'Ham. For England!

King.

Ham.

Ay, Hamlet.

Good.

King. So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.
Ham. I see a cherub that sees them.'

That is, my times are in God's hand. Again, when he reflects that acting upon a sudden impulse, in which there was nothing voluntary (for the deed was accomplished before he had conceived what it was), he had sent his two schoolfellows to death, Hamlet's thoughts go on to discover the divine purpose in the event.

'Let us know

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,

When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

Horatio.

That is most certain.'

Once more, when Horatio bids the prince yield to the secret misgiving which troubled his heart before he went to the trial of skill with Laertes, Hamlet puts aside his friend's advice with the words :

'We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come ; the readiness is all.'

"Does Shakspere accept the interpretation of events which Hamlet is led to adopt? No; the providence in which Shakspere believed is a moral order which includes man's highest exercise of foresight, energy,

and resolution. The disposition of Hamlet to reduce to a minimum the share which man's conscious will and foresight have in the disposing of events, and to enlarge the sphere of the action of powers outside the will, has a dramatic, not a theological, significance. Helena, who clearly sees what she resolves to do, and accomplishes neither less nor more than she has resolved, professes a different creed:

'Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie

Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.'
All's Well, I. i.

'Horatio, a believer in the 'divinity that shapes our ends,' by his promised explanation of the events, delivers us from the transcendental optimism of Hamlet, and restores the purely human way of viewing things:

'Give order that these bodies

High on a stage be placed to the view;

And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about; so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of death put on by cunning and forced cause,
And in this upshot purposes mistook,

Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I
Truly deliver.'

"The arrival of Fortinbras contributes also to the restoration of a practical and positive feeling. With

none of the rare qualities of the Danish Prince, he excels him in plain grasp of ordinary fact. Shakspere knows that the success of these men, who are limited, definite, positive, will do no dishonor to the failure of the rarer natures, to whom the problem of living is more embarrassing, and for whom the tests of the world are stricter and more delicate. Shakspere 'beats triumphant' marches, not for successful persons alone, but also for conquered and slain persons.

"Does Hamlet finally attain deliverance from his disease of will? Shakspere has left the answer to that question doubtful. Probably if anything could supply the link which was wanting between the purpose and the deed, it was the achievement of some supreme action. The last moments of Hamlet's life are well spent, and for energy and foresight are the noblest moments of his existence; he snatches the poisoned bowl from Horatio, and saves his friend; he gives his dying voice for Fortinbras, and saves his country. The rest is silence:

'Had I but time, - as this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest, — Oh, I could tell you.'

But he has not told. Let us not too readily assume that we know the stops' of Hamlet, that we can 'pluck out the heart of his mystery.'

"One thing, however, we do know,—that the man who wrote the play of Hamlet had obtained a thorough comprehension of Hamlet's malady. And assured as

we are by abundant evidence, that Shakspere transformed with energetic will his knowledge into fact, we may be confident that when Hamlet was written, Shakspere had gained a further stage in his culture of self-control, and that he had become not only adult as an author, but had entered upon the full maturity of his manhood."

·DOWDEN, Shakspere: His Mind and Art. "In Hamlet, though there is no Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare has suggested the prevailing rudeness of manners quite enough for his purpose. We see it in the single combat of Hamlet's father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgar wassail of the king, in the English monarch being expected to hang Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand merely to oblige his cousin of Denmark, in Laertes, sent to Paris to be made a gentleman of, becoming instantly capable of any the most barbarous treachery to glut his vengeance. We cannot fancy Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculating at Wittenberg, but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and Shakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through the play we get the notion of a state of society in which a savage nature has disguised itself in the externals of civilization, like a Maori deacon, who has only to strip and he becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his mouth watering for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the date of Hamlet, the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies alive in

their houses, with as much of their family about them as might be to make it comfortable. Shakespeare seems purposely to have dissociated his play from history by changing nearly every name in the original legend. The motive of the play—revenge as a religious duty belongs only to a social state in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative, but, with infallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen, not untamed Nature, as he found it in history, but the period of transition, a period in which the times are always out of joint, and thus the irresolution which has its roots in Hamlet's own character is stimulated by the very incompatibility of that legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the past with the new culture and refinement of which he is the representative. . . .

"It is an inherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet's that it should be conscious of its own defect. Men of his type are forever analyzing their own emotions and motives. They cannot do anything, because they always see two ways of doing it. They cannot determine on any course of action, because they are always, as it were, standing at the cross-roads, and see too well the disadvantage of every one of them. It is not that they are incapable of resolve, but somehow the band between the motive power and the operative faculties is relaxed and loose. The engine works, but the machinery it should drive stands still. The imagination is so much in overplus, that thinking a thing be