thoroughly revised it; and that the differences between the First Folio and the Second Quarto are in the main to be accounted for by supposing that the omissionsnow in the one, now in the other-represent cuts for acting purposes, due to the great length of the play. Even to-day the ordinary stage performance of Hamlet never includes the full text.

But after we know how the play has reached us, we have still to ask how the story that it tells reached Shakespeare. For the great dramatists, whose supreme originality lies in giving new form and meaning to what is already known, rarely, if ever, invent their own plots, and Hamlet offers no exception. The story of the play is very old. It appears first about the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the History of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus.1 The story, as it is there told, is very different from the one we know, four hundred years later, in Shakespeare. It is a rude and brutal tale, with elements in it that go back to a still more primitive stage of civilization. But certain essential facts of the play are present in the history. The fratricide on which the drama is based; the marriage between the murderer and Hamlet's mother; Hamlet's feigned madness in order to accomplish his revenge; the device (in a very different form, however, from that of the play) of using his love for a woman in order to lead him to betray himself; the killing of an eavesdropper (who has hidden under the rushes

Translated (in part) from the Latin in The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, by Oliver Elton (Folk Lore Society, 1893), pp. 106-130.

on the floor); the dispatch of Hamlet to England with two companions; the altering of the letter, and Hamlet's return (not, however, through the aid of the pirates),— all these details are present in the older story. But there is no ghost, and Hamlet's savage revenge is wholly different, while he himself lives to become king, and is later killed through the treachery of his second wife. Saxo's story was retold in French in 1570, in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, which was not translated into English until five years after the First Quarto was published. Shakespeare may possibly have known Belleforest; he almost certainly did not know Saxo. The story seems to have reached him in another way.

At least fifteen of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays— including the Merchant of Venice, King John, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cæsar, and King Lear—are more or less directly based upon earlier plays, and no clearer insight into Shakespeare's genius and originality can be gained than that which comes from a study of what he has done with the crude materials at his hand. In the case of Hamlet we know, from a number of interesting contemporary allusions, that there was an earlier play, although, unfortunately, it has not come down to us. But its author was very probably Thomas Kyd, and from an extremely popular play of Kyd's that is extantThe Spanish Tragedy-we can guess something of the character of the older Hamlet. For both plays-the Spanish Tragedy and the earlier Hamlet, which Shake

1Translation in Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library, Part I, Vol. II, pp. 211-279.

speare almost certainly used-very evidently appealed strongly to one of the marked tastes of an Elizabethan audience its fondness for what is often called the Tragedy of Blood. And if we consider the mere framework of Shakespeare's Hamlet, in connection with what we know of the Spanish Tragedy, it is not difficult to form some idea of the older play. A ghost, insanity, real or assumed, revenge, adultery, suicide, poisoning, stabbing— all the elements of sheer melodrama are present. And the amazing thing that Shakespeare has done is to take this old story of blood and lust and revenge, and make it the vehicle of his own profoundest thought and his supremest artistry, so that it stands as one of the two or three greatest tragedies in the world. The mere inventing of a plot is little; it is what the dramatist does with what he finds that counts.

What he has to do first and foremost is to make a play. The Ghost, Hamlet's assumed madness, the killing of Polonius, Ophelia's suicide, the exchange of the letters— all these are but the raw materials of a drama. They must be bound together into a single action, and that action must have a definite movement. And such a movement, in a tragedy, involves a conflict between two opposing forces. In Hamlet this conflict takes the form (we shall see another side of it in a moment) of a contest between Hamlet and the King. The play starts out with relative equilibrium; the contest has not yet begun. The real movement is initiated when the disclosure of the Ghost (the Exciting Force) stirs Hamlet to revenge. From that point up to the success of the play within the

play the action rises; Hamlet is the aggressor, and the King is on the defensive. But with Hamlet's refusal to kill the King while he is praying, comes the turningpoint, and the so-called Falling (or Return) Action begins; the King is the aggressor, and Hamlet is steadily forced to the wall, until, with the success of the King's and Laertes's plot against him, the catastrophe ensues. One may even indicate by a diagram the typical movement of a tragedy:

The details of the movement in Hamlet are elaborated in the introductory notes to the different scenes, and the interest of the story is not diminished but enhanced by observing the dramatic structure of the play.

But there is another conflict involved beside the contest between the two protagonists. One sometimes hears a tragedy spoken of as if it were merely a play with an unhappy ending. But the thing that really makes a tragedy is to use a German poet's phrase-the human spirit in conflict with itself or with the course of the world. In Romeo and Juliet, the first of Shakespeare's great tragedies, the conflict is of the latter type. It is Fate, as embodied in the family and the state, against which Romeo and Juliet-like the heroes of Greek tragedy-contend in vain. But in the later Shakespearean

tragedies, the emphasis is on the conflict of the hero with himself or rather, perhaps, the conflict within him of opposing passions or tendencies-that leads to his undoing. The great heroes of tragedy-Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Edipus, Faust-are exceptional persons, to be sure; but they are the battleground of contending forces that are universal in their application and in their appeal. And the great tragedies hold their lasting power because the tragic struggle is thus universal, as well as because it finds embodiment in actions of compelling, sometimes of enthralling, interest. The mere story of Hamletof his contest with the King-thrills even the occupants of the cheapest gallery; but it is the tragic conflict within Hamlet himself that challenges and holds our deeper interest.

And the problem of Hamlet himself is one of the most baffling and fascinating, too—in all literature. He is so real a person that men talk and write about him as they do about Cæsar or Napoleon or any of the great complex figures that have really lived. And no attempt to pluck out the heart of his mystery will ever be wholly successful, just because he is so absolutely real a person. But two or three of the most famous attempts to explain him may be given, as bringing out, at all events, certain phases of his complexity. That of Goethe is perhaps the best known of all: 1

To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit

1Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, Book IV, Chapter XIII (Carlyle's translation). This view is admirably criticised in one