Hamlet, doubtless a revision of the older play, was announced. As Professor Schelling surmises, there was doubtless some significance in the fact that simultaneously Jonson and Shakespeare should have revised two popular revenge tragedies for rival theatres. All these plays and others of the same period have much in common. There is usually a ghost, insanity real or feigned, melancholy, reflective speeches, unfaithful women, a play within a play, deferred revenge, much bloodshed. It is reasonable to suppose that these plays can throw considerable light upon each other.

The history of the Hamlet material is also of considerable importance. Ultimately the story goes back to an old Danish saga related by Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1200). About 1570 Belleforest published a version of it in his Histoires tragiques. Whether Shakespeare knew the story in French, or in an English translation, or through oral transmission, does not matter. He unquestionably knew it. On this story about 1589 someone, probably Kyd, had based a play generally known as the Ur-Hamlet. It has not come down to us, but it is often referred to, and it was doubtless the immediate source of Shakespeare's tragedy. Der Bestrafte Brudermord, a German play on the same subject, which has been traced back to 1710, is considered by many critics to be a free translation of the Ur-Hamlet. It may have been carried to Germany by English actors who are known to have performed in that country as early as 1586 and who certainly presented some form of the Hamlet story in Dresden in 1626. Finally, there are the Shakespearian versions of the story. The play was announced in 1602, but the earliest copy known was printed in 1603. It is not much more than half as long as the 1604 edition which is substantially the one we are familiar with.

In the four extant forms of the story (and by inference we may include the lost Ur-Hamlet) a king is killed by his brother who straightway marries the queen. In all of them the chief interest centres in the revenge to be wrought by the son of the murdered king. In all the son feigns insanity and the revenge is delayed. In the original story there was no ghost, but he appears for the first time in the Ur-Hamlet, where, as Lodge tells us in his Wits Miserie (1596), he "cried so miserally at the theatre, 'Hamlet revenge.'" In the original story, besides, was

the interview in the queen's chamber, with the stabbing of the eavesdropper, and later the voyage to England. Thus it is evident that in writing Hamlet Shakespeare borrowed the essential features of the plot either from the original story or from the contemporary revenge plays. This meant that Shakespeare, unless he specifically gave notice to the contrary, accepted and even assumed the general conventions and beliefs belonging to the popular understanding of a well-known story and genre. Hence a knowledge of these matters is of prime importance in a study of the play.

In the infancy of dramatic technique and in the days of romantic stories and of symbolic rather than realistic staging, the audience was obliged to collaborate with the dramatist in a somewhat comprehensive scheme of make-believe. In Othello, for example, we are asked to pretend that in the long time which Shakespeare meant to elapse between the first suggestion of Desdemona's guilt and her murder, husband and wife never talked the matter over save in the few minutes that they are together on the stage. Yet their misunderstanding was of a kind that might survive a five-minute conversation but not the intimacies of several weeks. Into such things, however, we must not too fussily pry. Similarly, in the revenge plays, we must not in our twentieth century unromantic mood ask if it were not possible for the avenger of blood to find abundant opportunity to plunge his sword into the murderer's breast. Of course it was, in spite of Switzer guards or plotting adversaries. But in that case there could be no play, no suspense spread over several acts. The revenge must be retarded. But unless the hero is promptly put in jail, in which case there could be no suspense or dramatic action, it is not easy satisfactorily to account for his delay throughout a whole play. The dramatist adopted various devices to retard the action-external difficulties, uncertainty, temporary insanity, and the like; but over and above all these was the tacit understanding with the audience that revenge to be taken on a person of high degree could be accomplished only with the greatest difficulty.

Besides finding means of delaying the action the dramatist had to contrive a theatrically effective finale. How weak would be the ending of Hamlet if the revenge had been accomplished in the praying scene or in the queen's chamber! It was not

enough that one or two guilty persons should be killed promptly or privately. They must be allowed to heap damnation on themselves; innocent blood must be shed; at the end the stage must be filled and a scene of horror ensue. This necessary

climax of interest was not easy to arrange within the bounds of probability, since in real life avengers "catch the nearest way." Hence the dramatist usually assumed that the hero could reach his ends only by an elaborate "plot," and his deus ex machina methods of bringing about his great scene demanded of an audience a child-like acquiescence in the necessity of the "plot."

These two pretences-that revenge must be delayed owing to the difficulty of the action, and that it must be elaborate and not simple and natural-are constantly relied upon in the revenge plays. Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy resolves (III, 13) to avenge his son's death, not with open injuries "as the vulgar wits of men" might contrive, but like a wise man by "closely and safely fitting things to time," remembering that "all times fit not for revenge," and that it does not avail him to menace his foes, for they will bear him down with their nobility. So he awaits his opportunity, pretending meanwhile that he has "let all slip." He sometimes reproaches himself; his wife and his dead son's mistress in their ignorance believe that he has forgotten; and on one occasion even the ghost loses hope and vociferously calls upon personified Revenge to intercede. But this omniscient being curtly assures the ghost that "Hieronimo cannot forget his son Horatio" and requests him not to argue. Thus the audience is assured that delay is necessary. In the closing scenes of the play, still more make-believe is required. Hieronimo thinks of a "plot;" immediately he is requested by the murderers to arrange an entertainment for the king; he happens to have in his pocket a tragedy, written years before, with just four parts. He and Bel-imperia take two, the murderers the other two. But though the revenge could have been effected then or during the rehearsals, it is postponed until in the course of the play within the play it is carried out in the presence of the court.

Precisely the same conventions appear in Antonio's Revenge. The ghost making the revelation concerning the murder tells the son to "invent some stratagem of revenge" and the

widow to maintain a seeming favour to the murderer's suit "till time may form our vengeance absolute." Later the ghost tells the son to "dog the court" in disguise till "Piero's blood may even o'erflow the brim of full revenge." Thus the ghost recognized the necessity of time and a plot, although there was no apparent reason why Antonio could not have had his revenge at any moment. Yet the ghost, far from condemning the delay, is always satisfied and even cheerful. The play ends with a "plot," quite unnecessary but theatrically effective.

Just as in the revenge plays a certain amount of delay was considered necessary, so also in the original story of Hamlet. There the prince, as he tells his mother, was restrained only by external difficulty: "I must stay the times, means, and occasion, lest by making over great haste I be now the cause of my own sudden ruin and overthrow, and by that means end before I begin to effect my heart's desire. He that hath to do with a wicked, disloyal, cruel, and discourteous man must use craft and politic invention, such as a fine wit can best imagine; . for seeing that by force I cannot effect my desire, reason alloweth me dissimulation. . to proceed therein." This is much like Hieronimo's language, already quoted. It is a very amateurish way to account for a delay extending over years; yet the reader is asked to be content.

Thus the assumption of necessary delay due to external difficulty belonged both to the old revenge plays and to Shakespeare's source. In neither, however, is it properly motived; the audience is expected to make-believe. But when Shakespeare undertook to tell the Hamlet story, being more skilful than his fellows, he succeeded in getting along with a mere hint of the convention of necessary delay. It hovers in the background, but is nowhere seriously needed. Yet it is there unmistakably, partly no doubt because it belonged to his material, and partly to insure that the audience would not be misled by Hamlet's soliloquies. The ghost vaguely intimates that the revenge cannot be immediate when he says:

The Hystorie of Hamblet, Chapter III.

The situation is precisely the same in Der Bestrafte Brudermord. Hamlet cannot get his revenge because the king is always "surrounded by many guards." In Shakespeare's 1603 Quarto, the queen, after Hamlet's return from the English voyage, sends a message to him, asking him to "be wary of his presence" lest "he fail in that he goes about."

"But howsoever thou pursuest this act3

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught.”

Hamlet's formal resolution to think of nothing but revenge suggests delay, and his binding of Horatio and Marcellus by solemn oath not to speak of the ghost has no point, if vengeance is only a few hours off. The final promise, however, unmistakably suggests necessary delay. Hamlet makes his friends. swear that if perchance hereafter he shall think meet to feign insanity, they will not at such times in gesture or in speech indicate that they could explain if they would. Note that Hamlet does not, as critics generally assume, decide on the spur of the moment to feign insanity. The idea occurs to him: he thinks he may adopt it, but he puts it by for deliberation. All this inevitably implies, not to-day or to-morrow, but a necessarily indefinite future date for the revenge.

The pretence of insanity could suggest only one idea to an Elizabethan audience a design on the part of the hero to protect his life while he engaged in a long and difficult undertaking. In the original story it is explicitly stated that Hamlet feigned madness, as did Lucius Junius Brutus and David (see I Samuel xxi, 10-15), so as to be enabled to carry out his plans in safety. Antonio in Antonio's Revenge disguises himself in a fool's dress because the duke will not pay spies to "dog a fool's act." Flamineo in The White Devil feigns insanity to "keep off idle questions." Titus Andronicus and Hieronimo both find the pretence of madness useful; and Hamlet certainly had some notion of protecting his life in the furthering of difficult projects when he "put an antic disposition on." The main point, however, is that the pretence of insanity clearly connected Shakespeare's Hamlet with the original story and with the other revenge plays, and unequivocally suggested to an Elizabethan audience that external difficulties existed, making delay necessary.

This suggests the spectral command in Antonio's Revenge ("Invent some stratagem of revenge") where, as already pointed out, the ghost assumes that delay is necessary. It is interesting to note that Shakespeare's ghost ends with "Remember me" and Marston's with "Remember this." Dr. Bradley's suggestion that the ghost feared that Hamlet would forget seems far-fetched.

*Like Antonio's in Antonio's Revenge.