The clue to Hamlet's conduct:

evidence of

Claudius's

guilt.

of episodes which he plans or utilizes all take place within that brief period. Is it not a somewhat startling commentary on Mr. Smeaton's thesis to find that the man whose active powers are "completely paralyzed" achieves so much in so short a time?

Coleridge and his followers have overlooked one all-sufficient reason for Hamlet's delay, of which Shakespeare has given us plenty of hints. It is true that Hamlet might have slain Claudius at any moment after his weird night-watch with Marcellus The need for and Horatio; but what decisive evidence had he, until after his return from the interrupted trip to England, that his uncle was really guilty of murder and usurpation? I do not ask what evidence there was to establish subjective certainty in Hamlet's own mind. That, of course, he had, after (though not before) the episode of the play. By the behaviour of Claudius on that occasion he and Horatio were convinced that the Ghost's tale was a true one. But if Hamlet that night had slain his uncle in cold blood, he would have been unable to demonstrate to the world that his action was justified.

II ii 568-70.

Now this it is that he wishes to do. The play is a detective story. Hamlet had suspected Claudius from the first, and the Ghost's revelation only confirmed the dark speculations of his own prophetic soul. Like a sane man, however, he would not take the Ghost's word for it, even though the supernatural disclosure chimed with his previous suspicions:

The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil; and the devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape.

Possibly, as he remarks to Horatio,

It is a damnèd ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul

As Vulcan's stithy

III ii 75 ff.

thus repeating a misgiving which had occurred to I iv 40-42. him when he first saw the spectre.

The new king was to outward seeming dignified and efficient, and was clearly popular. People who, while the former king was living, would "make mows" at Claudius, were now ready, as Hamlet himself informs us, to "give twenty, forty, fifty, II i 343 f. an hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little." What, then, would be the position of any man who should slay him, and afterwards offer as justification of the deed an unsupported allegation that a ghost had declared Claudius the murderer of his predecessor? Least of all could the heir-apparent have done this thing without incurring suspicion as to his motive. Hamlet alone knew what the Ghost had said. Even the other men who had seen it had heard no word from it. So how could Hamlet have vindicated himself?

Hamlet succeed his

father

To be sure, the whole situation is complicated, Why did not because, although we are told that the monarchy was elective, Hamlet was his father's immediate heir, and seems to have stood higher than Claudius in directly? the public estimation. In Saxo Grammaticus this fact is taken account of, and the usurper is kept in his position only by the support of an armed party. Shakespeare, although he makes the murderer's guilt secret, still leaves unexplained the acceptance of Claudius by the nation as the successor of his brother. This aspect of the matter, however, we are not called upon to discuss. Our task is to reply to those interpreters who represent Hamlet as a

Hamlet is a

man of

inflexible resolution,

and a successful man of action.

morbid philosopher, lapped in abstract dreaming
and unable to take decisive action. These critics
have to account for the fact that Hamlet, at point
after point of the play, shows himself capable of
sudden decisions and of the most effective sort of
action to carry them out. Hamlet conceives his
policy at the beginning of the play, and carries it
through, against all obstacles, to a triumphant con-
summation. If then he is really a man of Laputan
detachment, what unthinkable inconsistency must we
attribute to his creator!

I shall ask the reader to follow me through a
survey of the play, in so far only as this is necessary
to sustain my argument that Hamlet is in fact a
man of inflexible resolution, perfectly fitted for the
grim and terrible duty that is laid upon him. It
cannot be pretended that he delights in discovering
that his father had been murdered by Claudius, or
that he is in love with the task of visiting retribution
upon the usurper's guilty head. He is a gentleman
of rare refinement, not a bloodthirsty barbarian. I
do argue, however, that he has all the qualities of a
successful man of action, and that this is evidenced
by the fact that, against apparently insuperable dif-
ficulties, he attains his object, which is not merely to
kill Claudius, but also-nay, chiefly-to ensure
the world's approval of the justice of his course.
I contend that Shakespeare so thought of his hero,
and did not consciously envisage the weak, pro-
crastinating creature of Coleridge's and Goethe's
imagination. Fortinbras, to whom Hamlet gives
his dying voice, declares that had Hamlet become
king of Denmark, he was likely "to have proved
most royally." Hamlet was certainly a scholar; but
that did not mean, as it so often means in modern

times, a cloistered and incapable recluse. Scholars
in Shakespeare's day were quite likely to be men like
Sir Walter Raleigh, author of poems and of a
History of the World, but also a brilliant soldier,
sailor and statesman, explorer of unknown seas, and
founder of colonies in the Virginian wilderness; or
like Philip Sidney, poet, statesman and soldier; or
like Francis Bacon, a rare blend of the thinker and
the man of action. There is no contradiction, then,
between my interpretation and Ophelia's account of
the "noble mind" of Hamlet:-

The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observ'd of all observers.

Such a characterization (which agrees with the gen-
eral opinion of the Court and the populace) would
never in the Elizabethan period have been given to
an introspective dilettante, who only "unpacked his
heart with words" when confronted by circum-
stances that demanded deeds. Nor is there any
suggestion that King Claudius had so little respect
for his enemy as to interpret him in the Coleridgean
fashion. He recognizes that what Hamlet spoke,
"though it lacked form a little, was not like mad-
ness. His entire conduct is prompted by ever-
growing terror of the determinate vengeance of the
Prince.

But let us glance through the play, and see the course that Hamlet actually takes. The clue to his entire conduct is given, I submit, in his dying words to Horatio:

Horatio, I am dead;

Thou liv'st; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

III i 148 ff.

Hamlet's dying re

quests to

Horatio explain his whole course. Vi 319 f.

Ibid. 325 ff.

Upon Horatio's declining to do this, and offering, like an antique Roman, to die with his friend, Hamlet imperiously forbids him; and for what reason?—

O good Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

The words of a dying man are presumably to be taken seriously; and even those of a dying dramatis persona (to revert to Poe's distinction) must be assumed to indicate his creator's conception of him. Hamlet is anxious that his most intimate friend shall devote himself to the task of justifying Hamlet's cause to the unsatisfied. He urges it upon him to live solely for that purpose. This being the case, it seems justifiable to infer that Hamlet's own conduct in life had also been dictated by the desire to have the truth of his deadly secrets revealed upon incontestable evidence, in order that the world at large might judge him equitably. Now, when we scan his entire course of action, from the moment of his interview with the Ghost to that in which, with the thought of public vindication still uppermost in his mind, he dies, we find that this clue completely destroys the charge against him of being an ineffectual dreamer. It makes his acts consistent; it accounts for his delays; and in his conduct in unforeseen exigencies it shows the clear evidence of an effective man,-namely, that he is able to transform what, to ordinary people, would be insurmountable obstacles into instruments for the advancement of his cause.