with a view to understand Shakspere's manner of rehandling his work, is greatly diminished by the fact that numerous gaps of the imperfect report given in the earlier quarto seem to have been filled in by a stupid stage hack. That an old play on the subject of Hamlet existed there can be no doubt; it is referred to in 1589 (perhaps in 1587) by Nash, in his Epistle prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, and again in 1596, by Lodge (Wit's Miserie and the World's Madnesse), where he alludes to "the visard of the Ghost which cried so miserably at the Theator, like an oister wife, 'Hamlet, reuenge.' A German play on the subject of Hamlet exists, which is supposed to have been acted by English players in Germany in 1603; the name Corambus appears in it; and it is possible that portions of the old preShaksperian drama are contained in the German Hamlet. The old play may have been one of the bloody tragedies of revenge among which we find Titus Andronicus and The Spanish Tragedy, and it would be characteristic of Shakspere that he should refine the motives and spirit of the drama, so as to make the duty of vengeance laid upon Hamlet a painful burden which he is hardly able to support. One additional point must be noted with reference to the date of the play. In Act II. Sc. ii. L. 346, Rosencrantz explains that the tragedians of the city are compelled to travel on account of an "inhibition " which is caused by "the late innovation.” What does this mean? Does it allude to the Order in Council of June, 1600, limiting the number of playhouses about London to two, an order not carried out until the duty of enforcing it was urged upon the justices of Middlesex and Surrey, December 31, 1601? Or shall we understand the innovation as referring to the licence given January 1603-1604, to the children of the Queen's Revels to play at the Blackfriars Theatre-a building belonging to the company of which Shakspere was a member? The licence to the children (of whom >> Rosencrantz speaks depreciatingly) would act as an inhibition to the company of adult actors whose place they occupied. Beside the old play of Hamlet, Shakspere had probably before him the prose Hystorie of Hamblet (though no edition exists earlier than 1608), translated from Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques. The story had been told some hundreds of years previously, in the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus (ab. 1180-1208). The Hamlet of the Hystorie, after a fierce revenge, becomes King of Denmark, marries two wives, and finally dies in battle. No play of Shakspere's has had a higher power of interesting spectators and readers, and none has given rise to a greater variety of conflicting interpretations. It has been rightly named a tragedy of thought, and in this respect, as well as others, takes its place beside Julius Cæsar. Neither Brutus nor Hamlet is the victim of an overmastering passion as are the chief persons of the later tragedies-e.g. Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus. The burden of a terrible duty is laid upon each of them, and neither is fitted for bearing such a burden. Brutus is disqualified for action by his moral idealism, his student-like habits, his capacity for dealing with abstractions rather than with men and things. Hamlet is disqualified for action by his excess of the reflective tendency, and by his unstable will, which alternates between complete inactivity and fits of excited energy. Naturally sensitive, he receives a painful shock from the hasty second marriage of his mother; already the springs of faith and joy in his nature are embittered; then follows the terrible discovery of his father's murder, with the injunction laid upon him to revenge the crime; upon this again follow the repulses which he receives from Ophelia. A deep melancholy lays hold of his spirit, and all of life grows dark and sad to his vision. Although hating his father's murderer, he has little heart to push on his revenge. He is aware that he is suspected and surrounded by spies. Partly to baffle them, partly to create a veil behind which to seclude his true self, partly because his whole moral nature is indeed deeply disordered, he assumes the part of one whose wits have gone astray. Except for one loyal friend, he is alone among enemies or supposed traitors. Ophelia he regards as no more loyal or honest to him than his mother had been to her dead husband. The ascertainment of Claudius's guilt by means of the play still leaves him incapable of the last decisive act of vengeance. Not so, however, with the king, who now recognising his foe in Hamlet, does not delay to despatch him to a bloody death in England. But there is in Hamlet a terrible power of sudden and desperate action. From the melancholy which broods over him after the burial of Ophelia he rouses himself to the play of swords with Laertes, and at the last, with strength which leaps up before its final extinction, he accomplishes the punishment of the malefactor. Horatio, with his fortitude, his self-possession, his strong equanimity, is a contrast to the Prince. And Laertes, who takes violent measures at the shortest notice to revenge his father's murder, is in another way a contrast; but Laertes is the young gallant of the period, and his capacity for action arises in part from the absence of those moral checks of which Hamlet is sensible. Polonius is owner of the shallow wisdom of this world, and exhibits this grotesquely while now on the brink of dotage; he sees, but cannot see through Hamlet's ironical mockery of him. Ophelia is tender, sensitive, affectionate, but the reverse of heroic; she fails Hamlet in his need, and then in her turn becoming the sufferer, gives way under the pressure of her afflictions. We do not honour, we commiserate her. The play is hardly consistent with respect to Hamlet's age. In Act V. Sc. i. L. 155-191, it is stated that he is thirty years old, while in the first Act he is spoken of as still quite youthful; yet only a few months, at most, can have elapsed in the interval of time between the beginning and the end of the action. His profoundly reflective soliloquies point to an age certainly past early youth. 27. All's Well that Ends Well.-Among the plays of Shakspere mentioned by Meres in his Paliadis Tamia (1598) occurs the name of Love's Labour's Won. This has been identified by some critics with The Taming of the Shrew, by some with Much Ado about Nothing. But the weight of authority inclines. to the opinion that under this title Meres spoke of the play known to us as All's Well that Ends Well. It seems not improbable that All's Well, as we possess it in the first folio-and no earlier edition exists is a rehandling, very thoroughly carried out, of an earlier version of the comedy. Coleridge believed that two styles were discernible in it; there is certainly a larger proportion of rhyming lines in All's Well than in any other play completed after the year 1600; and the following rhyming passages have been pointed out as fragments retained from the earlier version: Act I. Sc. i. L. 231-244; Act I. Sc. iii. L. 134-142; Act II. Sc. i. L. 133-213; Act II. Sc. iii. L. 78-111 and 132-151; Act III. Sc. iv. L. 4-17; Act IV. Sc. iii. L. 252-260; Act V. Sc. iii. L. 61-72 and 325-340. It is, however, far from certain that any portion of the play is of early origin, and assigning conjecturally the date about 1602 as that of the completion of the whole, we may view it as belonging to the later group of the second cycle of Shakspere's comedies, not so early, therefore, as Twelfth Night or As You Like It, and certainly earlier than Measure for Measure. The story of Helena and Bertram was found by Shakspere in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (1566), Paynter having translated it from the Decameron of Boccaccio (Novel 9. Third day). Shakspere added the characters of the Countess, Lafeu, Parolles, and the Clown. What interested the poet's imagination in Boccaccio's story was evidently the position and person of the heroine. In Boccaccio, Giletta, the physician's daughter, is inferior in rank to the young Count, Beltramo, but she is rich. Shakspere's Helena is of humbler birth than his Bertram, and she is also poor. Yet poor, and comparatively low-born, she aspires to be the young Count's wife, she pursues him to Paris, and wins him against his will. To show Helena thus reversing in a measure the ordinary relations of man and woman, and yet to show her neither self-seeking nor unwomanly, was the task which the dramatist attempted. On the one hand he insists much on Bertram's youth, and gives him the faults and vices of youth, making the reader or spectator of the play feel that his hero has great need of such a finely-tempered, right-willed and loyal nature to stand by his side as that of Helena. On the other hand he shows us Helena's enthusiastic attachment to Bertram, her fears and cares on his behalf, her adhesion to him rather than to herself, when her husband seems to set their interests in opposition to one another, until we come to feel that the imperious need which makes Helena overstep social conventions is the need of perfect service to the man she loves. When she chooses him her words are: I dare not say I take you, but I give Bertram's beauty and courage must bear part of the blame of. Helena's loving him better than he deserves. With the youthful desire for independence which makes him break away from her, she can intelligently sympathise. In the last Act she appears-when he has entangled himself in falsehood and shame-to save him, and rescue him from his baser self. We feel that when he has at last really found Helena, he is safe, and all ends well. Parolles, the incarnation of bragging meanness, is the counterfoil of Helena-she, the doer of virtuous deeds; he, the utterer of vain and |