he never once does. His Hamlet " does not 
 know," any more than we, why his task recedes from 
 him. 
 
 Surprisingly popular latterly in the United States, 
 Werder's theory had small success among European 
 critics, in Germany or elsewhere. It is marked by the 
 " vigour and rigour " which Arnold ascribed to German 
 theories in general, the tactic of driving the thesis any- 
 how through or over the facts which is so characteristic 
 of German publicism — and politics. Of his own thesis 
 Werder writes : " That this point for a century long 
 should never have been seen is the most incomprehensible 
 thing that has ever happened in aesthetic criticism from 
 the very beginning of its existence "—a kind of vocifer- 
 
 • Mr. W. H. Widgery (Harness Prize Essays on the First Quarto of 
 'Hamlet,' 1880, p. 185 sq.) adopted, the position. 
 
OBJECTIVE THEORIES 21 
 
 ation that does not usually accompany real discoveries. 
 The stress of Werder's case lies on the position that a 
 mere kiUing of the king would not only put Hamlet 
 himself in danger from the indignant people but would 
 wholly fail to secure his real end-'— the j udicia l convictipn 
 and^^ecuti on of jtljfe^inurd erer . To the retort that 
 HanrtSF never once indicates any such ideal, Werder 
 replies that the " State of the case " speaks for him ; 
 and to the further retort that such an argument is merely 
 a petitio principii his genial supporter, Mr. W. J. 
 Rolfe, rephes that the " subjective " theorists, who 
 oppose, argue in the same fashion.' That is doubt- 
 less true; but Werder's thesis is not thereby to be 
 established. 
 
 Professor Tolman, who regretfully rejects Werder's 
 solution, leaves it intact by merely countering with the 
 subjective theory — "Character" as against "Fate." 
 The^ complete or general answer to Werder is that not 
 only is his explanation nowhere indicated in the play, 
 not only is his conception of the need for a judicial 
 punishment aUen to the whole ethic and atmosphere 
 of the play, but it comes to the same thing as the sub- 
 jective theory in that it makes Hamlet recoil from the 
 possible course and fasten on an impossible one. How 
 should the king be convicted ? On his own evidence; 
 under torture ? A public investigation is the last; thing 
 Hamlet could critically be supposed to wish ; and neither 
 his pictured compatriots nor the Elizabethan audience 
 can be conceived as craving for it. Above all, the 
 audience. Yet Werder is as insistent for his arbitrary 
 hypothesis as he is blind to the case for the subjective 
 
 ' Introd. to The Heart of Hamlet's Mystery (trans, of Werder's lectures, 
 1907), p. 18. 
 
22 THE ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 theory. In the closet scene, he observes ' " the Ghost 
 says only : 
 
 Do not forget. This visitation 
 
 Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose." 
 
 Only ! We are apparently invited to suppose that the 
 Ghost, like all the subjective critics, was mistaken ! RoMe, 
 most lovable of Shakespeareans, actually meets Professor 
 Bradley's challenge to face the text by saying that 
 an external obstacle is " clearly implied " in Hamlet's 
 
 Sith I have cause and will and strength and means 
 To do't 
 
 the very Unes that are preceded by 
 
 I do not know 
 Why yet I live to say, ' This thing's to do.' 
 
 And against the challenge to explain away Hamlet's 
 phrases about his " sword " and his " arm," Rolfe affirms 
 that the words are used " because the killing of the king 
 is the end or aim of his task," which must wait " until 
 he can 'bring the king to public justice.'"' It suffices 
 to confront this, once more, with Hamlet's words in the 
 praying scene : — 
 
 Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent: 
 
 When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage, 
 
 Or in the incestuous pleasures of his bed ; 
 
 At gaming,' swearing, or about some act 
 
 That has no relish of salvation in't ; 
 
 Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven . . . 
 
 I Trans, cited, p. 47. 
 
THEORY OF DEFECT IN THE DRAMATIST 23 
 
 Before this, the " public justice " theory simply dis- 
 appears, even as does the subjective theory before the 
 challenge of Hamlet's slaughterous acts, though that 
 theory naturally fastens on the lines before us as indi- 
 cating a recoil from the decisive action needed. 
 
 Well may Rolfe avow that " All the theories, whether 
 subjective or objective, have their difficulties." ' Those 
 of the theory he embraces, however, are the most obvious 
 and most instantly fatal of all. Framed and adopted 
 because of the failure of the subjective theory in any 
 of its forms to meet the data, it reveals itself as still 
 worse founded than they ; and it accordingly makes, 
 by far the worse figure in debate. Admitted by its 
 adherents to fail in meeting all the difficulties, and 
 raising as it does new difficulties of the most hopeless 
 kind, it compels us to seek sounder ground. 
 
 § 3. Theory of Defect in the Dramatist. 
 
 Both the subjective and the objective explanations 
 being so obviously inadequate to the data, the capable 
 Gustav RiimeUn (afterwards Kanzler of Tiibingen) in 
 his Shakespearestudien, published in book form in 
 1866, countered the critics in general with a thesis of 
 " faults of the poet " as against alike that of " faults 
 of the hero " and the claim to justify the play as a whole. 
 Bent on countering " Shakespeare-Mania " in the cen- 
 tenary year 1864, Riimelin was more concerned to impugn 
 Shakespeare's work than to explain it ; and he in turn, 
 
 • Rolfe is quaintly at strife with his leader oa one point. On, the 
 " times are out of joint " speech he writes (p. 37) : " Most significant 
 words, though the critics have taken little note of them." In the same 
 volume (p. io8) we find Werder writing : " Critics have made too much 
 of these words." 
 
24 THE MSTBETIC PROBLEM 
 
 thougb he pointed to the old Hamlet-saga as conditioning 
 Shakespeare's play, did not substantiate his case by the 
 data as to thfe pre-Shakespearean tragedy of Kyd. On 
 the other hand, Hebler, who resisted ahke Riimelin and 
 Werder, continued to maintain a position » in which 
 the dilemmas of the play were partly ignored. 
 
 Rumehn's position, as it happened, had long been 
 anticipated by British common-sense. Gildon in 1710 
 had charged on the play " abundance of errors in the 
 conduct and design," insisting that " Shakespeare was 
 master of this story," and therefore responsible for the 
 plot. Hanmer in 1730, in turn, pronounced that " our 
 poet by keeping too close to the groundwork of his plot 
 has fallen into an absurdity " ; adding : " Had Hamlet 
 gone naturally to work . . . there would have been an 
 end of our play. The poet, therefore, was obliged to 
 delay his hero's revenge ; but then he should have contrived 
 some good reason for it." * And Mackenzie in 1780 con- 
 fessed of the dramatist : "Of the structure of his stories, 
 or the probabiHty of his incidents, he is frequently care- 
 less " ; and again : "It may perhaps be doing Shake- 
 speare no injustice to suppose that he sometimes began 
 a play without having fixed in his mind, in any deter- 
 mined manner, the plan or conduct of his piece." 
 
 The same caveat was otherwise put by Edgar Poe : 
 
 In all commentatiirg upon Shakespeare there has been a radical 
 error never yet mentioned. It is the error of attempting to expound 
 
 ' AufsStze iiber Shakespeare, 2te Aufl. 1872. 
 
 > Cited by Malone, Var. ed. at end of play. Professor Bradley has, 
 I think, done Hanmer injustice (Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. p. 91) 
 by not citing the last sentence. It is in perfect accord with his own 
 avowal (p. 93) g;^ tllR pgyr^lngiiaLjn intelligibiii ty of a dramatic 
 <jhaiactef-"" ah oiira e BJ^^-thaJac apacityo r folly of tne ara'niiHstr" — ^We 
 >ihall see that these expressions are m t5g"prestint~case- undul y severe. 
 
THEORY OF DEFECT IN THE DRAMATIST 25 
 
 his characters, to account for their actions, to reconcile their incon- 
 sistencieSj not as if they were the coinage of a human brain, but 
 as if they had been actual existences upon earth. We talk of 
 Hamlet the man, instead of Hamlet the dramatis persona — of 
 Hamlet that God, in place of Hamlet that Shakespeare created. . . . 
 It is not . . . the inconsistencies of the acting man which we have 
 as a subject of discussion . . . but the whims' and vacillations, 
 the conflicting energies and indolences of the poet. It seems to 
 us Uttle less than a miracle that this obvious point should have 
 been overlooked.' 
 
 Needless to say, it had not been universally overlooked, 
 having been clearly put more than a century before Poe 
 by Gildon and Hanmer, and again by Mackenzie ; but 
 when Hartley Coleridge said : " Let us, for a moment, 
 put Shakespeare out of the question, and consider Hamlet 
 as a real person, a recently deceased acquaintance," he 
 was asking us to do what most of the later critics have 
 commonly done, to the miscarriage of the problem. It 
 is the course taken by Professor W. F. Trench in his 
 commentary on the. play, which only incidentally suggests 
 possibilities of confusion in Shakespeare's work, and 
 never at aU contemplates the problem of adaptation of 
 a previous play. This partly holds good, in fact, even 
 of the admirable study of Professor Bradley, who so 
 conclusively confutes alike the old subjective theory and 
 the modern objective theory of Hamlet's procrastination, 
 and so judicially, to my thinking, substitutes in effect, 
 although he does not consistently adhere to, the explana- 
 tion of psychic shock (if I may so phrase it) as being 
 alone broadly compatible with the data. Hamlet, in 
 short, as we see him, is neither weak of spirit nor really 
 outmatched by mere circumstance. Even Werder falls 
 back chronically on subjective solutions, as, for instance, 
 that Hamlet feels at certain stages that he is not getting 
 I Marginalia : Addenda : Works, ed. Ingram, iv. 469-70. 
 
26 THE ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 help " from abovie " — a thesis as entirely gratuitous as 
 the formula that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern perish 
 partly because "they are not serving God."' This is 
 the theorist's way of discounting the fact that Hamlet 
 avows his own unjustified abstention from action. 
 Granting the theatrical view that there has been a sur- 
 prising abstentian, the candid course, though not the 
 final solution, is to say with Professor Bradley that some- 
 thing in or undergone by Hamlet withholds him from 
 the act of revenge ; and that this something is cleairly 
 not mere over-refleclion, even though Hamlet does talk of 
 
 Some craven scruple 
 Of thinking too precisely on the event, 
 A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom. 
 And ever three parts coward. 
 
 The point is that after all his self-analysis he avows 
 
 I do not know 
 Why yet I live to say ' This thing's to do ' ; 
 Sith I have cause and will and strength and means 
 To do't. 
 
 And the conclusion must apparently be, if we are to 
 frame a theory of " the man Hamlet " at all, that for 
 his soul, poisoned by the knowledge of his mother's guilt, 
 the act of vengeanc e is i gaUsL. no solag e, fiercely as he 
 craves it from time; to time. Life for him remains 
 poisoned, there being nothing that can fully revive his 
 will-to-hve after that deadly injury. An adequate love- 
 motive is lacking, OpheMa being inadequacy incarnate. 
 For Hamlet, life is not worth living, and revenge is not 
 
 1 The Heart of Hamlet's Mystery, trans.' cite4. p. 169. 
 
THEORY OF DEFECT IN THE DRAMATIST 27 
 
 worth taking save by way of final closing of the whole 
 account. 
 
 But this comparatively just though incomplete in- 
 duction, to which the Germanic ethic of Werder made 
 him blind, is probably obscured for those who follow 
 him by reason simply of their habit of seeing Hamlet 
 as a planned play, not as a play of adaptation and 
 adjustment. We now know that such it was. Goethe's 
 account of the piece as something suddenly and wonder- 
 fully conceived by the poet » we now know to be a pure 
 chimera ; and Goethe would have confessed as much 
 if he had been told the play's history. And Professor 
 Bradley, who, if I read him aright, is at times in accord 
 with the construction above put, stops short, for the 
 same reason, of the verdict that Hamlet is not finally 
 an intelligible drama as it stands, though he nearly 
 pronounces it. That verdict we must face. Hanmer is 
 finally quite right : the poet as dramatist, having actually 
 put in Hamlet's mouth a repeated avowal of inexplicable 
 delay, should have given us a reason for it. And he does 
 not, precisely because his transmutation of the play was 
 but a process of making more and more mysterious a 
 delay which in the earlier story was not mysterious at all. 
 In the early story there were " objective " reasons for 
 Hamlet's delay, and these have been progressively elimin- 
 ated, leaving the harmonists to invent new. In the ] 
 early story Hamlet makes no seljtaccusals : these~TlavB-< I ' 
 been expressly inserted, so that the harmonists are irrove^-^ 
 to invenr explanations. Bjjt_£xplanations are just w4ia± 
 the draniatist- has neither inserted nor indicated. 
 
 Those wEo" argue that' a' reason is in any way given 
 are invariably found either to^ ignore or do violence to 
 I Eckermann, GesprSche, 1828, 11 Marz. 
 
28 THE ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 features of the play which conflict with their interpre- 
 tation, or to impose upon it and us a thesis which the 
 whole play rejects. The latest experimenters conform 
 to the rule. Thus the Rev. Dr. H. Ford, in his Shake- 
 speare's Hamlet : a New Theory (1900), claiming to 
 show " what was the poet's intention in the play," argues 
 that Hamlet's inhibition lies in his knowledge that 
 Christianity vetoed revenge. ' Yet of such a conception 
 or motive there is not one hint in the entire play. On 
 the contrary, not only does Hamlet many times vow 
 revenge and never once avow hesitation about its fitness : 
 he takes revenge on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with- 
 out a sign of subsequent remorse, whereupon Dr. Ford 
 declares that the deed " needs no apology. A justifiable 
 act of self-defence " [which it emphatically was not] 
 " carries with it no self-reproach." 2 And besides thus 
 substantially upsetting his own tiiesis, the theorist inci- 
 dentally suggests that, " though conscience repels the 
 thought of revenge, Hamlet nevertheless uses conscience 
 as a kind of subterfuge and excuse for not doing what he 
 has no intention of doing." 3 Solvuntur tabulee. For the 
 rest, the critic also argues, as so many had done before 
 him, that Hamlet before his knowledge of the murder 
 is already shattered by his mother's incestuous marriage 4 
 — all this by way of repelling the formula of " irresolu- 
 tion," which he mistakenly supposed to be so generally 
 held that his attempt to subvert it was a solitary protest.5 
 It might well survive his proposed amendment," which 
 is equally untenable, serving as it does merely to force 
 
 • Work cited, ch. ix. » Id. p. 30. 3 Id. p. 28. 
 
 4 He quotes Furnivall (p. 62) as putting the strong proposition that 
 for Hamlet the murder of his father is " only a skin-deep stain " in com- 
 parison with his mother's guilt. 
 
 5 Id. p. 5. 
 
THEORY OF DEFECT IN THE DRAMATIST 29 
 
 • 
 into new prominence the fact that the play cannot be 
 
 explained from within. 
 
 A similar criticism is elicited by the more studious 
 performance of Professor W. F. Trench, who, though 
 he does not cite them, virtually adopts the formula of 
 Schlegel and Coleridge and Lowell, accounting for Hamlet's 
 non-performance by representing him as a man of con- 
 templation, reacting only mentally, being from the first 
 incapable of the required action.' The thesis seems 
 unnecessarily complicated, not to say confused, by 
 the further position that Hamlet is chronically " pretty 
 mad " « — a theory which pretty well dispenses with the 
 psychological analysis to which the writer devotes so 
 much abiUty. The play is thus at once a " tragedy of 
 inefificiency," 3 of " the will-less-ness proper to the 
 contemplative genius," 4 and of a virtual insanity which 
 is equally proper to that genius. We are therefore not 
 to be surprised if we cannot understand Hamlet : "he 
 cannot understand himself " 5 — a proposition surely no 
 less applicable to half the characters in the play — or 
 in any play. But at the same time " We find it hard, 
 with Shakespeare's help, to understand Hamlet : even 
 Shakespeare, perhaps, found it hard to understand 
 him." Perhaps ! 
 
 And when the critic, after denying that Hamlet can 
 act, dismisses the slaying of Polonius with the remark * 
 that " About this ' rash and bloody deed ' Hamlet is 
 insanely unconcerned " — ^adding a footnote insisting that 
 
 • 
 
 • Work cited, pp. 74-9, 119, 137. 
 » Pp. 76, 86-7, 107, 131, 161, 163, 227. 
 3 P. 172. 4 P. 119, note. 
 
 5 P. 143. On p. 138 we have : " It must be admitted that Hamlet - 
 did not always correctly analyse his own motives." 
 ' P. 173. 
 
30 THE ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 his " I took thee for thy better " is only an afterthought 
 — and again dismisses the doom of Rosencrantz and 
 iGuildenstern with the comment : ' "A bloody thought 
 enabling him to write a letter that will lead to their 
 destruction," we seem entitled to doubt whether the 
 critic understands Hamlet either ; whether, in fact, this 
 whole business of " understanding Hamlet " is not a 
 following of a will-o'-the-wisp, to be renounced in favour 
 of the task of " understanding Hamlet." The light 
 from within invariably resolving itself into a multiplicity 
 of shifting lights, we are compelled to seek Ught from 
 without. 
 
 § 4. The Growth of the Play. 
 
 The history of the play is thus vital to the compre- 
 hension of it. A real Ufe is the Ufe of an organism ; and 
 a biography, whether general or episodic, is a necessarily 
 imperfect and selective presentment of a life by way 
 of narrative, document, and explanation. Its final value 
 is in proportion to the vividness and the consistency 
 with which it presents the organic personaUty, whether 
 that be consistent or inconsistent, recognizing the latter 
 quality where it subsists. A fiction is a willed mechanism, 
 simulating under an artistic form the presentment of 
 the career of an organism ; and its artistic va,lidity is 
 finally in terms of its measure of simixlative success. 
 Now, though the author of a fiction may use the device 
 -of pretended doubt as to the motives of his characters 
 by way of heightening illusion on one side, that device 
 is proper only to the novel, which admits of commentary. 
 A play does not ; and it is not rightly the business of 
 
 « P. 224. 
 
THE GROWTH OF THE PLAY 31 
 
 a dramatist to leave a character unintelligible. In the 
 words of Gildon, he is "master of the story " : that is, 
 he ought to be. So obvious is this that when the failure 
 happens we are entitled to infer either (a) oversight or 
 confusion on the part of the dramatist, or (6) some diffi- 
 culty imposed by his material. ^ And it is easy to show 
 that, while Shakespeare is certainly capable of oversight 
 and of occasional confusion, in this case he has suffered 
 or accepted a compulsion imposed by material which, 
 as a stage-manager revising a popular play of marked 
 action, he did not care to reject. 
 
 In a word, the dramatist is conditioned on the one 
 hand by his quaUties, congenital and acquired, and on 
 the other hand by his matter ; and when the matter 
 emerges as a prior play, with striking situations which 
 constitute its " drawing " power, the conditioning on that 
 side is apt to be constringent. Professor Bradley sees 
 and states with perfect clearness and fulness the probable 
 play of the personal equation in Shakespeare, the effects 
 or hmitations of culture, pressure of time, fatigue over 
 an uncongenial task, knowledge of the low standards 
 and poor taste of the bulk of his audience, and so on.^ 
 But in Hamlet, the first of the great plays in which 
 Shakespeare fully reveals his supremacy, there is far 
 more evidence of superabundant power and of keen 
 interest in the main theme than of haste or carelessness 
 — apart from his habitual indifference to time measure- 
 ment. When then the play falls short of intelligibility 
 in itself, it is at once the economical and the necessary 
 course to look for the solution in the conditions imposed 
 
 " Professor Bradley, who expressed himself more uncompromisingly 
 (as cited above, p. 24, note) would presumably assent to this. 
 » Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. p. 75. 
 
32 THE ^ESTHETIC PROBLEM 
 
 by the material. Without a study of these we are very 
 much in the position of the geocentric astronomer, 
 revolving in an incomplete induction. The history of 
 the play alone elucidates the main issue. 
 
II 
 
 THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 § 1. The Pre-Shakespearean Play. 
 
 Most critics have long been agreed that there was a 
 , pre-Shakespearean Hamlet, Prince of DENMARK-^pre- 
 sumably that noted by Hensiowe as played in 1594 — 
 and that its author was Thomas Kyd.^ Nashe's allusions, 
 in his address " To the Gentleman Students " prefaced 
 to Greene's Menaphon (1589), concerning " shifting 
 companions that run through every art and thrive by 
 none," leaving " the trade of Noverint whereto they were 
 born " ; " whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of 
 tragical speeches " ; " Seneca let blood Hne by line and 
 page by page," " the Kid in ^sop " ; " Itahan trans- 
 lations," and " twopenny pamphlets," point clearly and 
 solely to Thomas Kyd. He was the son of a scrivener ; 
 he is known to have issued at least one pamphlet, which 
 is preserved, and to have translated Tasso's treatise on 
 hoTisehold management (1588), and he echoes Seneca 
 throughout his Spanish Tragedy. The earlier theory 
 that " trade of Noverint " pointed to Shakespeare is ruled 
 out alike by date and by biographical fact. The identi- 
 
 t The hypothesis was first put by Malone. 
 
 3 33 
 
34 
 
 THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 fication of Kyd, definitely begun by English writers,' 
 has been carried further by Herr Gregor Sarrazin 
 in his Thomas Kyd und Sein Kreis (Berlin, 1892), 
 where actual survivals of Kyd's phraseology in Hamlet, 
 especially in the First Quarto, are specified : 
 
 Bellimperia. 
 Andrea. 
 
 Leartes. 
 Ophelia. 
 
 Farewell, my lord, 
 
 Be mindful of my love and of your word. 
 
 'Tis fixed upon my heart. 
 
 First Part of Jeronymo : Dodsley's Old Plays, 
 2nd ed., iii. 70.* 
 Farewell, Ophelia, and remember well what I have 
 
 said to you. 
 It is already lock't within my heart. 
 
 Hamlet, ist Q. Rep., i860, p. 16. 
 
 Fair locks, resembling Phoebus' radiant beams. 
 Smooth forehead, Uke the table of high Jove. 
 
 Soliman and Perseda, 333. 
 Hjrperion's curls ; the iront of Jove himself. 
 
 Hamlet, Fol. Ill, iv. 56. 
 
 Importing health and wealth of SoUman. 
 
 S. and P. V, i. 24. 
 Importing Denmark's health and England's too. 
 
 Hamlet, V. ii. 
 
 Isabella. O where 's the author of this endless woe ? 
 
 Hieronimo. To know the author were some ease of grief. 
 For in revenge my heart would fimd relief. 
 
 Spanish Tragedy, II. v. 39. 
 Revenge it is must peld my heart relief. 
 For woe begets woe, and grief hajigs on grief. 
 
 Hamlet, 1st Q. Rep. cited, p. 83. 
 
 ' E.g. W. H. Widgery, Harness Prize Essays on the First Quarto, 1880, 
 p. 100 sq. One of Sarrazin's parallels, given below, is indicated by 
 Widgery, p. 160. 
 
 » This play is not Kyd's, but founded on his Comedy of Don Horatio. 
 See below, p. 53 sq. 
 
THE PRE-SHAKESPEARBAN PLAY 35 
 
 BelHmperia. Hieronimo, I will consent, conceal, 
 
 And aught that may effect for thine avail. 
 Join with thee to revenge Horatio's death. 
 Hieronimo. On, then ; and whatsoever I devise^ 
 
 Let me entreat you, grace my practices. 
 
 S.T. IV. i. 45 (V. 146). 
 Gertrude. I will consent, conceal, and do my best. 
 What stratagem soe'er thou shalt devise. 
 
 Hamlet, ist Q. Rep. cited, p. 65. 
 
 The parallels to " Hyperion's curls " and " Importing 
 health " may be challenged on the ground that the First 
 Quarto does not yield them ; but as regards the last two 
 there can be no rebuttal. The Quarto lines disappear 
 in the Second Quarto and the Folio ; and they ate plainly 
 Kyd's. Further, though the First Quarto certainly 
 consists mainly of Shakespeare matter, some of it greatly 
 mangled, some not, it has many passages which are 
 plainly non-Shakespearean. Professor Dowden, adhering 
 to a position taken up in the past by various critics, 
 including Grant White and the German Mommsen, com- 
 mitted himself to the declaration : 
 
 For my own part, repeated perusals have satisfied me that 
 Shakespeare's hand can be discerned throughout the whole of 
 the truncated and travestied play of 1603. . . . With the exception 
 of the following lines : 
 
 Look you now, here is your husband. 
 With a face Hke Vulcan, 
 A look fit for a murder and a rape, 
 A dull dead hanging look, and a hell-bred eye 
 To aSright children and amaze the world, 
 I see notMng that looks pre-Shakespearean, and I see much that 
 is entirely unlike the work of Kyd.' 
 
 But th6 first and last propositions are beside the case, 
 since no one denies that there is a great deal of Shake- 
 
 t Introd. to Hamlet in " Arden " ed., p. zviii, 
 
36 THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 speare in the Quarto ; and the other denial was surely 
 an oversight. The " revenge " lines and the " consent, 
 conceal " lines, just cited, and seen by the Professor in 
 Sarrazin, are. pre-Shakespearean ; and in a dozen places 
 we have a plainly pre-Shakespearean basis for passages 
 which Shakespeare rewrote. Take Ophelia's reply to 
 Laertes : 
 
 Brother, to this I have lent attentive ear. 
 And doubt not but to keep my honour firm ; 
 But, my dear brother, do not you. 
 Like to a cunning sophister. 
 Teach me the path and ready way to heaven. 
 While you, forgetting what is said to me. 
 Yourself, like to a careless libertine. 
 Doth give his heart, his appetite at full. 
 And little recks how that his honour dies. 
 
 This is not a misreporting of the speech given us in the 
 Second Quarto : it is a transcript, probably imperfect 
 in two Unes, of a speech in a feebler and flatter style and 
 versification. Similarly Ophelia's account to her father 
 of Hamlet's distraction begins in the First Quarto in a 
 non-Shakespearean style : 
 
 O young Prince Hamlet, the only flower of Denmark, 
 
 He is bereft of all the wealth he had ; 
 
 The jewel that adom'd his features most 
 
 Is filcht and stol'n away ; his wit's bereft him ; 
 
 as does the speech of Polonius to the king and queen, 
 telling how he had ordered Ophelia to refuse the Prince's 
 addresses. It is earlier and poorer matter,' which in 
 
 » Mr. Widgery, in his brilliant prize essay {ftamtii Prize Essays, 1880), 
 finds Shakespearean quality in these passages. I cannot. Professor 
 Herford (essay in same vol., p. 84) partly leans to Mr. Widgery at this 
 point, but notes non-Shakespearean matter. 
 
THE PRB-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAT 37 
 
 the Second Quarto is rewritten. The version of the 
 " To be " soUloquy in the first may possibly be only a 
 mangling of what we have in the second ; but this cannot 
 be said of the king's soliloquy in the prayer scene : 
 
 O that this wet that falls upon my face 
 
 Would wash the crime clear from my conscience 1 
 
 When I look up to heaven, I see my trespass ; 
 
 The earth doth still cry out upon my fact, 
 
 [Pay me ?] the murder of a brother and a king ; 
 
 And the adulterous fault I have committed : 
 
 O these are sins that are unpardonable. 
 
 Why, say thy sins were blacker than is jet, 
 
 Yet may contrition make them white as snow. 
 
 Aye, but still to persever in a sin 
 
 Is an act 'gainst the universal power. 
 
 Most wretched man, stoop, bend thee to thy prayer ; 
 
 Ask grace of heaven to keep thee from despair. 
 
 This is not a first draft by Shakespeare, any more than 
 it is a misreport of the soliloquy of the Second Quarto : 
 it is pre-Shakespearean. And these and other equally 
 non-Shakespearean passages are printed by Professor 
 Dowden in an Appendix, with no suggestion there that 
 they are unUke the manner of Kyd. They are in fact 
 quite in the manner of The Spanish Tragedy and Arden 
 OF Feversham.» 
 
 But we have further the phraseological clues given by 
 Widgery and Sarrazin, to which may be added these : 
 
 I. In the scene between Horatio and the Queen after 
 Hamlet's return, which appears only in the First Quarto, 
 we have the fine : 
 
 For murderous minds are always jealous. 
 
 ' Kyd's authorship of Arden, first contended for by Fleay, and sup- 
 ported by the present writer in Did Shakespeare write ' Titus A ndronicus ' ? 
 has been independently and conclusively established by Mr. Charles 
 Crawford {Collectanea, vol. i). 
 
38 THE DOCUMENTARY PEOBLEM 
 
 where jealous must be read as a trisyllable, jelious. The 
 word is so scanned in the Spanish Tragedy (II. ii. 56), 
 and its occurrence with that scansion four times in 
 Arden is one of the many clues to Kyd's authorship 
 of that play. All four lines chime exactly with that 
 cited. 
 
 2. The revenge-grief couplet quoted by Sarrazin from 
 the First Quarto follows a line which also is an echo of 
 Kyd, by himself : 
 
 Therefore I will not drown thee in my tears. 
 
 Compare : 
 
 To drown thee with an ocean of my fears. 
 
 Spanish Tragedy, II. v. 23. 
 
 3. " As raging as the sea," in the Queen's speech to 
 the King after the closet scene, is but a sMght clue 
 (S.T. IV. iU. loi) ; but in the line : 
 
 He might be once tasked for to try your cunning, 
 
 in the First Quarto's version of the King's talk to Leartes 
 after learning of Hamlet's return — a piece of dialogue 
 clearly pre-Shakespearean — the "for to " points to Kyd, 
 who uses that idiom eight times in Arden. The " for 
 to " in the Une : 
 
 For to adorn a king and guild his crown, 
 
 in the First Quarto's closet scene, is probably a misprint 
 for "fit to." 
 
THE PRB-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAY 39 
 
 4. But there emerges here a further due, noted' by 
 Professor Boas,' which chnches the other. In the Spanish 
 Tragedy Bellimperia says (IV. i. 178) : 
 
 You mean to try my cunning, then, Hieronimo. 
 
 These small coincidences become progressively signi- 
 ficant as they accumulate ; and Professor Boas has noted 
 yet others. 
 
 5. After the King in the First Quarto has remarked 
 to Leartes : "He might be once tasked for to try your 
 cunning," Leartes asks : 
 
 And how for this ? 
 
 and the King begins his reply : 
 
 Maxry, Leartes, thus. 
 
 Exactly in the same fashion, in the Tragedy, when 
 HiercHiimo has been talking to Lorenzo of tragedy- 
 writing, the latter asks (IV. i. 74) : 
 
 And how for that ? 
 
 and Hieronimo replies : 
 
 Marry, my good Lord, thus. 
 
 And in both cases the explanation given is met in the 
 same way, Leartes saying, " 'Tis excellent," and Lorenzo, 
 " O excellent." 
 
 I Introd. to Kyd's works, 1901, p. li. 
 
40 THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 6. Yet again, there is a close parallel of phrase and 
 situation between the feigned reconciliation of Leartes 
 and Hamlet in the First Quarto and that of Castile's 
 son and Hieronimo in the Tragedy (III. xiv. 154). The 
 King says to Gertrude : 
 
 We'll have Leartes and our son 
 Make fiiends and lovers as befits them both. 
 
 Castile says : 
 
 But here, before Prince Balthazar and me, 
 Embrace each other, and be perfect friends. 
 
 In both cases, as Professor Boas points out, the formal 
 reconciUation is the prelude to the catastrophe. 
 
 7. Another echo noted by Professor Boas and others 
 occurs in connection with the play scenes. Hamlet in 
 the First Quarto (III. ii.) cries : 
 
 And if the King Ufce not the tragedy. 
 Why then, beUke, he likes it not, perdy.J 
 
 So Hieronimo in the Tragedy (IV. i. 196-7) : 
 
 And if the world like not this Tragedy, 
 Hard is the hap of old Hieronimo. 
 
 8. And yet again we have the cry of Hamlet : 
 
 I never gave you cause, 
 echoed in that of Lorenzo {S.T., III. xiv. 148) : 
 Hieronimo, I never give you cause. 
 
THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAY 41 
 
 To refuse to see in this string of verbal coincidences a 
 proof of the survival of portions of Kyd's original text 
 in Hamlet is to evade phenomena which can be explained 
 in no other way. They set up the same problem as we 
 are faced-by in the multitude of echoes from Peele in 
 Titus Andronicus. If we are to suppose Shakespeare 
 in these cases composing a play of his own, we conceive 
 him as parroting in the weakest way two of his contem- 
 poraries who were incomparably his inferiors in literary, 
 power. A tag or a poetic trope he might and did echo 
 from other poets, as they so constantly echoed each other ; 
 but here we have many phrases which are not current 
 tags, and tropes not worth repeating. If Shakespeare 
 penned them he was simply copying other men's humdrum 
 dialogue, as if for lack of power to make his, own inde- 
 pendently. The conception only needs to be put clearly 
 in order to be rejected. The young Shakespeare was 
 not more but less likely than other men to plagiarize thus 
 weakly and slothfuUy. In King John, as later in Lear, 
 he rewrites a whole play without cop3dng a Hne. 
 
 Seeing, then, that in the parts of our play under notice 
 there is no question of the intervention of any other 
 hand, we are bound in candour and in common-sense, 
 having regard to all the other cogent evidence for Kyd's 
 origination of Hamlet, to decide that the score of echoes 
 above noted signify the survival of so much of his matter 
 in Shakespeare's. first adaptation. In the relatively small 
 quantity of clearly non-Shakespearean work detachable 
 from the First Quarto, the number of the echoes is 
 conclusive. 
 
42 THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 § 2. The Old German Version. 
 
 But the really important problem is not so much to 
 detach survivals of Kyd's phraseology in Hamlet as 
 to ascertain with some precision what is of his deter- 
 mination in the structure and action of the play. We 
 know from the early allusions that his Hamlet played 
 the madman and cried " Revenge," and that the old 
 play had a Ghost. So much might have been inferred 
 from a comparison of the machinery in the existing play 
 and the Spanish Tragedy ; and we might confidently 
 infer that Kyd had introduced the play-within-the-play, 
 and also the Dumb Show. As confidently might we 
 expect him to delay the revenge of Hamlet in some such 
 fashion as he delays that of Hieronimo ; and to effect 
 a similarly comprehensive catastrophe. Even the suicide 
 of Ophelia dupHcates that of Isabella. 
 
 But actions having a general resemblance might be 
 handled very differently in detail, and to ascertain as 
 closely as may be Kyd's actual procedure we must 
 examine the old German play Der Bestrafte Bruder- 
 MORD, otherwise Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of 
 Denmark, probably identical with the tragedy of* 
 " Hamlet, Prince of Denmark " known to have been 
 played, with many, other Ehzabethan pieces, at the 
 Court of Dresden in 1626.^ This, though preserved only 
 through a manuscript of 1710, is at bottom clearly an 
 early form of our Hamlet.^ Like the First Quarto, 
 it has the name Corambis (Corambus in the German 
 
 ' Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865, p. cxv. sq. 
 
 » Latham, in his Two Dissertations (1872) suggested that the German 
 play may have been the original, and that the English travelling players 
 may have brought the account of it home with them. This will not 
 Viold for an instant. 
 
THE OLD GEEMAN VERSION 43 
 
 play) for Polonius ; and though the dialogue is visibly 
 much retrenched, it apparently represents an earlier 
 state of the play than that version. It possesses also 
 a Prologue in which Night is the principal speaker, 
 assisted by Alecto, Msegera and Tisiphone — ^in all proba- 
 bility a rendering of a prologue by Kyd.' Professor 
 Dowden, demurring to the use of this play by Mr. John 
 Corbin as evidence for his thesis ^ that the early Hamlet 
 and Ophelia were turned to partly comic purpose, and 
 that Hamlet was substantially a man of action, puts 
 it as " far more probable that the German play is a 
 debased adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in its 
 earhest form." 3 But that thesis really does not exclude 
 that which it repugns, seeing that Dowden accepted 
 Kyd's authorship of the 1589 Hamlet, and does not 
 suggest that Shakespeare's is a wholly new construction. 
 Granting as he does the origination, it is difficult to see 
 why he should have doubted that the simpler conception 
 of the hero seen in the German play points back to Kyd. 
 It seems probable indeed that the primitive episode in 
 which the German Hamlet contrives that the two ruffians 
 commissioned to kiU him (in place of Rosencrantz and 
 Guildenstern) shall shoot each other when they mean 
 to shoot him, is a substitution for Hamlet's narrative 
 of the altered letter, which could not be staged. The 
 story of the altered letter is in Belleforest's tale of Amleth, 
 and so lay to Kyd's hand* But not only is the prologue 
 markedly in the taste of Kyd's Ghost and Revenge 
 epilogues in the Spanish Tragedy and those of Love, 
 Fortune and Death in Soliman ; the simpler action 
 
 ' Cp. Widgery. as cited, p. 105. This is the answer to Latham's point 
 that .^e German prologue suggests a German poet oi some power. 
 » The Elizabetl^an Hamlet, 1895. 3 Introd. cited, p. xiv. 
 
U THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 of Hamlet is precisely what we should expect from 
 him. 
 
 By Dowden's admission, there was a Ghost in the Kyd 
 play : it is testified to in Lodge's allusion in Wits Miserie 
 in 1596 ; and there was a play-within-the-play in that 
 piece as in the Spanish Tragedy. The play-within-the- 
 play in the First Quarto differs in diction and in character- 
 names from that in the Second ; and is clearly primitive. » 
 What kind of action, then, and what kind of psychology, 
 was Kyd likely to put in his piece ? We should expect 
 from him a delayed revenge, as in the Tragedy, but a 
 revenge delayed simply — or partly — through lack of 
 opportunity or fear of miscarriage, as in that case. Now, 
 in the Brudermord, Hamlet tells Horatio immediately 
 after the Ghost scene what he has learned, and explains 
 that he proposes to feign madness. That Hamlet had 
 so enlightened Horatio is indicated in our Hamlet 
 (IIL ii. 81) as in the First Quarto, though the scene of 
 the communication has disappeared in the process of 
 transmutation which creates the mystery of the play. 
 There is no hint of the kind of difiiculty formulated by 
 Klein and Werder — the impossibiUty of proving the 
 king's guilt by citing the statement of the Ghost. Hamlet 
 in the German play makes use of the visit of the players 
 as in our play, but he writes nothing for them : he simply 
 commands them to play the play of " King Pyrrhus," 
 whose brother pours juice of hebenon in his ears as in 
 our drama. The German Hamlet, like the English, 
 is quite satisfied with the result, and he shows no 
 paralysing melancholy. He is, in short, as much a 
 man of action as Jeron3raio, delajdng only because 
 
 I On p. 180 of his 1*1126 Essay, Mr. Widgery seems to assign the idea 
 to Shakespeare ; but on p. 204 he admits that it was in the " Ur-Hamlet." 
 
THE OLD GERMAN VERSION 45 
 
 he must, though the delay is as it were artistically 
 elaborated. 
 
 Before the advent of the players he explains to Horatio 
 (11. V.) : 
 
 By this pretended madness I hope to find opportunity to avenge 
 my father's death. But you know my father ' [i.e. the present 
 King] is always surrounded by many guards, so that I may chance 
 to miscarry, and you may find my dead body. Let it then be 
 honourably buried, for on the first opportunity I find I will try 
 to kill him. 
 
 Then, when Horatio suggests that the Ghost may be a 
 deceiver, the actors arrive ; and although Hamlet has 
 no doubts, he sets his trap by their means. It is all in 
 Kyd's way of episodically developing and prolonging an 
 action. 
 
 Equally simple has been Hamlet's action towards 
 Ophelia, in which there is neither passion nor pathos. 
 With her, he plays the pseudo-madman comically, not 
 tragically, and his " get thee to a nunnery " is a ribaldry. 
 All the same, his method in his madness arouses the 
 suspicions of the King, as in our play, only Corambus 
 and Ophelia being deluded, as in that. After the play 
 scene, as in our tragedy, Hamlet has the chance to kill 
 the praying King, and abstains, for the theological reason, 
 with this noteworthy difference, that he bethinks him 
 that to kill the praying person is to " take his sins upon 
 thee." Then he goes to the Queen, seeking an audience, 
 not sent for, and proceeds to reproach her, making refer- 
 ence to the pictures, as in our play, Corambus is hidden, 
 as there, and is killed in the same fashion ; whereupon 
 
 ■ In the First Quarto, Hamlet twice addresses the King as " father." 
 Rep. cited, pp. 50, 68 (at III, ii. too, and IV. iii, 32). The word disappears 
 in Q. 2 and Folio. 
 
46 THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 immediately the Ghost appears, with thunder and light- 
 ning, invisible and inaudible to the Queen. Hamlet 
 takes the visitation simply as a demand for the hastening 
 of his vengeance : there is. no dialogue, and no real self- 
 reproach, any more than there is any sense of real guilt 
 on the part of Jeronymo when BeUimperia denounces 
 his delay. The delay in each case is for Kyd simply 
 the necessary involution of the drama. There is no 
 intentional mystery about his Hamlet. 
 
 Laertes (Leonhardus) in the German version returns 
 to avenge his father, and is pacified by the King, as in 
 our play : the main action is all given. The King, how- 
 ever, plans the poisoned foil as in the First Quarto, 
 Laertes doubtfully assenting. There is no burial of 
 Ophelia. She has gone mad, in a fashion to entertain 
 the groundUngs. Here, perhaps, there has been a German 
 vulgarization, for Kyd had the tragic sense ; but the 
 German Phantasmo, to whom the mad 'Ophelia attaches 
 herself, reveals the basis of Osric. Hamlet has paid no 
 further heed to Ophelia ; and when at the outset of the 
 fencing scene the Queen brings the news of her suicide, 
 the fencing goes on without a pause ! Here again there 
 has probably been compression. 
 
 At the beginning of the fifth Act Hamlet is simply 
 concerned because his vengeance is still delayed, the 
 fratricide being " always stirrounded by so many people." 
 " But I swear," he adds, " that ere the sun has made 
 his journey from the East to the West, I wUl revenge 
 myself on him." Then he tells Horatio of his experiences 
 (there is no graveyard scene), and is interrupted by the 
 arrival of Phantasmo with the invitation to the fencing 
 match. Hamlet fools with Phantasmo in the fashion 
 in which in our play he fools with Polonius ; but immedi- 
 
THE OLD GERMAN VERSION 47 
 
 ately afterwards is struck with apprehension and faints 
 with terror because his nose bleeds. He accordingly 
 goes to Court with a foreboding, and the fencing takes 
 place as in our play, with the difference that the news 
 of Ophelia's suicide is interjected as aforesaid, at the 
 outset. 
 
 The changing of the foils, the wounding and confession 
 of Leotihardus, the King's proffer of the poisoned drink, 
 the Queen's interception of it, her death, and Hamlet's 
 stabbing of the King, all follow in due course. But 
 there is no glad acceptance of death on the part of Hamlet, 
 who tells Horatio that his soul is now at peace, seeing 
 that he is revenged ; and that he hopes his wound will 
 amount to nothing. In his lament for his mother, who 
 has " half earned this death through her sins," he in- 
 quires who gave her the poisoned drink, and, learning 
 that it was Phantasmo, stabs him. Then the poison 
 o'ercrows his spirit, and with his dying breath he tells 
 Horatio to carry the crown to Norway to " my cousin, 
 Duke Fortempras, so that the kingdom may not fall 
 into other hands. Oh, alas, I die." And Horatio winds 
 up with a brief discourse, ending with four lines of sen- 
 tentious verse. There has been no previous mention 
 of Fortempras, which again is doubtless a result of 
 curtailment, as the entire German play is not half the 
 length of the Spanish Tragedy. 
 
 And here we are led to face a problem that seems to 
 have been ignored by all save one hostile critic of Hamlet, 
 that, namely, of the superfluous matter in the structure 
 as it stands. The German play has the distinction of 
 eliminating a quantity of detail that in no way helps 
 the central action, reducing that to comparative simplicity 
 and unity. There is thus a presumption that the existing 
 
48 THE DOCUMENTARY PROBLEM 
 
 version is the result of successive compressions. Hamlet 
 is the longest of all the Shakespeare plays, having 3,931 
 lines to the 3,332 of the long Lear ; yet the Brudermord 
 is the shortest of the three principal German versions 
 of Shakespeare tragedies reproduced by Cohn — con- 
 siderably shorter than the Titus Andronicus, and 
 much shorter than the Romeo and Juliet. There is, 
 in fact, more removable matter in Hamlet than in 
 any other of the plays named. How then came it to 
 be present ? 
 
Ill 
 
 KYD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 r 
 § 1. Superfluous Survivals. ; < 
 
 So many admiring critics have pronounced Hamlet a 
 gravely faulty play that it is unnecessary to labour the 
 general proposition. Seldom, however, has the verdict 
 been accompanied by a careful analysis ; and that is 
 now our business. 
 
 In 1873 the German poet Benedix, in his work Die 
 Shakspereomanie, carrying on the .debate on that theme 
 which began in Germany with the tercentenary of 1864, 
 contended that Hamlet is ill-constructed in respect of 
 five episodes which have only the effect of hampering 
 the action : 
 
 (i) The despatch and return of the embassy to Norway 
 have not the slightest interest for us. But weeks or 
 months ' must pass before the embassy returns. 
 
 (2 and 3) The journey of Laertes to Paris, and the 
 sending of Reynaldo after him, are equally irrelevant. 
 The directions of Polonius to Reynaldo have no interest 
 for us, and we are left waiting for his return, which cannot 
 take place for weeks or months. 
 
 (4) The journey of Fortinbras through Denmark to 
 
 ' This seems excessive. A few weeks would suffice, 
 
 1 49 
 
50 KYD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 Poland, involving the use of ships, must take months, 
 and for his return also we are kept waiting. 
 
 (5) Hamlet's journey to England puts off the denoiiment 
 just when the action is heightening, and leaves us again 
 waiting. 
 
 " We thus see," sums up Benedix, " four persons travel away 
 out of the piece ; and not till late do they come back again. These 
 journeys are wholly superfluous episodes. They cause the "time 
 of the action to be extended many months ; and it is due to these 
 episodes, and to them alone, that Hamlet's slowness becomes such 
 a mystery. The fourth Act looks hke an interpolation introduced 
 in the previous play." ' 
 
 If we take up the position which seems impUcit in 
 Professor Bradley's method of interpretation, that Shake- 
 speare's use of the prior material is to be considered his 
 plan, such criticism as the above, in so far as it may be 
 vahd, tells for us not only against the play but against 
 the playwright ; and it is a pity that Professor Dowden 
 should have thought fit to dismiss the criticism of Benedix 
 as merely trivial.' It is not trivial ; and if Shakespeare 
 is to be justified in the traditional manner it must be 
 faced.3 Even if it be claimed that Hamlet's dismissal 
 to England is part of the original saga, and is rightly to 
 be embodied as part, of his "weird," there arises the 
 demurrer that the playwright has altered the saga by 
 arresting Hamlet's voyage and bringing him back, thus 
 merely lengthening the action without any effect on the 
 sequel. As for the episodes of the embassies, the mission 
 of Reynaldo, and the campaign of Fortinbras, they are 
 
 « Furness's Variorum Hamlet, ii. 351. 
 
 > Shakspere Primer, p. 165. 
 
 3 Professor Trench in his " Commentary " (p. 49) not only says nothing 
 of the irrelevance of the embassy in Act I. sc. ii., he comments : " And 
 now to business." 
 
SUPERFLUOUS SURVIVALS 51 
 
 visibly excrescences on the plot as they stand, seeing 
 that even the impression made by the expedition on 
 Hamlet, rousing him to a fresh vow of immediate action, 
 does not produce such action, the dismissal to England 
 supervening all the same. 
 
 But that- the fourth Act was framed as a whole by 
 Shakespeare merely to make out the five is a weak and 
 false hypothesis. The play is far too long for stage 
 purposes ; the first Act could easily have been divided 
 into two at the fourth scene, where we have a new and 
 important action ; ' and the fourth Act contains the 
 necessary plot for the fencing scene. It was, moreover, 
 certainly given in the main to Shakespeare by his original. 
 
 As regards the embassy, the mission of Reynaldo, and 
 the expedition of Fortinbras, thje case is different. These 
 are in no way necessary, as the play stands, to the final 
 action ; and, for that very reason, to suppose that 
 Shakespeare invented them is to impute to him a, kind 
 of gratuitous mismanagement impossible to him as a 
 practical plajnvright. Rather we must assume that they 
 too were given him ; and pronounce that his error lay 
 in retaining them. The Re3maldo scene is either a 
 retention of a previous scene that is practically super- 
 seded by the actual introduction of Laertes, or an attempt 
 at a genre effect such as we find so often in Chapman 
 and Jonson. The disappearance from the German play 
 of all the scenes named is a result of the recognition of 
 their superfluity either by the original English actors 
 who took the play to Germany or by some later German 
 adapters. 
 
 > See below, p. 56, as to the cessation of the numbering of Acts and 
 scenes in the Folio after 11. ii. It is generally agreed that Act IV has 
 been wrongly divided, its earlier scenes belonging to Act III. 
 
52 KYD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 That the episodes of the embassy and the expedition 
 were given by Kyd is the h3^othesis forced upon us by 
 a study of the structure of the play in comparison with 
 that of the Spanish Tragedy. That the mission of 
 Reynaldo was given by Kyd is more doubtful, though 
 we have it in the First Quarto, with the name Montano 
 instead of Reynaldo. If it be not Kyd's, it is still' pre- 
 sumably pre-Shakespearean : that is to say, it is highly , 
 unlikely that Shakespeare was the first to load the play 
 with such an irrelevance as it finally amounts to. But 
 it is just possible that in an earlier form of the play 
 Reynaldo's mission counted for something in the action, 
 even as there is reason to think that the embassy and 
 the expedition of Fortinbras had a part in an original 
 action still more multifarious than the present. 
 
 An obvious objection to such a suggestion is that for 
 any more widespread action there was simply no room, 
 unless we suppose that much of the dialogue in the 
 existing play was wholly unrepresented in the original. 
 But I do not propose to employ this rebuttal : there is 
 an alternative explanation. 
 
 § 2. Was Kyd's "Hamlet" a Double Play? 
 
 Over twenty years ago I tentatively put forward 
 the hypothesis that 'Hamlet as we have it may be a 
 condensation of a double play. The suggestion, so far 
 as I know, met with no discussion ; and I have not tiU 
 now repeated it ; but to-day, on a fresh survey of the 
 problem, it still seems to me a possible solution of the 
 evaded problem. Three circumstances should be noted 
 before it is discussed on its merits : 
 
 I. About the time of the "publication of Hamlet, 
 
WAS KYD'S "HAMLET" A DOUBLE PLAT? 53 
 
 Shakespeare was concerned in the reduction of Whetstone's 
 two-part play of Promos and Cassandra to a single 
 play. Measure for Measure. 
 
 2. There were current a number of sequel-plays ; ' 
 and there is strong reason for thinking, with Fleay, that 
 Julius C^sar as it stands is a compression of two plays 
 into one. 
 
 3. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy is a member of a double 
 play. Henslowe enters a Spanes {Spanish) cotnodye 
 donne oracoe in February 1592, and this is repeatedly 
 played on a day before Jeronymo — the old name for 
 the Spanish Tragedy. 
 
 It cannot have been the existing First Part of 
 Jeronimo, printed in 1605. The old Comedy was prob- 
 ably not new in 1592. It is the fourth play named 
 in the Diary, which at this point appears to continue 
 a 'previous record, now lost. Written before 1592, it 
 could not have had such a number of double endings 
 as the existing First Part, which has forty-four in the 
 first Act, as against only a dozen in the whole Tragedy, 
 The First Part being further in the main markedly 
 different in style from Kyd's work, Mr. Greg and Professor 
 Boas agree that it is much later (circa 1600 ?), adding 
 that it is not a comedy.* As to this I would make a 
 demur. The original play must, like this, have included 
 the death of Don Andrea, by way of preluding the 
 Tragedy, yet it was called a comedy ; and there are 
 many instances in which serious drama was in those 
 
 ' On the French stage of the period, sequences sometimes ran for as 
 many as eight days — an outcome of the old practice in " mystery-plays." 
 The fullest extension of sequence on the Tudor stage occurred in the 
 case of the Chronicle plays, which would give the cue to sequdls in general 
 drama. Chapman has thus two double-plays in the next decade. 
 
 ' Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 150, 
 
54 KYD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 days styled " comical." i Deaths did not necessarily 
 make a tragedy, provided that the hero was successful, 
 and Horatio is so in the First Part. That play, then, 
 is presumably a rewriting of the old Comedy of Don 
 Horatio, preserving its main action, and prohably parts 
 of its text ; and we are left with the presumption that 
 Kyd wrote the Comedy, whether before or after Jeronimo 
 it is impossible to guess. 
 
 On the whole it seems to have been much less success- 
 ful than the Tragedy, for while we have in Henslowe 
 several sequences of " doneoracio " and " Jeron37mo," 
 the latter is far more frequently played by itself through- 
 out 1592. It was played by Lord Strange's men, and 
 does not appear in the repertory of the Earl of Sussex's 
 company in 1593-4, or in those of the combinations of 
 the Queen's men and Sussex's, or the Admiral's men 
 and the Lord Chamberlain's, in the same years. Not 
 till 1597 does Jeronymo reappear * in the Diary ; and 
 the Comedy never reappears at all, while the other goes 
 on steadily. 
 
 Assuming that the First Part proceeds on the main 
 lines of the Comedy, and that the Comedy was Kyd's, 
 we may get some light from the former on Kyd's mode 
 of construction. It starts with an embassy from Spain 
 to Portugal to demand over-due tribute. A refusal 
 leads to the fighting in which Don Andrea is killed. Don 
 
 ' E.g. The Comical History of Alphonsus King of Arragon, by Greene, 
 printed in 1599. 
 
 » Creizenach {Gesch. des neueren Dramas, IV. i. 539) notes that " Jero- 
 nymo " is entered in Henslowe's Diary on 7th. January, 1597, as " ne " 
 (new), and, taking the reference to be to the First Part, pronounces that 
 the priority of the Tragedy [now generally admitted] is thus proved. 
 But the reference is probably to a mere reproduction of the Tragedy 
 with some new matter. " Ne " frequently means this in Henslowe. 
 If it were the First Part he would have called it so. " Jeronymo " is 
 always his name for the Tragedy. 
 
WAS KYD'S "HAMLET" A DOUBLE PLAY? 55 
 
 Balthazar, the Portuguese Prince, is hot for refusal, and 
 fights valiantly. He is primarily a counterpart of 
 Fortinbras ; and there is ground for a presumption that 
 Kyd would have given the latter more than a merely 
 negative part to play. The " post-haste and romage in 
 the land " described in the first scene of Hamlet is 
 dramatically irrelevant to the present action ; and the 
 story of the combat between the fathers of Fortinbras 
 and Hamlet ultimately serves no purpose save to prepare 
 for the succession of Fortinbras at the catastrophe. 
 Was it introduced solely for that purpose ? Kyd's 
 method, in the Ught of his practice, would have been to 
 send the ambassadors to Norway at the outset ; and 
 it is quite conceivable that the King's speech at the outset 
 of Scene ii, which we find in the Brudermord beginning 
 almost exactly as it does in our play, but without the 
 item of the embassy, was originally the beginning of 
 the piece, iiBith that item. It would in fact be properly 
 so placed, chronologically ; for the marriage has taken 
 place before the Ghost appears. There has clearly been 
 a rearrangement of scenes and speeches even as between 
 the First and Second Quartos ; and the " To be " soliloquy 
 is left ill-placed. It would come properly before the 
 Ghost scene, speaking as it does of " the bourne from 
 which no traveller returns." ' 
 
 The obvious effectiveness of the Ghost scene as an 
 introduction would explain easily its transference to 
 that position, supposing it to have been originally placed 
 later. Kyd's method indegd-jyj3uld_£resumably--haA^e 
 
 > It is even conceivable that this speech, in a pre-Shakespearean form, 
 was originally written for another play. It has no proper place in 
 Hamlet after the Ghost scene. It might have held the place of the present 
 soliloquy in I. ii. : " O that this too, -too solid flesh would melt " ; but 
 that, too, in a prior form, is in the First Quarto. 
 
56 KTD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 -been io_prdude with a GliDst prologue ; . and to develop 
 that into a dramatic scene would be in the obvious course 
 of theatrical development. ■ As it is, the preparations of 
 Fortinbras are idly made to explain " this our watch," 
 as if there would not be sentinels on the King's castle 
 at all times. Such rearrangements of play-openings 
 take place on our own stage in the case of non-literary 
 pieces. It is to be observed, too, that the scene in which 
 Hamlet sees the Ghost is hot numbered in the Folio, 
 and that after the second scene of Act II the numbering 
 of Acts and scenes ceases altogether. Apparently there 
 has been a rearrangement which upset the original 
 divisions.' As the case stands, Hamlet's scene with the 
 Ghost, which takes much longer to play than to read, 
 would make an Act in itself. 
 
 One possible clue to the original employment of the 
 Fortinbras motive is given in the German play, in the 
 scene in which, before meeting the Ghost, Hamlet teUs 
 Horatio how the King has had himself crowned while 
 Hamlet was in Germany ; " but with a show of right he 
 has made over to me the crown of Norway, and appealed 
 to the election of the States." It seems impossible to 
 account for this passage as a German invention, since 
 it in no way concerns the remaining action. It must 
 surely belong to the pre-Shakespearean play. And the 
 presumption is that on this pretext Kyd brought his 
 Hamlet and Fortinbras into some conflict, which not 
 only filled the stage for a time but prepared for the 
 bequest of the crown at the close. 
 
 As it is, the account of the old combat between the 
 
 I As there is great diversity throughout the Folio as to the numbering 
 of Acts and scenes, it cannot be specially argued from in the case of 
 Hamlet ; but probable rearrangements would seem to be the likely 
 explanation in most of the cases. 
 
IRRELEVANT SCENES 57 
 
 kings of Denmark and Norway presents a situation in 
 which the lands of the elder Fortinbras — that is to say, 
 the Kingdom of Norway ' — ^had been forfeited to the 
 elder Hamlet, King of Denmark. Such a situation would 
 provide an action lengthening the play to such an extent 
 that the death of Polonius, followed by the dispatch of 
 Hamlet to England, may have been the conclusion of 
 a " First Part," leaving the second to begin with the 
 return of Laertes to seek his revenge. And such a break 
 would give the necessary interval for the return of 
 Laertes, which is now lacking. 
 
 Such a procedure seems likely enough for Kyd. 
 Duplication seems to have been the note of his early 
 work. In the Kyd Hamlet, a " murdered Ghost " 
 figures as in the Tragedy ; a play-within-a-play figures 
 in both ; Fortinbras, as aforesaid, pairs with Balthazar ; 
 Laertes seeks to revenge his father as does Hamlet, merely 
 inverting the order of the Tragedy, where the father 
 revenges his son ; Isabella's madness and suicide are 
 duplicated in Ophelia's ; and the suicide of Ophelia in 
 the German play resembles that of Jeronymo. Beginning 
 the second play with the Laertes motive, Kyd might 
 carry on the two themes side by side with the Norwegian 
 complication and the madness of Ophelia. 
 
 § 3. Irrelevant Scenes. 
 
 But it would not be in Kyd's way to introduce Laertes 
 without letting us see him informed of his father's death ; 
 and that consideration brings us to the conundrum of 
 the mission of Reynaldo-Montano, which clearly derives 
 
 I In the old Hamblet story, the combatants are originally not kings 
 but pirate chiefs. Hamblet's , father marries the king's daughter. 
 
58 KYD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 somehow from a pre-Shakespearean source. That Shake- 
 speare invented such a purposeless episode as the present 
 merely to exhibit the character of Polonius is unthink- 
 able. On the other hand, the scene is not at all in the 
 manner of Kyd. As it stands, it suggests the intervention 
 of another hand between Kyd and Shakespeare, though 
 Shakespeare may have revised. 
 
 Such irrelevant scene-writing is the specialty of Chap- 
 man, alike in comedy and tragedy. It is abundantly 
 exhibited in Monsieur d'Olive, where the subsidiary 
 character o'ercrows the plot ; and it appears to be 
 Chapman's hand that developed ParoUes in All's Well.^ 
 As out play now stands, the only conceivable motive 
 for the Reynaldb scene is the theatrical need for comic 
 rehef after the tremendous Ghost scene. But if we 
 suppose the mission of Montano-Re3?naldo in the original 
 play to have served a purpose in the action, we may 
 guess that in that Montano played the part of a messenger 
 to Laertes with the news af his father's death. On that 
 view we might doubtfully guess that Corambis had been 
 dispatching him on the eve of the play-scene, and that 
 the news of the death, following immediately afterwards 
 and before Montano's departure, replaced the proposed 
 mission. But this is highly problematic ; and we can 
 but insist on the obvious probabiUty that the exi sting 
 scene is neither by Kyd nor by Shakespeare, save in 
 so far as Shakespeare may have recast it.» If Kyd had 
 an equivalent scene, it may have stood at the beginning 
 af Act III. 
 
 A similar problem arises as to the "To be " sohloquy. 
 
 » See Shakespeare and Chapman, pp. 264, 270, 272. 
 » There are twelve double-endings in the first nineteen lines — a very 
 high proportion for Shakespeare. 
 
IRRELEVANT SCENES 59 
 
 That, as it stands, obviously clashes with the fact of 
 the appearance of the Ghost ; and it is difficult to believe 
 that Kyd had the idea of making Hamlet contemplate 
 suicide immediately after vowing to revenge his father 
 — unless, indeed, by way of crudely shamming madness ; 
 or in a state of partial despair at non- success, hke 
 Jeronymo. 
 
 In the German play, there is no hint of such a mood ; 
 and in the place where it would have been appropriate 
 in our play— the first Act, before the revelation of the 
 Ghost — the ground is already covered by the soliloquy 
 y/hich follows the dialogue of Hamlet with the King and 
 Queen. In the First Quarto, the soliloquy — which here, 
 albeit the text is corrupt, indicates a somewhat different 
 form — follows on Corambis' account to the King and 
 Queen of Hamlet's love-melancholy upon Ophelia's 
 rejection of his suit., The Queen withdraws, and the 
 King listens to the soliloquy and the subsequent dialogue 
 with Ophelia; the "fishmonger" talk following. In 
 the Second Quarto, as in the Folio, Polonius entreats 
 the King and Queen to go, proposing another opportunity 
 for their overhearing such a dialogue ; and we have at 
 once Hamlet's " fishmonger " dialogue with him, fol- 
 lowed by the entrance and dialogue of Guildenstern 
 and Rosencrantz, and the advent of the players ; the 
 " To be " soliloquy and its sequel being relegated to the 
 third Act. AH this rearrangement cannot have been 
 the work of the piratical editor. It tells of a protracted 
 process of reconstruction. 
 
 It is an open question, then, whether the "To be" 
 soUloquy is an early item in Shakespeare's transmutation 
 of Hamlet into a pessimist ; or whether an original speech 
 has been removed by him, recast, from a more appro- 
 
60 KYD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 • 
 
 pnate place ; or whether it was originated by the hand 
 or hands that had begun to recast the play before he 
 took it up. As it stands, the versification appears to 
 be his in the first form as well as in the second, allowance 
 being made for the reporter's corruptions. 
 
 For the rest, while we may certainly ascribe a play- 
 within-the-play to Kyd, with some dialogue on the 
 functions of the players as we have it in the Brudermord,' 
 it is tolerably certain that neither the player's Pyrrhus- 
 speech nor the existing interlude is by him. The fact 
 that Hamlet in the German play, begins by recalling a 
 " Pyr-P5rr-something," and that a king Pjnrrhus is there 
 the counterpart of the Albertus of the First Quarto and 
 the Gonzago of the Second, raises speculation ; but 
 the player's speech and the interlude as they stand are 
 not Kyd's.' I have elsewhere suggested that both may 
 be the work of Chapman, and that Hamlet's compli- 
 mentary account of the play from which the Pyrrhus 
 speech was taken may thus have been a tribute to the 
 " rival poet " from Shakespeare. There is the alter- 
 native hypothesis » that, as it is certainly an imitation 
 of Marlowe's Dido, the imitation may have been made 
 by Shakespeare in order to pay a compHment to Marlowe, 
 perhaps after his death. But the existing play-scene I 
 take to be Chapman's work.3 The absolute echo of 
 Greene in the opening lines raises the question whether 
 that poet may here have collaborated with Kyd in the 
 original play, or added something to it later, as he seems 
 to have done to some extent in Arden. But if so, 
 Shakespeare or another had ejected Greene's work to 
 
 > Admittedly parts of the advice to the player in Q. i are non- 
 Shakespeajrean. 
 
 = Put by Widgery, as cited, p. i6i. 
 
 3 See Shakespeare and Chapman, p. 215 sq. 
 
IRRELEVANT SCENES 61 
 
 begin with, for the version in the First Quarto differs 
 entirely at the outset from that in the Second, the Greene 
 hnes being absent. The solution I would offer is that 
 the interlude as it stands in the First Quarto is substan- 
 tially Kyd's ; that Chapman may have inserted the 
 passage with the hne (echoed in his Widow's Tears) : 
 
 None weds the second but she kills the first, 
 
 which is a duplication of the thought in the Queen's next 
 hnes ; and that he later rewrote 'the scene for the com- 
 pany, echoing Greene's Unes after he had revised Greene 
 in All's Well, where there is a similar passage.' I do 
 not agree with Mr. Widgery that the opening Hnes in 
 the First Quarto version are beyond the power of Kyd': 
 they seem to me quite possible to the Kyd who trans- 
 lated Cornelia ; and they are really not good enough 
 for Shakespeare. 
 
 Kyd it certainly was that introduced the madness and 
 suicide of Opheha, perhaps vulgarizing the madness in 
 part as is done in the Brudermord in the episode with 
 Phantasmo. But it is his hand that gives the King's 
 Unes : 
 
 Ah, pretty wretch, this is a change indeed : 
 O June, how swiftly ruite our joys away ! 
 Content on earth was never certain bred ; 
 To-day we laugh and live, to-morrow dead. 
 
 These cannot be Shakespeare's. Neither did Shakespeare 
 write the scene between Hamlet and his mother as it 
 stands in the First Quarto. Even Professor Dowden 
 
 ' See Shakespeare and Chapman, p. 266. In Selimus, which is cer- 
 tainly in the main Greene's, there is yet another use (L 41) of the formula 
 there sampled. 
 
62 KYD'S PROBABLE CONSTRUCTION 
 
 gave up part ; and the remaining lines wholly lack 
 Shakespeare's touch, though their versification is regular. 
 As we have seen, they include a duplication of lines in 
 the Spanish Tragedy. The hues are probably Kyd's 
 down to the end of the scene. 
 
 As for the next, in which Fortinbras passes with his 
 troops, it is probable that Hamlet's solilbquy. Second 
 Quarto, which alone motives it, was already written when 
 the First Quarto was issued, but was dropped in the 
 representation as it is dropped in the Folio, for sheer 
 lack of time. But to Kyd, finally, must we attribute 
 the scene, lacking in the Second Quarto, in which Horatio 
 tells -the Queen of Hamlet's safe return — an episode 
 which here is very slightly handled, Hamlet having been 
 simply " set ashore " after having altered the King's 
 letter so as to doom the two courtiers. The scene may 
 have been curtailed ; but it is certainly non-Shake- 
 spearean, and the Une : 
 
 But murderous minds are alwa}^ jealous (jelious), 
 
 with its peculiar scansion, po;nts definitely to him. The 
 opening speech by Horatio is probably a rewriting of an 
 earlier ; it has four double-endings in seven lines, which 
 ^ Kyd would not have produced in 1589 ; but the writing 
 is not Shakespeare's. The rest is in Kyd's early manner. 
 Whether he had a graveyard sceiie it is impossible to 
 guess ; but Ben Jonson's phrase, " sporting Kyd," sug- 
 gests that he did some humourous work ; and in the 
 rest of his preserved matter we have none save the 
 Basilisco scenes in Soliman and Perseda, scenes which 
 cannot quite confidently be assigned to him. He may 
 then have introduced a graveyard scene hy way of carry- 
 
IRBELEVANT SCENES 63 
 
 ing on Hamlet's pretence of madness, which never 
 amounts to much in his hands, so far as the writing goes 
 in the First Quarto and the|gBRUDERMORD. The proba- 
 bility is that his Hamlet, hke the Hamblet of the story, 
 indulged in mad action, to eke out a pretence that was 
 inadequate in respect of the dialogue. 
 
 One thing should here be incidentally noted. The 
 association of Horatio with the Queen at the first 
 entrance of Ophelia, in the Second Quarto, is probably 
 due to the simple fact that, Polonius being dead and 
 the missioners gone, there is no other known courtier 
 to introduce. But the arrangement works ill ; for 
 Horatio thus knows of Ophelia's madness, yet tells Hamlet 
 nothing of it before the funeral scene. There was no 
 careful reconstruction here. 
 
IV 
 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 § 1. Old Action: New Psychosis. 
 
 It remains to note how Shakespeare's handling has turned 
 a Hamlet who was very little of a mystery into a Hamlet 
 who is very much one. The first step in counter-sense, 
 certainly, was taken by Kyd, when he combined the 
 revelation by the Ghost with the mock-madness of the 
 old story given him in Belleforest. In that, no Ghost 
 is needed, the murder being known to all, though the 
 traitorous brother (Fengon) persuades the people that 
 he killed Hamblet's father (Horvendile) only in defence 
 of Geruth, Hamblet's mother, who is secretly Fengon's 
 paramour. Hamblet's madness, accordingly, is assumed 
 in the manner of the old myth of Brutus and David, 
 to save his hfe, he feeling sure that otherAvise Fengon 
 will slay him. It is not primarily a matter of wild talk 
 but of demented action, thdugh Hamblet proceeds to 
 make " subtill answers " which arouse Fengon's sus- 
 picion, leading him to seek to entrap the youth by means 
 of a " fair and beautiful woman " and " certain courtiers." 
 Here we have the germs of Ophelia and Rosencrantz 
 and Guildenstern ; and in the foster-brother who puts 
 Hamblet on his guard we have a hint of Horatio. 
 
 64 
 
OLD ACTION: NEW PSYCHOSIS 65 
 
 Another attempt is made by Fengon to entrap Hamblet 
 in a talk with his mother, with a counsellor concealed 
 behind the hangings, ' and the counsellor is killed by 
 Hamblet in the manner of the play, which here also 
 follows the story. Before the slaying scene, however, 
 Kyd had previously composed the play-within-the-play, 
 which gratuitously reveals to the King Hamlet's ghost- 
 given knowledge of the murder — a fresh confusion of 
 the old plot. In that, the killing of the courtier is fol- 
 lowed by Hamblet's dispatch to England ; his counter- 
 feiting of the letters,, so as to doom the messengers, as 
 in the play ; and his manifold English adventures, which 
 the play ignores. 
 
 Whereas, then, the barbaric Hamblet shams madness 
 to save his life, Kyd's Hamlet, who shams madness after 
 supernaturally learning of a wholly secret murder, thereby 
 begins at once to endanger his. Apprised by the Ghost, 
 he 'had no occasion to alter his behaviour: it was his 
 business to behave as before, the King having thus far 
 no designs On him. And the pl^y-within-the-play is 
 another supererogation. Kyd loved to complicate his 
 motives thus. In Arden he introduces items of sacri- 
 .. lege and avarice which are dramatically needless, being 
 motived only by the academic principle that he who 
 suffers must have sinned ; and he invents two wronged 
 men, one of whom appears merely to curse, doing nothing 
 further in the action. By thus confusiilg the original 
 Hamlet-plot through his favourite Ghost-motive, Kyd, 
 led to retain the mock-madness by his success with the 
 semi-madness of Jeronymo, prepared the divagation 
 
 " Under straw in Saxo Grammaticus ; under a quilt in Belleforest. 
 The hangings appear in the Enghsh translation, of which only a copy 
 dated 1608 exists. 
 
 5 
 
66 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 which Shakespeare so wonderfully develops. The Ghost- 
 warned Hamlet who shams madness to no purpose grows 
 naturally into the Hamlet who unintelligibly swerves 
 from revenge. 
 
 That Kyd's inconsistencies of construction thus inhere 
 in Shakespeare's play is a fact which criticism must 
 sooner or later face. Lowell, rightly arguing that " if 
 you deprive Hamlet of reason, there is no truly tragic 
 motive left," confuses his position by accepting the 
 absurd pronouncement of early Victorian " experts " 
 that Hamlet really exhibits in perfection the symptoms 
 of madness, and explains that "if such a man assumed 
 madness, he would play his part perfectly." Then he 
 remembers that the assumed madness is " one of the 
 few points in which Shakespeare keeps close to the old 
 story," and accordingly declares him to have done so 
 with " unerring judgment." Hamlet, that is to say, 
 shams madness merely because he does not know what 
 else to do: "the scheme of simulated insanity is pre- 
 cisely the one he would have been likely to hit upon, 
 because it enabled him to follow his own bent, and to 
 drift with an apparent purpose," and so forth. Then 
 we are to believe that Shakespeare saw in the expedient 
 of the barbarian of the story, a man of action abso- 
 lutely, " precisely " what would be done by a man of 
 exactly opposite structure. To such shifts does idolatry 
 conduct us. 
 
 We shall ultimately do much more for Shakespeare's 
 credit by honestly acknowledging that his Hamlet pre- 
 tends madness because Kyd's Hamlet did so before ; 
 and that in Kyd's Hamlet the device is put out of joint, 
 first by Kyd's own further device of the Ghost's reve- 
 lation, which cancel? the prudential motive of the saga 
 
OLD ACTION: NEW PSYCHOSIS 67 
 
 Hamblet, making Hamlet on the contrary at once arouse 
 the King's suspicion ; and secondly by the device of the 
 play^within-the-play, which is anything but a madman's 
 plan, though Jeronymo gave the precedent. In a word, 
 Hamlet's mock-madness is now ill-motived. Lowell, in 
 his best " high priori " manner, writes that " Voltaire 
 complains that he [Hamlet] goes mad without any suffi- 
 cient object or result. Perfectly true, and precisely 
 what was most natural for him to do, and, accordingly, 
 precisely what Shakespeare meant that he should do." 
 What Voltaire really said ' was that " pour ne pas donner 
 d'ombrages a Gertrude, il contrefait le fou pendant toute 
 la pi6ce " — a jest which incidentally suggests a better 
 -motive for Hamlet's mock-madness than 4ny given by 
 the idolaters. As criticism, Voltaire's fling is perfectly 
 just ; and, like some of his other flings it is to be met, 
 not by brazening things out, but by granting that Shake- 
 speare did at times make himself answerable for other 
 men's artistic sins.a He did so when, essaying his immortal 
 task of transmuting the crude play of Kyd into a dramatic 
 marvel, he retained all the archaic machinery while 
 transfiguring all the characters. A marvel his tour de 
 force remains ; but no jugglery can do away with the 
 fact that the construction is incoherent, and the hero 
 perforce an enigma, the snare of idolatrous criticism. 
 
 It is of no avail to plead, as Mr. Widgery so eloquently 
 does after Werder, that Hamlet in the play has an in- 
 superably difficult task, seeing that he cannot prove the 
 King's guilt by citing the testimony of a ghost. Why 
 
 ' Lettre et messieurs de I'aeaddmie franfaise, 13 auguste, 1776. 
 
 » E.g. the scene between Henry and Catherine in Henry V, which 
 Voltaire contemned. Most of his attacks on Shakespeare turn on real 
 blemishes, and they are bracketed with very high praise. The sin of 
 his criticism is its want of final balance. 
 
68 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 did he not at the outset tell both Horatio and Marcellus 
 what the Ghost had told him ? They would have 
 believed, and been believed, readily enough. Given a 
 Ghost who is credited by the audience, why should he 
 not be credited by the characters ? When, again, the 
 King rushes away in confusion from the play, it is surely 
 idle to argue, as does Mr. Widgery, that' Hamlet has 
 failed in his object because the King does not speak. Is 
 not his confusion a sufficient proof of his guilt ? To 
 say that the courtiers do not so recognize it is to argue 
 in a circle. Shakespeare would never have planned a 
 play on such lines and with such a thesis, any more than 
 he would have invented the prayer-scene and the motive 
 that there withholds Hamlet. 
 
 All these devices, once more, are but the machinery of 
 Kyd, adapting a barbaric story in which the barbarian 
 must delay his revenge because he is only one against a 
 powerful chief, whom the people heartily support, believ- 
 ing him to have saved the youth's mother from her 
 husband's violence. It all goes back, possibly, to a sun 
 myth ; but the barbaric tale is fairly coherent. Kyd 
 needed a tale of delayed vengeance, and for him, though 
 he makes Hamlet indirectly accuse himself in the closet- 
 scene with the Ghost,! there was no more mjrstery in 
 Hamlet's delay than there was in Jeronymo's, or in the 
 halting and hindered movement of the action in Arden, 
 with the baffled attempts, and the two reconciliiations 
 of the doomed man with his enemy. Kyd's tragedy- 
 method was not psychological or didactic, with all his 
 devotion to Seneca : it is one of protracted and long- 
 
 I In Q. I the dialogue is cjearly in part Kyd's ; and in the Brudermord 
 we have the same deprecation of the supposed wrath of the Ghost at 
 delay. 
 
OLD ACTION: NEW PSYCHOSIS 69 
 
 baffled action ; and he of necessity ekes out the time 
 with incidents and expedients, especially where, as in 
 Hamlet, he has a plat full of delays given to his hand. 
 In the closet-scene in the First Quarto, the Ghost says 
 nothing of an " almost blunted purpose " ; that is 
 Shakespeare's modification. Kyd has no such conception. 
 His Hamlet says : 
 
 Do you not come your tardy, son to chide. 
 That I thus long have let revenge shp by ? 
 
 but the Ghost repHes only : 
 
 Hamlet, I once again appear to thee 
 
 To put thee in remembrance of my death. 
 
 Do not neglect, nor long time put it ofi, — 
 
 going on to urge him to -comfort his mother. This is 
 wholly in the spirit of the Spanish Tragedy, where the 
 partly unavoidable and partly artificial delay of revenge 
 is the great preoccupation of the distracted Jeronymo, 
 who delays in order to obtain a grand finale of slaughter 
 by means of his play-within-the-play. He begins plotting 
 immediately after the murder : 
 
 Meanwhile, good Isabella, cease thy plaints. 
 Or at the least dissemble them awhile : 
 So shall we sooner find the practice out. 
 
 II. V. 113. 
 
 When he gets Bellimperia's letter he is suspicious : 
 
 Hieronimo, beware; — thou art betrayed. 
 And to entrap thy Ufe this train is laid. 
 Advise thee, therefore, be not credulous. . . 
 Dear was the life of my beloved son. 
 
70 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 And of his death behoves me be reveng'd : 
 Then hazard not thine own, Hieronimo, 
 But live t' effect thy resolution. 
 I therefore will by circumstances try 
 What I can gather to confirm this writ. . . . 
 triviqti . . ,ylj,:, . III. ii. 37-49. 
 
 He contemplates , suicide and refrains : 
 
 For if I hang or kill myself, let's know 
 Who will revenge Horatio's murther then ? 
 
 He thinks of. appealing to the King, but decides to " go 
 by, go by." He 
 
 will revenge his [Horatio's] death, 
 But how ? not as the vulgar wits of men. 
 With open but inevitable ills. 
 As by a secret yet a certain mean. 
 Which under friendship will be cloakM best. 
 Wise men will take their opportunity 
 Closely and safely, fitting things to time ; 
 But in extremes advantage hath no time ; 
 And therefore all times fit not for revenge. 
 Thus therefore will I rest me in unrest. 
 Dissembling quiet in inquietness — 
 
 III. xiii. 
 
 and so on. Revenge, awaked from sleep by Andrea's 
 ghost (an item which has been mistakenly ridiculed), 
 replies : 
 
 , Sufficeth thee that poor Hieronimo 
 Cannot forget his son Horatio, 
 Nor dies Revenge although he sleep awhile. 
 
 III. xii. 
 
 Bellimperia bitterly reproaches Hieronimo for his delay, 
 but he reassures her and plots on ; Isabella, committing 
 
THE INFUSION OF PESSIMISM 71 
 
 suicide, denounces his negligence ; but he is all the while 
 at work. For Kyd, Hamlet was substantially in the 
 same case ; and in making the prince excuse himself 
 to the Ghost he is not implying that Hamlet has been 
 really ■ remiss. That is Shakespeare's development of 
 the situation. Professor Bradley subtly argues ' that 
 when the Ghost says " Remember me " he is^ouching, 
 not accidentally, on a faculty of forgetting known to 
 him in Hamlet ; but in all probability the touch came 
 from Kyd. When Jeronymo says (III. vi. 103) : 
 
 This makes me to remember thee, my son, 
 
 he does not mean that he had ever forgotten him. 
 
 § 2. The^ Infusion of Pessimism. 
 
 The vital dramatic difference, however, between 
 Jeronymo and Hamlet was that while the audience saw 
 and followed Jeronymo's purpose, there was no very 
 clear purpose in Kyd's Hamlet to follow. The question, 
 put to this day by the unsophisticated, " Why doesn't 
 he kill his uncle and hve happy ever afterwards with 
 Opheha ? " was forestalled by Kyd only in so far as he 
 offered the explanation given in the Brudermord, that 
 the King is always surrounded by his guards. That 
 explanation, given him in the old story, probably seemed 
 to him sufficient. But he in effect partly qualified it 
 when, multiplying his episodes after his manner, he 
 staged the play-scene, which put the King on his guard, 
 and then the prayer-scene. If meantime, as we have 
 surmised, there had been going on an action in connection 
 
 1 Shakespearean Tragedy, p. laS. 
 
72 SHAKESPEAEE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 with Fortinbras, Elizabethan audiences would be apt 
 to be impatient. 
 
 True, once more, there has been no great delay in all : 
 indeed, save for the indefinite interval between Acts I 
 and II there has been none at all ! The play-scene is 
 only a day after the arrival of the players ; and on that 
 night the action rushes on to the point of the decreeing 
 of Hamlet's voyage to England. After being convinced 
 by the King's behaviour, Hamlet has had but one chance 
 to slay him ; and to stress that one recoil as the critics 
 do is to pay a remarkable tribute to the " time-devouring " 
 power of Shakespeare's dramatization. Hamlet, when all 
 is said, is commoifly condemned on the strength of a 
 single recoil from assassination, and that under circum- 
 stances in which, religion apart, any high-minded man 
 would have recoiled. To stab the King in the back 
 while he knelt praying would have been truly a precious 
 proof of " resolution " and " faculty for action." But 
 the fact remains that, as Shakespeare's added soliloquies 
 imply, the audiences, disregarding, under the dramatic 
 spell, all questions of real time, fidgeted, without the 
 modern critics to help them. They would have scouted 
 the suggestion that a ghost was not a good witness ; 
 after the convincing play-scene they would grow sus- 
 picious ; and after the prayer-scene many must have 
 been moved to sarcasm, though doubtless Kyd's edifying 
 theology impressed some. The broad fact is that, time 
 apart, Hamlet as it were wilfuUy delays in our play, 
 while Jeronyrno is constantly planning his comprehensive 
 vengeance, and loses no clear opportunity, though he 
 too is slow, to the extent of angering his wife and 
 Bellimperia. * 
 
 Now, Shakespeare's handling of the play is above all 
 
THE INFUSION OF PESSIMISM 73 
 
 things a masterly effort to hint a psychological solution 
 of the acted mystery, while actually heightening it by 
 the self-accusing soliloquies. It is he who makes Hamlet 
 keep the Ghost's tale secret : in the Brudermord it is 
 at once revealed to Horatio ; and in our play we learn 
 at the play-scene that it had been revealed in the interim. 
 It is he who stresses the Queen's guilt, here reverting 
 to the original story as against the treatment indicated 
 in the Brudermord, where the King makes no charge 
 against his wife, though Hamlet speaks doubtfully of 
 her at the close. In the First Quarto we have the Ghost's 
 speech on the battlements from the text given in the 
 Second ; but in the closet- scene the Queen protests her 
 absolute ignorance of the murder, and pledges herself, 
 in lines that are obviously Kyd's, to assist Hamlet against 
 the King. Here Kyd follows the Belief orest story, in which 
 Geruth protests her innocence of the murder, sapng 
 nothing of other matters. In the Second Quarto these 
 passages disappear, and though Hamlet does not acci;ise 
 the Queen of complicity in the murder, his tone is that 
 of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his 
 mother's degradation. 
 
 This, if there be any, is the new ground note of Shake- 
 speare's Hamlet. The guilt of -a mother is" an almost 
 intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained 
 and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or 
 ra,ther a hint of one. The childUke subserviency of poor 
 'Ophelia tells to the same effect.' Utter sickness of heart, 
 revealing itself in pessimism, is again and again drama- 
 tically obtruded as if to set us feeling that for a heart 
 so crushed revenge is no remedy.^ And this implicit 
 
 ' Professor Bradley's gallant and brilliant defence of the ill-starred 
 child does not alter her relation to the action. 
 > Never that it is forbidden by religion. 
 
74 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 pessimism is Shakespeare's personal contribution : his 
 verdict on the situation set out by the play.' But the 
 fact remains that he has not merely not been exphcit — 
 as he could not be — ^he has left standing matter which 
 conflicts with the solution of pessimism ; he has exhibited 
 Hamlet as roused to determination by the spectacle of 
 the march of Fortinbras and declaring that he knows 
 not why he has refrained ; and he has further exhibited 
 him acting with abundant vigour in the sea episode, as 
 he had previously done in planning the Court play. These 
 displays of vigour, like the killing of Polonius, do not 
 consist with a pessimism so laming as to preclude revenge. 
 And the ultimate fact is that Shakespeare could not make 
 a psychologically or otherwise consistent play out of 
 a plot which retained a strictly barbaric action while 
 the hero was transformed into a supersubtle EHzabethan. 
 
 § 3. The Upshot. 
 
 If this be pronounced aspersive criticism, I have but 
 to say that for me the play becomes only more wonderful 
 
 > Over thirty years ago I put the thesis of Hamlet's pessimism in an 
 essay on The Upshot of Hamlet (1885). It has since been independently 
 put by several German writers, who however leave the issue at that. 
 See Hermann Tiirck's Hamlet ein Genie, 1888, and Das psychologische 
 Problem in der Hamiet-Tragodie, i8go ; also his polemic with Kuno 
 Fischer over their respective originalities : Die Uebereinstimmung von 
 Kuno Fischer's und Hermann tiirck's Hamtei-ErklSrung. 1894 ; land 
 Kuno Fischer's kritische Methode, 1894. Both writers, as it happened, 
 were repeating a British thesis. But Tflrck has the phrase : " Hamlet 
 is the tragedy of idealism " (Hamlet ein Genie, p. 17), partly endorsed 
 by Professor Bradley, p. 113. On the other hand, my proposition that 
 Shakespeare imports a temporary pessimism of his own into Hamlet's 
 situation was partly anticipated by RumeUn in his Shakespearestudien, 
 1866, p. 96 : " So war auch in Shakespeare die Hamlet-natur nur ein 
 Theil seines Gemiithslebens." But he again was anticipated a century 
 earlier by a British critic who far outwent his age in psychological pene- 
 tration ; " For what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet or Othello, 
 but different modifications of Shakespeare's thought ? " — Maurice 
 Morgann, Essay on Falstaff, 1777, p. 16. 
 
THE UPSHOT 75 
 
 when the manner of its evolution is realized. What 
 Shakespeare could not do, no man could have done. 
 What he did remains a miracle of dramatic imagination. 
 In the place of one of the early and crude creations of 
 Kyd, vigorous without verisimilitude," outside of refined 
 sympathy, he has projected a personality which from 
 the first hne sets all our sjonpathies in a quick vibration, 
 and so holds our minds and hearts that even the hero's 
 cruelties cannot alienate them. The triumph is achieved 
 by sheer intensity of presentment, absolute lifeUkeness 
 of utterance, a thrilling and convincing Tightness of 
 phrase, and of feeling where wrong feeling is not part 
 of the irremovable material. He who will may argue 
 that Shakespeare should not have accepted intractable 
 material. Let him tell us whether he would rather have 
 been without Hamlet, and whether he cannot see that 
 the practical compulsion to handle or retain intractable 
 material underlies half a dozen of the Shakespeare plays 
 as well as Hamlet, — ^Timon, Pericles, Cymbeline, 
 Henry V, the Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, 
 All's Well, to say nothing of other comedies. Till 
 that is seen, Shakespeare is not revealed. 
 
 He was, as usual, adapting an old play for his company, 
 in the way of business. Its main features he had to 
 preserve, else the public would miss what they looked 
 for. Hamlet must retain its Ghost and its mock-mad- 
 ness, no less than the real madness of OpheHa. To satisfy 
 the poet as well as his cultured patrons, the Prince must 
 be made truly princely ; and every stroke to that end 
 was an element of success. But the revenge of the refined 
 
 " This, of course, does not apply to Arden, which is later, and psycho- 
 logically very much superior to the Tragedy, though little better in point of 
 verse technique. 
 
76 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 Hamlet irnist be delayed as was that of the barbaric 
 Hamblet, without the original reason ; the old machinery 
 must be retained, down to the prayer-scene ; and so 
 there emerged a puzzling and unexplained character in 
 place of one analogous to the rudely and clearly outlined 
 Jeronymo, never puzzling to anybody save the characters 
 alongside him, who are not in his counsels as the 
 audience are. 
 
 Evolving a Hamlet of the h;ighest mental lucidity, 
 Shakespeare himself at one point accepted the inference 
 of an " almost blunted purpose," a will that will not act 
 when it shotild ; and by a score of subtle strokes he 
 tacitly suggests how a man may feel the barrenness of 
 a revenge to which he is vowed. But this is only half 
 of his composite Hamlet : the other is the presentment 
 of a man who can act with lightning speed and force, 
 and will " make a ghost of him that lets me." Of all 
 the explanatory formulas, that of Mackenzie, so Uttle 
 discussed,' is the best.' He posits an excess of sensibiUty 
 which yields uncertain and divergent action — a spirit 
 which recoils as uncontrollably from straightforward 
 killing as from another's villany or unworthiness. With 
 a difference. Professor Bradley pronounces that Hamlet 
 " tries to find reasons for his delay in pursuing a design 
 which excites his aversion."^ Such a conception may 
 as easily be read into Shakespeare as that of psychic 
 shock, or pessimism arising out o^ personal disillusion- 
 ment. But it also is inadequate to the data. Hamlet 
 thrusts through the arras without hesitation, and shows 
 no horror at his deed. He has no scruple about sending 
 
 > The essay on Hamlet is not included in the collected edition of 
 Mackenzie's Miscellanequs Works, 3 vols. 1820. 
 » Shakespearean Tragedy, p 226. 
 
THE UPSHOT 77 
 
 his schoolfellows to their death on the bare surmise that 
 they knew the contents of the King's dispatch. A " sensi- 
 biUty " which yields at once these results and an insuper- 
 able recoil from vengeance on a villain is not finally 
 thinkable. In the words of Salvini, " A man like Hamlet 
 has never existed, nor could exist."' This, as we must 
 admit in the fconclusion, is not really an ultimate indict- 
 ment of Shakespeare : but it is a necessary estoppel of 
 certain theorists who turn an aesthetic suggestion into 
 a false historic theorem. 
 
 When, on the other hand, we can see so clearly how 
 Shakespeare was artistically committed to a series of 
 barbaric actions which had nothing to do with either 
 sensibility or pessimism, but which he had yet to assign 
 to a prince in whom sensibility and pessimism were 
 artisflcally developed by himself for the very purpose 
 of dramatic verisimilitude, it is idle to follow the dogged 
 defensive tactics of Werder, who was determined to find 
 a consistent whole where such does not exist. 
 
 The whole of Werder's polemic, as we saw, is a defiance 
 of the two vital soUloquies (II. end ; IV. iv.) in which 
 Hamlet impeaches himself. To call these, as Werder 
 does, " protests against the circumstances," is to do 
 sheer violence to the text. Hebler was able to confute 
 the thesis on the sole basis of the first,' convicting Werder 
 of grotesque misconstructions— partly due, it may be, 
 to the translation he followed.3 But Hebler's own 
 solution was only less unsatisfying. Insisting on the 
 subjective solution, he formulated a " defective com- 
 
 I l^rt. " Salvini on Shakespeare," by Helen Zimmern, Gentleman's 
 Magazine, February 1884. 
 
 " Art. Die Hamletfrage, in Im neuen Reich, 1875, No. 41. 
 
 3 Cp. The Heart of Hamlet's Mystery, note by translator, p. 44. 
 
78 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 mingling of blood and judgment," ' resulting not in a 
 defect of will but in a defect of efficiency — " not a Will-not 
 but a Can-not," " grounded in his [Hamlet's] personality." » 
 This formula in turn merely evades the many instances 
 in which Hamlet can act with instant and decisive force ; 
 and we are left with nothing better than the nugatory 
 notion that a man cannot do what he does not do. The 
 problem of the play is merely baulked : we get an argu- 
 ment in a circle. 
 
 The German battle-roydl of the seventh and eighth 
 decades of last century is in fact but a protracted process 
 of thesis-seeking, in which every device is tried to explain 
 the problem without looking to its genesis. RiimeUn, 
 who came nearest doing so, was biassed by his purpose 
 of combating " Shakespeare-Mania " and convicting the 
 idol of clay feet, or at least clay toes. Rightly turning 
 back to the old saga for the starting-point, he wrongly 
 reasoned that all the difference between that and the 
 final play is of Shakespeare's making ; never inquiring 
 how fresh foundations may have been laid in the inter- 
 mediate play, though he actually refers 3 to the First 
 Quarto, and might by comparing that with the Bruder- 
 MORD, in the hght of the Kydrhypothesis, have seen 
 the necessity of reckoning with other determinants than 
 the saga and Shakespeare. Rightly enough he pro- 
 nounces the play to have beeri often retouched ; and he 
 makes the very intelligent suggestion that the duphcation 
 of Hamlet's fooling with Polonius and Osric cannot have 
 been original, but must have come of a readjustment, 
 what was intended as a substitution of effects being by 
 oversight allowed to result in a repetition. But he sees 
 
 • Art. cited, p. 562. > Id. p. 571. 
 
 3 Shakespearestudien, 1866, p. 90. 
 
THE UPSHOT 79 
 
 nothing of the pre-Shakespearean construction, and so 
 gets by a leap to the theory of "an unsatisfactory inter- 
 weaving of an episodical, modern-subjective "element in 
 the old-northern saga " ' (a theory which, he avows, 
 vill not untie all the knots), laying the whole procedure 
 at Shakespeare's door. 
 
 Hebler countered Riimehn by a tu quoque ! He summed 
 up that in Riimehn's view Shakespeare sought (i) prim- 
 arily and ostensibly to represent the saga-Hamlet and 
 not a loiterer {Saiimer) ; (2) but, as suited him best, at 
 the same time a creature of his own spiritual cast ; and 
 (3) was thus compelled to make him a loiterer, albeit 
 one who reproached himself for being so. To which 
 Hebler retorted that RiimeUn himself had gone through 
 the experience he ascribes to Shakespeare : that RiimeUn 
 began (i) with the saga-Hamlet, but found himself (2) 
 caught by the idea of Shakespeare's introduction of his 
 own personality into the matter ; and so was led to the 
 third view — of Hamlet as a self-reproaching loiterer — 
 by way of modifjang positions first and second.* How- 
 ever that may be, Riimelin ends in sheer arbitrariness 
 when he pronounces that Shakespeare's Hamlet differs 
 from the barbarian in that " he must end tragically, 
 like all the figures in which the poet has poured perilous 
 stuff (Krankheitstoff) out of his own mental hfe— -Uke 
 Werther, Clavigo, Faust, Eduard." 3 As we know, 
 Shakespeare's Hamlet simply had to end tragically 
 because the play was a tragedy to begin with. 
 
 All the while, Riimelin was at one point nearer the 
 true line of criticism than Hebler, inasmuch as, in 
 Hebler's words, he substituted a thesis of " Faults of 
 
 ' Id. p. 87. » Aufsaine, as cited, pp. 214^15. 
 
 3 Shakespearestudien, p. 96. 
 
80 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 the Poet " for that of " Faidts of the Hero." It was 
 much sounder than Werder's " Faults of the Situation " ; 
 and only needed revision and development to 3deld a 
 " positive " critical method. But among them the 
 German combatants reached no sohd ground ; and 
 Riimelin, who became unfairly identified with the " Anti- 
 Shakespeare-maniacs " who followed, is not even named 
 by Max J. Wolff in his outline-list of German critical 
 pronouncements on Hamlet. 
 
 That writer in turn, who ranks as the leading Shakespeare 
 critic in latter-day Germany, carries the geocentric prin- 
 ciple of interpretation to a height of fantastic complexity 
 which it is to be hoped will be the signal for a resort, 
 even in Germany, to positive methods. 
 
 Rejecting Goethe's formula as the Inost unfit of all, 
 and ignoring Werder's, he combines a whole series of 
 subjective solutions with a new one to the effect that 
 Hamlet is the representative of Truth against a world 
 of falsities, which at the same time he cancels by the 
 added formula that Hamlet " will not " act. His exposi- 
 tion works out, in brief, thus : 
 
 1. "At one stroke the roles of the tragedy are dis- 
 tributed " (in the " seems, madam," speech) : " Here 
 Hamlet as representative of Truth ; on the other side 
 the court, the world of show." Hamlet stands alone 
 with Horatio and the despised players. " To them, 
 the professional cultivators of show. Truth must take 
 her flight, for all o^hei milieus are closed to her." " After 
 your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their 
 ill report while you hve " ; — because " then the comedians 
 are the voice of Truth " (!). 
 
 2. Hamlet sets himself to be the reformer of the time 
 — to put right the disjointed world. 
 
THE UPSHOT 81 
 
 3. " But this is not to be accomplished by man, or by 
 Hamlet, but without him, or against him, only through 
 the indwelUng moral power of Truth." 
 
 3d!. A God is needed to fulfil the mission. 
 
 4. A great tragic irony lies in the exposition. All 
 human foresight is fruitless. 
 
 5. The Prince reacts to every new impression. 
 [Mackenzie's formula, unconsciously adopted.] 
 
 6. He is a dilettant. [What else could a prince be ?] 
 
 7. Having had no discipline of duty, therefore, he 
 is " himself an enigma," and therefore he refuses 
 when for the first time duty enters his hfe with 
 her behests. 
 
 i«. Yet the moral ideal within him makes him worthy 
 to be the champion of Truth, however many human 
 failings he may also have. 
 
 8. Pessimism, however, had already overwhelmed him. 
 
 9. So his uncle's crime does not appear to him as 
 one man's guilt. All mankind is responsible 
 for it. 
 
 9«. " His pessimism shuts out for him the knowledge 
 that in the person of the crowned murderer he 
 can and should tear up the root of the evil. He 
 lets pass the moment indicated (gewiesenen) by 
 Fate. [Which ?] . . . he neglects doing what he 
 should and can, to hang on to it plans for world- 
 betterment which overpass human powers." [Where 
 does he so plan ?] 
 
 10. " Hamlet will not avenge his private wrong. As 
 to this hfi is quite clear from the start." He shows 
 it by the entry in his tables (I).^ 
 
 8a. " This appeals to his mood, as consummating his 
 
 » This verdict is also given by Professor Trench. 
 6 
 
82 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 pessimism, which under all outward show has 
 
 scented corruption." 
 lOfl. " Because he will not act, because he will not 
 
 undertake the plaiijly prescribed deed laid upon 
 
 him, he will tell his friends nothing." [How then 
 
 comes he to tell Horatio later ?] 
 lob. " Hamlet relates himself quite passively to his 
 
 task. He cannot reform the world ; he will not 
 
 punish his uncle." ' > 
 These, I think, are all the motives and explanations, 
 put in their sequence. It seems impossible to put more 
 " points in Hamlet's soul " : the geocentric method has 
 been diligently exhausted. And it is all to no purpose. 
 Formulas which are in conflict cannot be reduced to unity 
 by imposing either a general formula of Truth-seeking 
 which would equally apply to Lear and Othello, and 
 is therefore neutral to all, or an arbitrary " wiU not " 
 formula which is never given save by reducing to the 
 form of an accusation the perplexity set up by the delay 
 in the action. The delay was there from the start, as 
 the dramatic datum of an original action in which there 
 was no thought of Truth versus Show, or World-Better- 
 ment, or overruling Providence, or over-susceptibiHty, 
 or pessimism, or the fataUty of dilettantism in princes, 
 or the refusal of the hero to act. The motive of the 
 original story is to follow the hero's way of acting. This 
 remains the motive of Kyd, who, however, by altering 
 the basis fatally confuses the movement. Shakespeare, 
 by immensely heightening the character, puts it in still 
 further irrelation to the action, giving us one great satis- 
 faction in forgoing another. 
 
 I Shakespeare, der Dichter unA sein Werk, von Max J. Wolfi, 3te Aufl, 
 1913, ii. 120-7, 
 
THE UPSHOT 83 
 
 It is true that he indicates over-sensibility, and a 
 pessimism which makes action seem vain ; but he also 
 presents other and contrary things, and he could not 
 indicate a " will not " which would cancel all the rest 
 of the play, or a " plan " of reforining the world which 
 would explode it. He can be clearly seen inserting 
 soliloquies which absolutely posit the' need for an explan- 
 ation. That at the end of the third Act is a seH-impeach- 
 ment by Hamlet which avows as much ; and it is clearly 
 an addition made without close heed to what goes before ; 
 for Hamlet talks of arranging for a play as if he had not 
 already arranged one with the players — unless that 
 previous arrangement is itself an addition which takes 
 no note of the soliloquy. ^ So with the sohloquy at the 
 passage of the army of Fortinbras, an expedient of the 
 same kind, designed to satisfy or pacify the auditors 
 who wanted to know why Hamlet did not commit the 
 right murder instead of the wrong one. Of course it 
 could not satisfy ; and, inserted as it is in the Second 
 Quarto, we find it dropped from the Folio, evidently as 
 having been dropped from the prompter's copies. Written 
 
 I Professor Trench confidently argues (pp. 109, iii, 122, 124, 160, 
 225, note) that after arranging to supply the players with a new speech 
 for The Murder of Gomago Hamlet " resolves to substitute for that an 
 original play of Ms own composition." This will not stand. The play 
 finally is " The Murder of Gonzago " (III. ii. 249, 273, 275) ; and Hamlet 
 instructs the player to " speak the speech . * . as I pronounced it to 
 you." In the First Quarto the players are " the Duke and Dutchesse," 
 not " King and Queen " as in the Second and in the Folio. To say that 
 in the actual play-scene he " changes the name of his Mousetrap to that 
 of a play that was before his mind on the previous day " is quite un- 
 warrantable ; the " name " is a jesting one spontaneously thrown out, 
 not the real title of a new piece. Not that we are necesSarily to suppose 
 that there was such a play, though there may have been [Albertus is 
 the Duke's name in Q. i : and " Lucianus, nephew to the King," seems 
 to mean " to the King of Guyana," which there takes the place of 
 " Vienna "] ; but that the thesis of Hamlet's inability to keep to any ' 
 plan is gratuitous. The dramatist is the factor. 
 
&4 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 in Shakespeare's yiyicJest verse, it dojBS but aggravate 
 the perplexity by assujniiig that Hamlet has much need 
 to excuse himself, and avowing that he cannot. Instead 
 of suggesting or sanctioning a theory of either subjective 
 or objective hindrance, it negates both. It is almost 
 as if the dramatist, anticipating Lowell and Professo;r 
 Trench and thp rest, were censuring his own adopted 
 creature. But that, of course, is not Shakespear^^'s way. 
 He has simply decided to accept inexplicable delay as 
 the formula of a play w:luch reached him with that 
 character apparently stamped upon it. 
 
 For it is idle to pretend that Shakespeare was deeply 
 concerned tp secure perfect artistic consistency. As an 
 adaptor and reconstructor he worked wonders ; but 
 he had to let pass many incongruities, in many plays. 
 To those already noted we may add the retention of the 
 Dumb Show, in which, before the play, the murder is 
 enacted even as it is after the speeches. As it is the 
 action and not the speaking that upsets the King, he 
 ought either to have been upset by the Dumb Show or 
 to have collected himself for the repetition.' Shakespeare 
 at this point merely let stand what he found, as he let 
 stand the episodes which we have seen to be " out of 
 the frame." Whether or not by reason of the P^^Y being 
 originaUy in two parts, it is fuU of fortuitoi^s retardations ; 
 and it is not surprising that in a recent revival the actor- 
 manager dropped such matters as the advice to the players 
 and Polonies' aidvicie to Laertes ; even as the Reynajdo 
 scene had been dropped long before. 
 
 It is possible, indeed, to exaggerate the incpngrpiti^ 
 of the piece. Though Hamlet's age is certainly a conun- 
 drum. Professor Bradley has perhaps made needless 
 I This was ,co9m«p.te4 on ^ century ago. 
 
THE UPSHOT 85 
 
 difficulty I as to Hamlet's proposed return to Wittenberg. 
 " Going back to school ifi Wittenberg" does not liecessarily 
 mean that he has just come thence ; and his reception 
 of Horatio and MarCellus does not imply, as Professor 
 Bradley says, that he and Horatio are supposed to have 
 left Wittenberg " for Elsinore less than two months ago." 
 Hamlet may have left it years before ; and his " Horatio, 
 or I do forget nTyself," siiggests long severance. As 
 Professor Trench remarks, " the city " may very well 
 be Copenhagen, where Hamlet may have spent time 
 after leaving Wittenberg. But there is real incongruity 
 in his telling Horatio (HI. ii.) how he has prized him 
 " since niy dear soul was mistress of her choice," after 
 greeting him with " Horatio-^or I do forget myself." 
 Even Professor Trench, who assures us that Shakespeare 
 is " regular and orderly in his work with the r^uiarity 
 and order of a classical genius," ' arid warns us that 
 when we fail to understand it may be our own fault,3 
 also declares 4 that " when we fail to understand him 
 [Shakespeare], it certainly is often his own fault." 
 
 It is most true, if we must say " fault " in a case, where 
 the master is performing a miracle of transmutation, 
 vitaUzing, elevating and irradiating a crude creation into 
 a world's wonder, and finally missing artistic consistency 
 simply because consistency was absolutely excluded by 
 the material. He leaves it possible for some (including 
 Professor Trench) to think Hamlet more or less really 
 mad. He indicates no totally ejtplanatory formula because 
 he could not : the play will riot now go into any. In 
 pajdng ourselves with saving formulas of Hamlet's mys- 
 tery we are but obscuring Shakespeare's mystery, which 
 
 I In Note B on Hamlet in Shakespearean Tragedy. 
 
 ' P. 187. 3 P. 166. 4 P, 109. 
 
86 SHAKESPEARE'S WORK OF TRANSMUTATION 
 
 is here finally so legible and so vividly interesting. Hamlet 
 is only the more wonderful for being rightly " understood." 
 When Furnivall indignantly rejected ' the thesis of the 
 Clarendon Press editors that the First Quarto in its 
 construction is mainly the work of the earher pla3rwTight, 
 he was but revealing the uncritical temper of the older 
 Shakespeare-worship. Disregarding the real tests of 
 diction and psychology, he was staking Shakespeare's 
 greatness on such positions as the invention of the idea 
 of a play-within-the-play and the creation of such dia- 
 logue as Hamlet's " chaff " with Polonius — ^work within 
 the capacity of lesser men than Kyd. The assailed editors 
 had made a loyal induction from the documents ; and 
 Furnivall and Dowden, refusing to make it, were seeking 
 for Shakespeare the wrong . kind of credit. His real 
 triumph was to turn a crude play into the masterpiece 
 which he has left us. It is a perfectly magnificent tour 
 de force, and its ultimate aesthetic miscarriage is only 
 the supreme illustration of the vulgar but ancient truth 
 that an entirely satisfactory silken purse cannot be 
 constructed, even by a Shakespeare, out of a sow's ear 
 —if one can without indecency apply that figure to a 
 . barbaric saga which ultimately yielded us Hamlet. 
 
 ^stheticaUy, it is improper. For, when all is said, 
 the " pragmatic " test is practically final for such a thing 
 as a drama. Hamlet has " made good " : it has enor- 
 mously overpassed the simple end of the playwright, to 
 entertain. The miraculous puppetry of the actor-manager 
 has kept millions at gaze for centuries now ; and if 
 Shakespeare could be recreated and asked why he managed 
 here and there so oddly, he might with an unanswerable 
 effect open eyes of wonder and ask what should make 
 I Aca4emy, August 7, 1880. 
 
THE UPSHOT 87 
 
 us thus put his mechanism to the rack. " Do you want 
 an absolute," he might ask, " as a stage entertainment ? " 
 And though we might make play with Hamlet's dictum 
 about holding up a mirror to Nature, we should be met 
 by the reminder that that too is part of the play ; and 
 we should know that Shakespeare had non-suited us. 
 
 And so he might silence us if we sought to debate with 
 him on the character of lago, which in Professor Bradley's 
 fine dissection we almost feel to be drawn from Ufe itself. 
 " Did you mean to make a study of moral insanity ? " 
 we might ask him : "is the formula of lago simply that 
 he is at bottom the criminal type, crafty in will-worship 
 and stupid in craft — a reversion to the ape or savage ? " 
 " Does that really matter ? " he might reply. " Has 
 not the play sufficed to occupy intelligent people ? What 
 matters it whether lago could or could not have really 
 existed? Could Othello? Could FalstafE ? For that 
 matter, could any imagined person ? What is fiction ? 
 . . . The play works. Would anything but lago serve 
 to drive a tragedy that hinges on a handkerchief ? If 
 you think so, try another." And there an end. 
 
 But the critical intellect too has its rights : its concern 
 is simply conceptual truth ; and as against — not Shake- 
 speare but — those who formulate Ptolemaic schemes of 
 his works, its rights are absolute. The " purpose of 
 playing is " — ^well, not exactly what Hamlet-Shakespeare 
 alleges ! But the purpose of science is indisputably to 
 know how things actually went ; and it is time we had 
 done with Ptolemaic methods, though the Uterary 
 Ptolemaists have included some remarkably able men, 
 recalling the distinguished prototype, who was a very 
 able man indeed. 
 
INDEX 
 
 All's Well that Ends Well. 75 
 Arden of Fever sham, 37, 65 
 
 Belleforest, 43, 65 n. 
 Bellimperia, 70 
 Benedix, 49 sj. 
 Boas, Prof., 39 sq., 53 
 Bradley, Prof., 24 n., 25, 26, 27, 
 31, 71, 73 «., 76, 85, 87 
 
 Chapman, 58, 60, 61 
 Christianity and revenge, 28 
 Closet scene, the, 73 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 13, 19, 25 
 Coleridge, S. T., 12, 14, 29 
 Comedy of Don Horatio, 53, 54 
 Corambis, 42, 45 
 Corbin, 43' 
 Corson, 20 
 Crawford, C, 37 n. 
 Creizenach, cited, 54 «. 
 Cymbeline, 75 
 
 Desdemona, 15 
 Double plays, 52 sq. 
 Dowden, 35, 43, 50, 61, 86 
 
 Falstafi, 87 
 
 Fengon, 64 
 
 Fischer, 74 n. 
 
 Fletcher, G., 19 
 
 Ford, Dr. H., 28 
 
 Fortitibras, 47, 49, 52, 55, 56, 57 
 
 Fumess, 19 «., 20 
 
 Fumivall, 28 n., 86 
 
 Gertrude, 73 
 
 Geruth, 64, 73 
 
 Gervinus, 13 n. 
 
 Ghost, the, 14, 16, 44, 64 sq. 
 
 66, 71, 75 
 Gildon, 12 «., 24, 25, 31 
 Goethe, 11, 12, 19 w., 27 
 Greene, 60, 61 
 Greg, W. W,. 53 
 
 Hamlet, the play, structure of, 
 14, 49 sq. 
 anomalies of, 49 sq., 57 sq., 74 
 history of, n, 30 s^., 33 sq. 
 old German version of, 42 
 
 Shakespeare's transmutation 
 of, 71 s?., 75 sq. 
 Hamlet, theories of character of, 
 II sq. 
 
 age of, 84 sq. 
 
 energy of, 13, 23 
 
 alleged procrastination of, 15 
 sq., 72 
 
 weakness of, 13, 14 sq. 
 
 madness of, 66, 75, 85 
 
 self-impeachment of, 18, 83 
 Hamblet, 64 sq. 
 Hanmer, 24, 25, 27 
 Hebler, 24, 77, 79 
 Henry V, 67 «., 75 
 Henslowe, 33, 53, 54 
 Herford, Prof., 12 n. 
 Horvendile, 64 
 Hudson, 20 
 
90 
 
 INDEX 
 
 lago, 87 
 Isabella, 70 
 
 Jeronymo, 65, 67, 69 sq., 76 
 
 King Lear, 41 
 Klein, 19, 44 
 
 Kyd, author of the pre-Shakes- 
 pearean play, 24, 33 sq., 
 57 sq., 64 sj. 
 methods of, 64 sq., 68 sq. 
 prologues of, 43 
 
 Latham, 42 n. 
 Levinstein, 19 
 Lowell, 14 sj., 66, 67, 84 
 
 Macbeth, 15 
 
 Mackenzie, H., 12, 24, 25, 76 
 
 Madness, myths of, 64 
 
 Malone, 24 n., 33 n. 
 
 Marlowe, 60 
 
 Measure for Measure, 18, 75 
 
 Mommsen, T., 35 
 
 Monsieur D'Olive, 58 
 
 Morgann, 74 n. 
 
 Nashe, 33 
 
 Ophelia, 26, 45-46, 61, 64, 73, 75 
 Osric, 46 
 Othello, 15, 87, 
 
 ParoUes, 58 
 Pericles, 75 , 
 
 Pessimism, Shakespeare's infu- 
 sion of, 71 sq., 74 n. 
 Play-scene, the, 44, 65, 83 n. 
 Poe, 24 sq. 
 Polonius, 29 
 
 Polonius and Osric scenes, 78 
 Prayer-scene, the, 16 sq., 45, 72 
 Ptolemaiism, 87 
 P3nThus speech, the, 44, 60 
 
 Rejmaldo, 16, 49, 51, 57 
 Rolfe, 20, 22 sq., 23 n. 
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstem, 
 
 26, 28, 30, 43, 64 
 RumeUn, 23 sq., 74 n., 78, 79 
 
 Salvini, cited, 77 
 
 Sarrazin, 34 
 
 Saxo Grammaticus, 65 n. 
 
 Schlegel, 12, 29 
 
 Seneca, 33, 68 
 
 Soliloquies, the, 83 
 
 Soliman and Perseda, 43, 62 
 
 Spanish Comedy, the, 53 
 
 Spanish Tragedy, the, 42, 44, 69 
 
 Time, Shakespeare's treatment 
 
 of, 18 
 Timon, 75 
 " To be," soliloquy, 14, 37, 55, 
 
 58 sq. 
 Tohnan, Prof., 21 
 Trench, Prof. W. F., 16, 25, 50 
 
 «., 83 n., 84, 85 
 Tiirck, 12 «., 74 n. 
 
 Ulrici, 13 
 
 Voltaire, 67 
 
 Werder, 19 sq., 25, 44, 77, 80 
 
 Werther, 12 n., 19 «., 79 
 
 White, R. G., 35 
 
 Widgery, 20 n., 36 «., 61, 67, 68 
 
 Winter's Tale, A, 75 
 
 Wolff, Max. J., 80 sq. 
 
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