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FINIS.
[Footnote 1: 'which must now be claimed'--except the Quarto be right
here also.]
[Footnote 2: The Quarto surely is right here.]
[Footnote 3: --Hamlet's mouth. The message he entrusted to Horatio for
Fortinbras, giving his voice, or vote, for him, was sure to 'draw on
more' voices.]
[Footnote 4: 'lest more mischance happen in like manner, through plots
and mistakes.']
[Footnote 5: 'had he been put forward'--had occasion sent him out.]
[Footnote 6: 'to have proved a most royal soldier:'--A soldier gives
here his testimony to Hamlet's likelihood in the soldier's calling. Note
the kind of regard in which the Poet would show him held.]
[Footnote 7: --the passage of his spirit to its place.]
[Footnote 8: --military mourning or funeral rites.]
[Footnote 9: imperative mood: 'let the soldier's music and the rites
of war speak loudly for him.' 'Go, bid the souldiers shoote,' with which
the drama closes, is a more definite initiatory order to the same
effect.]
[Footnote 10: The end is a half-line after a riming couplet--as if there
were more to come--as there must be after every tragedy. Mere poetic
justice will not satisfy Shakspere in a tragedy, for tragedy is life;
in a comedy it may do well enough, for that deals but with
life-surfaces--and who then more careful of it! but in tragedy something
far higher ought to be aimed at. The end of this drama is reached when
Hamlet, having attained the possibility of doing so, performs his work
in righteousness. The common critical mind would have him left the
fatherless, motherless, loverless, almost friendless king of a
justifiably distrusting nation--with an eternal grief for his father
weighing him down to the abyss; with his mother's sin blackening for him
all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven and earth; and with
the knowledge in his heart that he had sent the woman he loved, with her
father and her brother, out of the world--maniac, spy, and traitor.
Instead of according him such 'poetic justice,' the Poet gives Hamlet
the only true success of doing his duty to the end--for it was as much
his duty not to act before, as it was his duty to act at last--then
sends him after his Ophelia--into a world where true heart will find
true way of setting right what is wrong, and of atoning for every ill,
wittingly or unwittingly done or occasioned in this.
It seems to me most admirable that Hamlet, being so great, is yet
outwardly so like other people: the Poet never obtrudes his greatness.
And just because he is modest, confessing weakness and perplexity, small
people take him for yet smaller than themselves who never confess
anything, and seldom feel anything amiss with them. Such will adduce
even Hamlet's disparagement of himself to Ophelia when overwhelmed with
a sense of human worthlessness (126), as proof that he was no hero!
They call it weakness that he would not, foolishly and selfishly, make
good his succession against the king, regardless of the law of election,
and careless of the weal of the kingdom for which he shows himself so
anxious even in the throes of death! To my mind he is the grandest hero
in fiction--absolutely human--so troubled, yet so true!]
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