The Tragedie of Hamlet

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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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