watches and meets his father's ghost.

The season of the

year is perhaps March; the nights are bitter cold. The second Act occupies part of one day; Polonius despatches Reynaldo to Paris, Ophelia enters alarmed by Hamlet's visit, her father reads Hamlet's letter, the players arrive; and, when Hamlet parts from them, his words are, "I'll leave you till to-night." But before this day arrives, two months have elapsed since Hamlet was enjoined to revenge the murder—it was two months since his father's death when the play opened, and now it is "twice two months." Next day Hamlet utters his soliloquy, "To be or not to be," encounters Ophelia as arranged by Polonius, gives his advice to the players, is present at the performance of the play; and, night having come, he pleads with his mother, and again sees his father's spirit. Here the third Act closes, but the action proceeds without interruption; the King inquires for the body of Polonius, and tells Hamlet that the bark is ready to bear him to England. We must suppose that it is morning when Hamlet meets the troops of Fortinbras. Two days previously the ambassadors from Norway had returned, with a request that Claudius would permit Fortinbras to march through Denmark against the Poles; Fortinbras himself must have arrived almost as soon as the ambassadors, and obtained the Danish King's permission. In IV. v. Ophelia appears distracted, and Laertes has returned from Paris to be revenged for Polonius's death. An interval of time must have passed since Hamlet sailed for England—an interval sufficient to permit Laertes to receive tidings of the death of Polonius and to reach Elsinore. In the next scene letters arrive

announcing that Hamlet is again in Denmark; before he was two days at sea, he became the pirates' prisoner. On the day of the arrival of letters Ophelia is drowned. Her flowers indicate that the time is early June. Ophelia's burial and Hamlet's death take place on the next day. Yet the time has been sufficient for Fortinbras to win his Polish victory and be again at Elsinore, and for ambassadors to return from England announcing the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. We might obligingly imagine that the pirate ship conveying Hamlet to Denmark was delayed by baffling winds; but his letters are written after he has landed, and they describe his companions as holding their course for England. The truth is, as stated by Professor Hall Griffin (whose record of the notes of time has aided me here), "Shakespeare is at fault"; he "did not trouble himself to reconcile inconsistencies which practical experience as an actor would tell him do not trouble the spectator."

...

The division of the last three Acts of the play is made without the authority of any early edition. Act v. certainly opens aright. But the division between II. and III. is a matter of doubt, and the received division between III. and IV. is unfortunate. Mr. E. Rose proposed that III. should open with Hamlet's advice to the players (III. ii. of the received arrangement), and that IV. should open with the march of Fortinbras (our present IV. iv.). As regards IV., this is the division of Mr. Hudson in his Harvard Shakespeare; and but for the inconvenience of disturbing an accepted arrangement, to which references are made in lexicons and concordances, I should in this edition follow Mr. Hudson.

The names of the dramatis persona incongruously mingle forms derived from the Hamlet tradition of the North with classical, Italian, and German forms. "Gertrude" is a modification of Saxo's "Gerutha." " Horatio," in the old play Jeronimo, is the name of Andrea's faithful friend, who reappears in The Spanish Tragedy. Both "Ofelia," the name of a shepherd, and "Montano" (the name of Reynaldo in the Quarto of 1603), are found in the Arcadia of Sannazaro. The autograph signaturesdated 1577-of Jörgen Rossenkrantz and P. Guldenstern appear on the same page of an old German album in the Royal Public Library at Stuttgart, the original owner of which had resided for some time at Copenhagen;1 it does not follow that these individuals were in any sense the originals of Shakespeare's courtiers; an ambassador named Rosencrantz was sent to England at the accession of James the First, and there were other Guildensterns. Shakespeare probably obtained the names from actors who had returned from the Continent. "Fortinbras," wrote Mr. Elliot Browne (Athenæum, July 26, 1876), "is evidently Fortebras, or Strongarm of the family of Ferumbras of the romances, or may have come directly from Niccolo Fortebraccio, the famous leader of the condottieri."

It is not proposed here to notice the stage-history of Hamlet, the interpretations by eminent actors, nor the vast critical library that has grown around the play. Critics, I think, have sometimes erred in not keeping vividly before their imagination the nature of Shake

1 See for facsimile Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxv.; and, for letters on the subject, xxvi.

speare's task. They often speak as if the poet started with some central idea of which Hamlet was to be the exponent. "Shakespeare," wrote Goethe, "sought to depict a great deed laid upon a soul unequal to the performance of it." "In Hamlet," wrote Coleridge, "Shakespeare seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses and our meditation on the working of our minds-an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds." I prefer to think of Shakespeare as setting to work with the intention of rehandling the subject of an old play, so as to give it fresh interest on the stage; as following the subject given to him, and as following the instinctive leadings of his genius. The traditional Hamlet was distinguished by intellectual subtlety, by riddling speech, by a power of ingeniously baffling his pursuers, and, at the same time, by a love of truth. But the subtlety of Saxo's Amleth-and we may be sure the same is true of Kyd's Hamlet-was what Burke happily describes, in a different connection, as a "clumsy subtlety." If he would be taken to be mad, he affects unclean and brutal habits, or crows like a cock, or rides a horse with his head towards the tail. Shakespeare was attracted by the intellectual subtlety of Hamlet, and was inevitably led by his genius to refine this subtlety, and to diversify its manifestations. was caught in the web of his own imaginings, and became so absorbed in his work that he forgot to keep it within the limits suitable for theatrical representation; the tragedy has, perhaps, never been presented in its entirety on the English stage in consequence of its in

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ordinate length.

The swift and subtle wit that had its play at the Mermaid Tavern was now incarnated in one of the creatures of Shakespeare's imagination.

Hamlet is not the exponent of a philosophy; he has, it is true, a remarkable power of reflection and a tendency to generalise, but he is not a philosophical thinker who seeks to co-ordinate his ideas in a coherent system. Perhaps Ulysses, perhaps Prospero approaches nearer to the philosopher, but neither Ulysses nor Prospero is a wit; and Hamlet is a wit inspired by melancholy. He is swift, ingenious, versatile, penetrative; and he is also sad. And when Shakespeare proceeded to follow the story in the main as he had probably received it from Kyd, it turned out that such subtlety overreached itself -which Shakespeare recognised as wholly right, and true to the facts of life. Hamlet's madness is not deliberately assumed; an antic disposition is, as it were, imposed upon him by the almost hysterical excitement which follows his interview with the Ghost, and he ingeniously justifies it to himself by discovering that it may hereafter serve a purpose. But in truth his subtlety does not produce direct and effective action. Hamlet is neither a boisterous Laertes, who with small resources almost effects a rebellion in revenge for a murdered father, nor a resolute Fortinbras, who, mindful of his dead father's honour, can march through danger to victory. Hamlet's intellectual subtlety sees every side of every question, thinks too precisely on the event, considers all things too curiously, studies anew every conviction, doubts of the past, interrogates the future; it delights in ironically adopting the mental attitudes of