■'"in Criticism. 



19 



the greatest of dramas. Such a plot would be exactly in the spirit of 

 other dramatists — Webster, Marlowe, Massinger — but it is not 

 Shakespearian. Besides, thus considered, the work would lose all 

 traces of that exquisite discrimination for which Shakespeare is re- 

 markable: Elsewhere he has treated of insanity of different degrees 

 and nature, as in Lear, proceeding from filial ingratitude, in Mulcolio 

 from vanity, in Othello from jealousy. After these analyses, there 

 would be nothing novel or forcible in the representation of mental 

 disorder arising from grief at the death of a parent, and nothing ele- 

 vated in the depicting of madness assumed as a cover for revenge. 

 Then, again, in this very play we have the madness of Ophelia arising 

 from disappointed love. There is no reason to suppose that the dram- 

 atist intended to contrast real with pretended madness, for he makes 

 no sufficient discrimination between them, and it cannot be that he 

 intended in the same play to give two examples of madness, springing 

 from similar causes. Moreover we have had in Shakespeare an un- 

 questioned instance of assumed madness in the character of Edgar, in 

 King Lear But if we regard Hamlet as one who, starting out to 

 assume madness, gradually falls a victim to real melancholy, as one 

 who, simulating a fever, may excite himself into an actual feverish 

 condition, this drama takes on a new and startling significance. It 

 then occupies a fresh field even among Shakespeare's manifold and 

 wondrous creations, and furnishes us with an intellectual analysis of 

 insanity, flowing from a spring hitherto unknown to literature. 



Let me say, in conclusion, that there are few old writers who have 

 so small need of critical and conjectural help as Shakespeare. He 

 has a vocabulary peculiarly his own, but his unskilled reader gets the 

 meaning of most of his recondite words from the context and his own 

 instinct. We are all learners at his feet. He is his own best corn- 



Since writing the foregoing, I have been informed of an essay written by Mor- 

 gann, about one hundred years ago, proving in brilliant style that Falstaff was 



