tator is given to overmuch "letting of empty buckets into empty wells" is very familiar criticism. There are many commentaries to write and very little to write about, and the temptation to archæological minutiæ on the one hand, or esthetic rhapsody on the other, is perhaps too strong for resistance. But a ruthless sweeping away of both alike will, I think, reveal the Hamlet that Shakespeare himself wanted; and this Hamlet, I think, will turn out a very different sort of person from the one the commentators manufacture for us.

Prince Hamlet - as we have him in the First Folio seems to me a manly, punctilious, and rational gentleman, with a legally balanced mind, conservative in method and tendency, with a lawyer's caution and respect for the conventional and established order of things; above all, suspicious of intuitions, surmise, and guess-work. Far from being infirm of purpose, like that whilom Macbeth who let "I dare not" wait upon "I would"— who dared not to think, much less to look upon, what his own hands had wrought- here was, it seems to me, a man whose deliberate and solemn judg ment, once committed to an act, was suffered neither to relax nor hurry its due issue and performance. Surely that was an impatient and impertinent ghost who came a second time from his prison-house to complain of the "almost blunted purpose" of such a man as this! He had taken a prince's word, this ghost, that while memory held its sway his message should be remembered, and should have rested in the assurance. For the prince had weighed long and considered deeply

before giving his word or putting any reliance upon or believing in ghosts at all. He is rather disposed, on the whole, to jeer at the very idea of such things as unpent spirits, released from their confine, revisiting the glimpses of this moon; albeit in the days of Shakespeare all kinds of specters, supernatural and disembodied shapes, were conceded a constant interposition in sublunary matters: nay, men were put to death upon their testimony for many years after Shakespeare's own funeral.

The story of "Hamlet" is not a record of usurpation, murder, blood, and death like "Macbeth," nor of domestic tragedy like "Othello," nor of madness like "Lear." Rather is it the history of purposes adhered to and of the end which compassed them. The man who, living consecrated to a purpose, accomplishes that purpose before he dies, is not ordinarily held to be a failure, infirm of resolution, weak and listless of that purpose. To every selfregarding, trustful, determined, and just man must come, at some time, deliberation as to method; as to consequences-hesitancies, interruptions of time and circumstances. Did not Prince Hamlet, perhaps, eat and sleep between the ghostly interview and the catastrophe of his revenge, during the visit of the players, their rehearsals and performance, the accidental killing of Polonius, the interval in which news of that accident could have reached Laertes in France, and his recall, the embassy to England, the escape, the return, the funeral of Ophelia? Was there no more interval to these than the waits and betweens of the play at our theaters?

Had the dramatist whose completed work is before us in the First Folio desired to portray a madman named Hamlet, he had plenty of models at hand. The Belleforest "Hamblett" would rend his clothes," wallow in the mire, run through the streets with fouled face, like a man distraught, not speaking one word but such as seemed to proceed from madness and mere frenzy; all his actions and gestures being no other than the right countenance of a man wholly deprived of all reason and understanding; in such sort that he seemed. fit for nothing but to make sport to the pages and ruffling courtiers that attended in the courts of his step-father." But is it not the patent fact that Shakespeare followed no such model; that he deliberately rejected the childish Saga and the almost equally crude "Hamblett" tale, and created a new Hamlet with attributes of his own, whose story bore only the most attenuated resemblance to these? And if Shakespeare deliberately discarded all the former Amleths and Hambletts, why should we restore them? What have they to do with Hamlet the Dane, in inky cloak, who did not rant nor grovel, but cherished only

"That within which passeth show"?

To me this somber and stately prince bears no likeness to predecessors who were very mountebanks in silly apings of a mind diseased. Is it not the very paradox of esthetic criticism to leave the perfect work of a master, and go back to the childhood of a re-utilized tale for an inconsequent and irresponsible lunatic "who fails to act in any definite line of consistent purpose; neglects what he

deems a sacred duty; wastes himself in trifling occupations; descends to the ignoble part of a courtjester; breaks the heart of a lady he dearly loves; uselessly and recklessly kills her father, with no sign of sorrow or remorse for the deed; insults a brother's legitimate grief at her grave, and finally goes stumbling to the catastrophe of his death the most complete failure, in the direction of the avowed purpose of his life, ever recorded"? 1 The esthete who thus declaims, might, perhaps, have labored under provincial disadvantage. Old Dr. Johnson, to be sure, once delivered himself of a valuable note to the effect that "the pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth"; but surely, not since the old doctor's day has a metropolitan English stage so interpreted the masterpiece of a master.

To begin with, it is to be remembered that our Hamlet is an Englishman, and the Denmark in which he moved - an English court, ruled by an absolute monarch of the Tudor cast, one Claudius, a very passable Henry VIII., not quite so far along in uxoriousness at his taking-off, perhaps, but well in for it. No amount of scenic or critical realism will enable us to confess a further obligation in Shakespeare to Denmark than for a very limited stock of allusion and nomenclature. There certainly is neither habitude, cast of thought, method, or custom that can be called Danish or that suggests itself as characteristic of Denmark's warlike, simple, sturdy and unphilosophic inhab

1 "The Subjection of Hamlet,” p. 16. William Leighton. Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., 1882.

itants of any dynasty or date, in the salient points and characters of the play.

The characteristic of the particular tragedian who enacts Hamlet—the blonde wig, the Danish court-dress, the mantle of fur; the portraits hung on the chamber-wall, or worn "in little" on the actor's breast; the Tudor scenery which Garrick used, or the barbaric court with its rude arches and columns hung in arras; its figures draped in habit of old Scandinavia—all these, while alike creditable to the study and conception of this or that actor (and valuable as relieving the spectator from a too monotonous usuetude), are still redundant, if we are to ask who, after all, Hamlet, in the mind's eye of his creator, Shakespeare, was.

Hamlet, to the true critic, "in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations," must ever be and remain an Englishman. From the Prince's philosophy of life and duty, the courtier phrases of Polonius and Osric, to the burlesque dialect and dialectics of the grave-diggers, every speech and sense put into the mouth of the dramatis personæ is purely English-English thought, methods, habits of reasoning, analogies, and expression are everywhere before us. There was nothing incestuous in the marriage of Claudius to his brother's widow, by Danish laws, traditions, or customs. The technical denial of consecrated sepulture to suicides, the polishing of young gallants at the French court, the employment of strolling players every act, law, tenure, or custom on which the action of the play is anywhere suspended-is English, and English only.

Add to all these that the succession from Claudius is stated in such unmistakable terms of Eng