To the common public ‘Hamlet’ is a famous piece by a famous poet, with crime, a ghost, battle, and carnage; and that is sufficient. To the youthful enthusiast ‘Hamlet’ is a piece handling the mystery of the universe, and having throughout cadences, phrases, and words full of divinest Shakespearean magic; and that, too, is sufficient. To the pedant, finally, ‘Hamlet’ is an occasion for airing his psychology; and what does pedant require more? But to the spectator who loves true and powerful drama, and can judge whether he gets it or not, ‘Hamlet’ is a piece which opens, indeed, simply and admirably, and then: "The rest is puzzle"!

The reason is, apparently, that Shakespeare conceived this play with his mind running on Montaigne, and placed its action and its hero in Montaigne’s atmosphere and world. What is that world? It is the world of man viewed as a being ondoyant et divers, balancing and indeterminate, the plaything of cross motives and shifting impulses, swayed by a thousand subtle influences, physiological and pathological. Certainly the action and hero of the original Hamlet story are not such as to compel the poet to place them in this world and no other, but they admit of being placed there, Shakespeare resolved to place them there, and they lent themselves to his resolve. The resolve once taken to place the action in this world of problem, the problem became brightened by all the force of Shakespeare’s faculties, of Shakespeare’s subtlety. ‘Hamlet’ thus comes at last to be not a drama followed with perfect comprehension and profoundest emotion, which is the ideal for tragedy, but a problem soliciting interpretation and solution.

It will never, therefore, be a piece to be seen with pure satisfaction by those who will not deceive themselves. But such is its power and such is its fame that it will always continue to be acted, and we shall all of us continue to go and see it.

"Hamlet Once More." Pall Mall Gazette. Dec. 6, 1884. Letters of an Old Playgoer. 1919. Chap. V.

c.2000
Alexander Pogrebinsky II
lxhamlet@hotmail.com Hamlet