Certain New Elucidations of Shakespeare 65 



merges in the conviction that the person endeavored against is 

 the title character of the play. Then that wish or will reveals 

 itself, in the fifth scene, as Hamlet's father's ghost's demand for 

 vengeance. That must work havoc, we fear, with Hamlet's 

 fortunes. The resolution of this obstruction is ' tragic,' and is 

 reached when, at the close of the First Act, Hamlet accepts the 

 fate that he foresees. The major involvement is personal, being 

 no less than the king himself. We look on him as Hamlet's 

 probable destroyer, because of Hamlet's undisguised insolence 

 and contempt. The resolution of it comes in the second scene 

 of the Second Act, where we are relieved to find that the king 

 will not proceed at once against the life of Hamlet, or not perhaps 

 at all unless persuaded, through Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 

 that Hamlet is actuated from knowledge of his secret. The 

 imaginative climax occurs at the point where, at the middle of the 

 play, the king ' rises ' self-convicted and self-condemned. 



These appear to be the chief points, not considered by our 

 author, in the workmanship of Hamlet, most popular of all stage 

 plays. Why it has appealed so equally to the popular and the 

 pundit mind is a question that can in part be answered. It is 

 great literature not less than superb acting drama. The hero is a 

 princely nature, and is transfigured at the beginning with sublime 

 dignity of thought and utterance.^^ His problem has been made 

 so unjust and absolute as to engage us with him much as if it 

 were also ours. We are agog over Hamlet's strategy, and thrill 

 with him as he opens the crime of the king to the public of all 

 Denmark. We thrill again when he sets right finally, in triumph, 



33 The Folios show no division into acts and scenes after the opening of 

 the second scene of the Second Act. This seems most consonant with the 

 notion that the first form of the play, like some other tragedies of Shake- 

 speare, may have been undivided, and that revision was begun, but was 

 suspended after some three hundred lines of the scene just named. There 

 is a palpable falling off in the quality of the diction, especially Hamlet's, 

 and there are certain crudities, all of which tend to impress us that the 

 residue of the text has not shared in the vitalization effected in the first six 

 scenes. One notes also the inconsistency between conceptions of the title 

 figure. The Hamlet of the First Act carries no suggestion of a thirty- 

 years' maturity, nor do we anywhere envisage the student from Witten- 

 berg as either fat or scant of breath. 



167 



