Certain Nezu Elucidations of Shakespeare 59 



request of publishers, on a popular handbook, What Is Shake- 

 speare, based on the last two dramas. He once gave considerable 

 study also to The Tempest, but, having changed his judgment, is 

 not now minded to review Quiller-Couch's praises: We shall 

 consider further only the three lectures of this author on the play 

 of Hamlet. 



Very informally and pointedly, not at all like a professor's 

 deliverances, the series opens. The refreshing thing in Quiller- 

 Couch's criticism is the absence of e.v cathedra confidence, of the 

 academic consciousness. Nowhere in the volume does this 

 author address himself to his work with more singleness of vision 

 and common-sense directness of attack : 



So much has been written upon Hamlet, that one can hardly descry the 

 play through the rolling cloud of witness. The critical guns detonate with 

 such uproar, and, exploding, diffuse such quantities of gas, as to impose 

 on us that moral stupor which I understand to be one of the calculated 

 effects of heavy artillery warfare. . . . This loud authority confuses us 

 all. It starts us thinking of Hamlet not as an acted play but as a mystery, 

 a psychological study, an effort 'of genius so grandiose, vast, amorphous, 

 nebulous, that men of admitted genius — even such men as Coleridge and 

 Goethe, — tracking it, have lost their way in the profound obscure. 



Now, with all the courage of humility, I say that this is, nine-tenths of 

 it, rubbish. 



I insist that we take Shakespeare first, and before any of these imposing 

 fellows. At all events he wrote the play, and they did not. 



Moreover, he wrote it as a play — to be acted on a stage before an 

 audience. 



Moreover, he wrote it, not for an audience of Goethes and Coleridges, 

 but for an audience of ordinary men and women. 



And yet further, if pressed, I am ready to maintain that any work of 

 art which is shapeless, nebulous ; any work of art which misses its artistic 

 purpose to be the prey of pedants and philosophers, is to that extent a bad 

 piece of art. And I hope to demonstrate that Hamlet is no such thing, 

 but a masterpiece. 



The chief points in the author's demonstration that this is no 

 closet play, written for private dissection, come from the stage 

 side: 



To this day a travelling company of actors, thrown upon their beam- 

 ends for lack of money, having acted this or that to empty houses, always 

 as a last resort advertise Hamlet. It can be counted on, above any other 



161 



