speare, whose interest was primarily in character, retarded the action chiefly by making Hamlet the kind of man who would remain inactive while others achieved their end. To admit this, however, is not to grant that Hamlet was infirm of will or a weak weaver of pretexts or a melancholy dolt overwhelmed in bestial oblivion. Inaction is often to a man's credit, and, despite the world's valuation, rational and moral action is of higher value than more spectacular behaviour.

This is not the place for a complete analysis of Hamlet's temperament, but attention may be called to three outstanding characteristics which are sufficient to account for his delay,his reason, his conscience, and his passion. No one doubts that Hamlet was reflective. His mother seems to him worse than a beast that lacks "discourse of reason;" his famous panegyric on man centres in the thought "how noble in reason;" and perhaps the profoundest thing he says in the play is

"Sure, He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and godlike reason

To fust in us unus'd."

Some persons have even accused Hamlet of "thinking too precisely on the event." But he levels this charge against himself only in a soliloquy of unfair self-reproach. The play does not exhibit him at any point as calculating all the remotest possibilities of a deed before performing it. On the contrary, when occasionally he tips the scale of well-balanced reason, he errs on the side of impulsiveness. That Hamlet is a man of conscience, always desirous of doing the right thing, is apparent throughout the play. Even the king describes him as "most generous and most free from all contriving." And, finally, his passion, as has been shown, burns whenever his displeasure is aroused and flames fiercely when he thinks of his uncle. It is almost the only infirmity of a noble nature.

The first period of delay is due to the inhibition of sober reason and a just conscience. Hamlet and Horatio and Marcellus doubted the ghost's honesty from the beginning, and if fifty opportunities for revenge had offered, a man of Hamlet's temperament could not have undertaken the awful responsibility of killing a king without real proof of his guilt. Not till the middle of Act III does Hamlet get his evidence. Then he is

given a chance to stab the king at prayer, but he puts it by because of his passionate hatred so clearly shown on many occasions. He can see no satisfactory revenge in sending his uncle to heaven. Not too much reason but too much savagery delays the action here. Had Hamlet been less passionate he might have secured his revenge and prevented all the train of evils that now begin. From this time on to the end, external difficulties of a very tangible kind retard the action. The king knows Hamlet's intentions and takes means to thwart them. Hamlet is practically a prisoner in the first part of Act IV, and in the rest he is out of the country. By reason of his alertness and prowess, however, he manages to return to Denmark (Act V), and on the same day secures a maimed revenge.

Thus partly circumstances and partly character retard the revenge. The external difficulties, however, might possibly have been overcome by a man of entirely different temperament. Yet even the fiery Laertes, moved to armed rebellion by the mysterious death of his father, fell a bewildered victim to the subtle wiles of the king; and it is far from clear that Hamlet who was under surveillance could have gained his ends by force. In any case, however, he was constitutionally estopped from adopting Laertes' plan, not because he could not act, but because sober reason told him that insurrections usually fail. It was not a question of will but of sense. Hamlet knew that "our indiscretion sometimes serves us well;" but he knew also that it often serves us ill, and his reason utterly forbade such a devil-may-care indiscretion as served Laertes only because the king wished to use him as a tool. Hamlet was never weak or despondently inactive; he did not waste his powers in filmy reflection barren of manly endeavour. Far from being inert, he was vigorously active; instead of being indifferent to the progress of events in an evil world, he was over passionate. Above all, save when anger made him forget himself, he was prone to act only when reason and conscience approved. In the life of such a person, occasions will always arise when the "low world" with its coarse custom of measuring only "things done, that took the eye and had the price," will pass its summary sentence of condemnation. A higher tribunal, however, will reverse the judgment.

A few problems remain. What was the purpose of the melancholy? In the first place, it is partly conventional: it appears in the original story and it runs an established course throughout the revenge plays where it possesses almost every person who has been visited by great grief or disillusionment. In The Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo sees the world only as "a mass of public wrongs." Alexandro in the same play is content to leave the world "with whom there nothing can prevail but wrong." In The Malcontent Pietro longs for the last day to "drop on our curs'd heads" for

"All is damnation: wickedness extreme.
There is no faith in man."

Malevole exclaims, "World! 't is the only region of death, the greatest shop of the devil; the cruelest prison of men.

There's nothing perfect in it but extreme, extreme calamity." In Antonio's Revenge, the hero finds that a "golden ass" and a "babbled fool" get all the world's rewards,

"Whilst pale cheek'd wisdom, and lean ribb'd art
Are kept in distance at the halbert's point."

If Shakespeare had not made Hamlet talk in some such strain, his audience would have considered him abnormal. The melancholy, however, is turned to account in motiving Hamlet's fear of illusions, and so indirectly in retarding the action. But this done, we hear very little more about it. That it transformed Hamlet from an energetic to an apathetic character, making him literally forget the ghost's commission, as Dr. Bradley alleges, is not suggested in the text; and in view of its conventional use in other revenge plays could not occur to an audience. Hamlet's melancholy is no more significant than Job's.

What is the explanation of the unfounded self-reproaches? Partly the melancholy; partly impatience and passion; chiefly the consciousness that someone else could have accomplished the revenge more promptly. A less scrupulous man would have taken the ghost's word; a less bitter but more impulsive man would have killed the king at prayer, satisfied with such revenge as chance offered; a man who in a blind rage could rush. at his adversary careless of consequences might have reached even the resourceful Claudius, in spite of the precautions which the knowledge of danger made him take. All this Hamlet

knew, and the thought tortured him into self-condemnation. A clear example of the way in which he is torn with doubt regarding the adequacy of his ethical and rational ideals and almost forced into pragmatism appears in his last great soliloquy. Consider the circumstances. Even the captain of the army admits that the expedition against Poland has no basis in reason, as the plot of land in dispute is not worth five ducats; and Hamlet, oppressed with the folly of sacrificing more than "two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats" for "this straw", diagnoses in the body politic an inward ulcer resulting from the corruptions of much wealth and peace. Then follows the soliloquy, in which he abruptly shifts his point of view. He wonders now if his prudent rationality is not chiefly cowardice and wishes that he were like Fortinbras who takes no thought of before and after but

"Makes mouths at the invisible event,

Exposing what is mortal and unsure

To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell."

Hamlet decides that the way to be great is to disregard reason and "to find quarrel in a straw" in questions of honour. Thus for the moment he envies the man who can get things done even if the performance outrages prudence and ethics. But this attitude of mind is quite out of harmony with his reflection of a few minutes earlier and with all the fundamental things of his character.

To Hamlet, in his first soliloquy, the world is "an unweeded garden," wholly occupied with "things rank and gross in nature." The same idea appears in the suicide soliloquy where he laments

"The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes."

And what chance has Hamlet or his kind in a world where "things rank and gross in nature possess it merely?" The finer spirits in this play are three, and they represent as many attitudes towards their untoward environment. Ophelia silently conforms to the world, but she loses her reason and her life. Horatio quietly goes his own way, philosophically accepting the

good and the evil; he lives and he lets live. Hamlet alone makes a struggle. He gains here and he loses there. But he finds on the whole that he is not best fitted to achieve material ends. The grosser spirits in the play are three also. Fortinbras, the best of them, is a youth "of unimproved mettle hot and full" who will sell his soul and the chief good of his time for a bauble that men call honour. His course is irrational but great rewards attend his way. Laertes has many of the "taints of liberty," "a fiery mind," "unreclaimed blood," impulsiveness. He is absolutely indifferent to the consequences of his act and not too scrupulous as to the means. "Let come what comes," the act's the thing. Claudius is in striking contrast; he has strong self-control and much subtlety; but when he wants a thing a woman or a crown or physical safety-he will get it promptly, by the nearest way consistent with safety, without regard to "conscience and grace."

The three last are they who obtain the world's rewards. One of them is a soldier concerned with honour; another is a pursuer of pleasure and selfish ends; the third, in spite of some good qualities, is, in Hotspur's phrase, a "damned politician." Hamlet is none of these, though he sometimes frets because he is not. He is the child of reason and of conscience, passionately indignant because "things rank and gross possess the earth." He cannot fight with the world's weapons though he Occasionally snatches one; but he makes a valiant struggle with his own and the contest is full of tragic interest.

Shakespeare may have put much of himself into this play. In the period of the "joyful comedies," he seemed to find life good as Hamlet had once found it. In the period of the great tragedies, extending from about 1601 to 1608, the clouds seem to hang on him. If Professor Dowden and others are right in this regard, Shakespeare's disillusionment found its earliest expression in Hamlet. Like Marston,' then, he may have written his tragedy not for one

"nuzzled twixt the breasts of happiness Who winks and shuts his apprehension up

From common sense of what men were, and are,"

Prologue to Antonio's Revenge.