FHE SECRET -i, 
 OF HAMLET I 
 
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
THE SECRET OF HAMLE 
 
 PRINCE OF DENMARK. 
 
 BY 
 
 SOUTH G. PRESTON. 
 
 CINCINNATI, OHIO. 
 
 Thb Kditoe. Publishing Compait?, 
 
 No. 337 Pike Building. 
 
 TWO COPIES RECEIVED 
 
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 copyright. 1897 . by 
 The Editor Pubushinq Company. 
 
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 (3)- 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Arcanum of the Word * Hamlet' 7 
 
 II. The Art of Shakespeare ... 18 
 
 III. The Apparition . . -29 
 
 IV. Hamlet and Ophelia . . , 38 
 V. Hamlet and Ophelia (Continued) . 51 
 
 VI. Hamlet and Horatio ... 63 
 
 VII. The Secret of Hamlet . 76 
 
 VIII. The Play Within The Play . 88 
 
 IX. Hamlet and the Cherub . . loi 
 
 X. Death of Hamlet .... in 
 
 XI. Horatio and Ophelia .... 120 
 
 Epilogue ..... 132 
 
 (5) 
 
MOTTOES. 
 
 Act first, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe 
 You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
 
 And yet be patient. One Playwright may show. 
 In some fifth act, what this wild drama means. 
 
 —Tennyson, *' The Play." 
 
 Antonio. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. 
 
 It wearies me; you say, it wearies you; 
 
 But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, 
 
 What stuff 't is made of, whereof it is born, 
 
 I am to learn ; 
 
 And such a war*:-wit sadness makes of me, 
 
 That I have much ado to know myself. 
 ***** 
 Gratiano. You look not well, Signior Antonio ; 
 
 You have too much respect upon the world : 
 
 They lose it, that do buy it with much care. 
 
 Believe me you are marvellously chang'd. 
 Antonio. I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; 
 
 A stage, where every man must play a part, 
 
 And mine a sad one. 
 — Shakespeare, " The Merchant of Venice." 
 
 My mystery is for me, and for the sons of my house. — 
 Saying attributed to Jesus in Clem. Alex. Strom, v. lo, 64. 
 
 His care to guide his fiock and feed his lambs. 
 By words, works, prayers, psalms, alms, and anagrams. 
 
 — Cotton Mather. 
 
 (6) 
 
THE SECRET OF HAMLET, 
 
 I. 
 
 THE ARCANUM OF THE WORD 'HAMLET/ 
 
 The word ' Hamlet ' reveals to the initiated the 
 secret of the character of the hero of the myste- 
 rious play of Shakespeare entitled, ' Hamlet, 
 Prince of Denmark.' The name is evidently ana- 
 grammatized from the name 'Amleth,' of Icelandic 
 origin, which is derived from the Norse aml^ toil 
 (still used, colloquially in Icelandic, amla^ to toil), 
 and lothi, devoted to, and probably has reference 
 to his mythic impersonation of the endless toil and 
 travail of the sea. In modern Icelandic the word 
 amlothi is a regular equivalent for an idiotic or 
 stupid man. So, in the very beginning, the pro- 
 phetic character of the person named ' Hamlet,' 
 and the assumed role of this typical Man, is inti- 
 mated in the name 'Amleth.' 
 
 Life itself is the mysterious sea on which Man — 
 Humanity — toils and sails in the little body-ship of 
 the human spirit; and 'Amlothi' or 'Amleth' is 
 a person devoted to toil in journeying over the 
 * sea of life.' 
 
 Shakespeare intensified and enlarged the mean- 
 
 (7) 
 
8 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 ing of the word 'Amleth,' so that his word should 
 intimate his intensified and enlarged view of life. 
 
 * Hamlet ' is Shakespeare — his word, logos — the 
 revelation of his philosophy of life ; the only- 
 begotten name of his genius ; the Man through 
 whom he reveals himself to the world. 
 
 There is a close relation between philosophy and 
 literature ; the greatest masters in philosophy have 
 also been the greatest masters in literature. Plato, 
 in his philosophy, gave voice to 
 
 * * " the prophetic soul of the wide world, 
 Dreaming on things to come," 
 
 and expressed the prophetic hopes and longings of 
 the human soul, for the want which has been sup- 
 plied by the revelation of the light of the world. 
 
 And in ' Hamlet ' Shakespeare appears in litera- 
 ture as the most articulate voice, crying from the 
 profound depths of universal human experience, 
 in despairing thunder-tones, for the Savior of 
 ' thought ' and ' life ; ' for one whose knowledge 
 and life will save thought from insanity, and life 
 from death. 
 
 The fact of human sin is recognized by the con- 
 science and consciousness of men ; and most 
 clearly attested in the highest forms of literature, 
 as in the ' Odyssey ' of Homer, the ' ^neid ' of 
 Virgil, and the ' Hamlet ' of Shakespeare. 
 
 Sin is the contradiction of life, the subversion 
 of energy, the unreality of life, the movement of 
 an empty masquerade ; and when once conscience 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 9 
 
 awakens to the sense of sin, with discord and 
 death, there comes for it no obliteration — 
 
 **Nor poppy, nor mandragora, 
 Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
 Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
 Which thou owedst yesterday." 
 
 The Actor says in that awful tragedy . ' 
 
 " I 'gin to be aweary o' the sun." 
 
 This, in human experience, is the drear of sin, 
 that in the gathering night yet discerns through 
 the baleful shadows its own discord. This becomes 
 its intolerable burden and its torment. 
 
 Shakespeare anagrammatized ' Amleth ' into 
 * Hamlet ' by transposing the final letter h and 
 placing it first in the name 'Hamlet.' The pur- 
 pose of this anagrammatization is not explained by 
 the suggestion of euphony. Camden (Remains, 
 7th ed., 1674) defines ' Anagrammatisme ' as *' a 
 dissolution of a name truly written into his letters, 
 as his elements, and a new connection of it by arti- 
 ficial transposition, without addition, subtraction, 
 or change of any letter, into different words, mak- 
 ing some perfect sense applyable to the person 
 named." 
 
 This old English definition indicates the purpose 
 of Shakespeare, who, desiring a name concealing, 
 yet revealing to the * initiate,' the character of the 
 Hero of his Tragedy, found in the word ' Hamlet ' 
 the name that felicitously displayed to perfection 
 the ' applyable sense ' he desired. The * Eliza- 
 bethan Age ' was not averse to what might be 
 
lO The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 justly styled the 'Anagrammatic craze.' 'Eleanor 
 Audley,' wife of Sir John Davies, is said to have 
 been brought before the High Commission in 1634 
 for extravagances, stimulated by the discovery that 
 her name could be transposed to ' Reveale, O 
 Daniel,' and to have been laughed out of court by 
 another anagram, submitted by the Dean of the 
 Arches — ' Dame Eleanor Davies,' ' Never soe mad a 
 ladie.' 
 
 *' Perhaps," says a recent author, " the only prac- 
 tical use to which anagrams have been turned is to 
 be found in the transpositions in. which some of the 
 astronomers of the seventeenth century embodied 
 their discoveries, with the design apparently of 
 avoiding the risk that, while they were engaged 
 in further verification, the credit of what they had 
 found out might be claimed by others. Thus Galileo 
 announced his discovery that Venus had phases 
 like the moon in the form : ^Hcec immatura a me 
 jamfrustra Icguntcroy ;'' that is, *• Cynthice Jiguras 
 ccmulatur Mater Ajnorum.'' " 
 
 Indeed, there seems to be an ' anagrammatic * 
 tendency in many great writers. Pilate's ques- 
 tion, ^ ^uid est Veritas?'' has been changed into 
 'Sst Vir qui adest; ' ' Horatio Nelson ' into 
 'Honor est a Nilo; ' ' Florence Nightingale ' into 
 ' Flit on, cheering angel ; ' 'James Stuart ' into 'A 
 just master ; ' and ' Charles James Stuart ' into 
 ' Claimes Arthur's seat.' 
 
 The pseudonyms adopted by authors are often 
 transposed forms, more or less exact, of their 
 names; thus, * Calvinus ' becomes 'Alcuinus;' 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 1 1 
 
 * Francois Rabelais,' 'Alcofribas Nasier;' 'Bryan 
 Waller Proctor,' ' Barry Cornwall, poet ; ' ' Henry 
 Rogers,' ' R. E. H. Greyson.' 'Telliamed,' a 
 simple reversal,' is the title of a well-known work 
 by ' De Maillet.' The most remarkable pseudonym 
 of this class is the name ' Voltaire,' which the 
 celebrated philosopher assumed instead of his fam- 
 ily name, Francois Marie Arouet, and which is now 
 generally allowed to be an anagram of 'Arouet I. J./ 
 that is, Arouet the younger (lejeune, the younger). 
 
 The name ' Voltaire ' resolves itself into ' O alte 
 virP (O noble man!) Disraeli bears in his name 
 evidence of his capacity for swaying men. ' I lead, 
 sir,' is not at all an inaccurate commentary on his 
 history. John Abernethy, by anagrammatization, 
 is described as 'Johnny the Bear ;' Randle Holmes, 
 the author of a book upon the subject of Heraldry, 
 'Lo! Men's Herald;' the astronomer, ' moon- 
 starer;' telegraph, ' a great help;' astronomers will 
 never claim that they have ' no more stars ' to 
 examine. 
 
 Of the poet Waller, some brother poet has said : 
 
 " His brows need not with laurel to be bound, 
 Since in his name with lawrel is he crowned." 
 
 Cranshawe and Car were great friends, and after 
 the death of the former, the latter acted as his post- 
 humous editor. While engaged in this work, he 
 discovered to his joy that his friend's name could 
 be read, 'He was Car.' Touched to find that 
 the unity of their thoughts was thus typified by 
 their unity of name, he wrote the following lines : 
 
12 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 ♦* Was Car then Cranshawe, or was Cranshawe Car, 
 Since both within one name combined are? 
 
 '• Yes, Car's Cranshawe, he Car; 'tis love alone 
 Which melts two hearts, of both composing one." 
 
 Christianity is accurately described in the words, 
 ' it's in charity.' 
 
 The old Hebrew augurs, and Plato and the phi- 
 losophers who succeeded him, placed great faith in 
 the virtue of anagrams ; and the Puritan writer, 
 Cotton Mather, writes in a couplet contained in an 
 elegy on the death of John Wilson : 
 
 *' His care to guide his flock and feed his lambs. 
 By words, works, prayers, psalms, alms, and anagrams." 
 
 The latest illustration of simple reversal is in 
 the title of a philosophical work of fiction, entitled 
 'Etidorhpa,' — or 'The End of Earth' — a reversal 
 of 'Aphrodite,' name of the beautiful sea-born 
 being of the Greeks ; and a like inversion of 
 method, 'Aphrodite,' or the Pure Love-passion of 
 the race, lies hidden as the bottom principle and 
 motif of this marvellous story. With this key, 
 * Etidorhpa ' is the End of Earth — the summation 
 and final fact and principle of all that is to be 
 sought for and desired in this human sphere ; Eti- 
 dorpha, the beautiful Spirit and Myth of Love. 
 
 So, in 'Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,' Shake- 
 speare reveals the motif of the tragedy in the ana- 
 grammatized name, ' Hamlet.' 
 
 The esoteric meaning of ' Hamlet ' is explained 
 by dividing the word into three parts, for the pur- 
 pose of definition, and then replacing the three 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 13 
 
 definitions in order. The first part is the letter 
 'H.' Its form suggests spirit — being formed by- 
 two perpendicular lines ( | | ) , united by one hori- 
 zontal line ( — ), and thus forming the letter ' H.* 
 It is an ' aspirate ' — a spirate, spirit — equivalent to 
 ' breath,' life. 
 
 There was a significance in the change of the 
 names of Abram and Sarai into Abraham and 
 Sarah. It was the addition of the letter h that 
 gave the significance, giving a larger meaning to 
 the two words, as these two persons, who were 
 really one, by faith received more life and char- 
 acter than could be defined by the words 'Abram ' 
 and ' Sarai.' One of the two ruling consonants 
 was taken from the name 'Jehovah,' and added 
 to the two names 'Abram' and 'Sarai,' because 
 these persons by obedience were made more 
 divine. The consona7its contain the meaning of 
 words. There is an alphabet of principles as well 
 as of forms ; the former is the spirit of the letters. 
 "As by the arrangement and rearrangement of the 
 signs of the literal alphabet into words, and these 
 in turn into sentences, we give an intellectual 
 expression to our thought and purpose, so it is pos- 
 sible to combine and build into our lives the units 
 that compose the Alphabet of Principles. Thus 
 will the Word become flesh, and expression be 
 given to the thought of God concerning man, that 
 creation of Adam in the Divine Mind, perfect 
 from the first and yet requiring time and space and 
 growth of cell and soul for its evolution or out- 
 working." 
 
14 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 As Jehovah gave to Abram a letter from His 
 name, signifying imparted thought and life, so 
 Shakespeare gave to 'Amleth,' by rearrangement, 
 the letter //" from his name, because in the ideal 
 Hamlet he put his deepest thought and life into 
 the conception of this typical hero. The name and 
 form of this letter ZTis that of a w^indow, or place 
 through which the light comes, the root and ideal 
 meaning of which is to see, to behold — signifying 
 Perception, the basis of all knowledge. H^ then, 
 is a spirit, with two /'^ — a double consciousness, 
 one person. This is Man, a living spirit : two 
 selves, a higher and lower self, united in one per- 
 sonality. 
 
 The second part of the divided word ' Hamlet ' 
 is the little word ' am,' the first person of ' to be,' 
 signifying ' being.' 
 
 The third part is the little word ' let ' — to hinder, 
 to hold, to restrain ; hindrance. Shakespeare illus- 
 trates the meaning of the word when Horatio and 
 Marcellus endeavor to keep Hamlet from following 
 the ghost : 
 
 *' My fate cries out, 
 
 And makes each petty artery in this body 
 
 As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. 
 
 Still am I called.— Unhand me, gentlemen; 
 
 By Heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me ! 
 
 I say, away! Goon; I'll follow thee." 
 
 This incident is an arcane epitome of the secret 
 of Hamlet. Horatio and Marcellus are holding 
 the struggling Hamlet, who wants to follow the 
 Ghost, the supernatural power whose command is 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 15 
 
 law. This is the outward expression of the inner 
 struggle that Hamlet experiences when his will is 
 influenced by the two selves — the higher and the 
 lower self. Tennyson decribes the 'Two Voices,' 
 that cry unto Man : 
 
 " A still small voice spake unto me : 
 ' Thou art so full of misery, 
 Were it not better not to be?' 
 
 *' Then to the still small voice I said : 
 ' Let me not cast in endless shade 
 What is so wonderfully made.' " 
 
 Placing these definitions together in order, the 
 esoteric meaning of the word ' Hamlet ' is revealed. 
 Hamlet is a Player, acting the part of Humanity, 
 in a play representing Man's spiritual life struggles 
 within the circumscribed conditions of this world, 
 under the conscious pressure of the supernatural. 
 Man — every man, living, toiling man, who when 
 he would do good, has a consciousness of the 
 presence of evil : 
 
 "For the good that I would, I do not; but the 
 evil which I would not, that I do " — the confession 
 of St. Paul's interior life struggle. Shakespeare 
 and St. Paul give analogous explanations for the 
 contradictions of life. St. Paul explains : 
 
 *' Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, 
 but sin that dwelleth in me." 
 
 And Shakespeare causes Hamlet to explain his 
 actions to Laertes : 
 
i6 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 "Give me your pardon, sir: I've done you wrong; 
 But pardon 't, as you are a gentleman. 
 This presence knows, 
 
 And you must needs have heard, how I am punished 
 With sore distraction. What I have done. 
 That might your nature, honour, and exception 
 Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. 
 Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet: 
 If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, 
 And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, 
 Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it. 
 Who does it, then? His madness : if 'the so, 
 Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd; 
 His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy." 
 
 And this is Hamlet — Humanity hindered — limi- 
 ted by nature ; conscious of the inner struggle be- 
 tween the natural and spiritual man ; the inner con- 
 flict of Will and Passion. 
 
MOTTOES. 
 
 Who taught you this? 
 i learned it out of women's faces. 
 
 — Shakespeare, *' Winter's Tale." 
 
 Poems are painted window panes. 
 
 If one looks from the square into the church, 
 
 Dusk and dimness are his gains — 
 
 Sir Philistine is left in the lurch; 
 
 The sight, so seen, may well enrage him, 
 
 Nor anything henceforth assuage him. 
 
 But come just inside what conceals ; 
 Cross the holy threshold quite — 
 All at once 'tis rainbow-bright, 
 Device and story flash to light, 
 A gracious splendor truth reveals. 
 This to God's children is full measure, 
 It edifies and gives you pleasure. 
 
 — Goethe. 
 
 (17) 
 
II. 
 
 THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Shakespeare represents the human mind as 
 lying not under the dominion of one despotic 
 propensity, but under a mixed government, in 
 which many powers contend for mastery. Accord- 
 ing to this view, Hamlet would signify a collection 
 of persons — a small village, without a governing 
 municipal power. Esoterically, the word would 
 signify a collection of faculties and passions — ' out 
 of joint ' — a little Cosmos under the co-ordinating 
 responsibility and conscious pressure of a larger 
 Macrocosm — a mysterions Denmark that holds the 
 Prince a prisoner. 
 
 ' Denmark is a prison ' — to Hamlet — and this 
 Prince, heir apparent to the throne of inner domin- 
 ion is really a struggling spirit in a Denmark-body 
 of 'too, too solid flesh.' Hamlet is a kingdom 
 within, an inner kingdom at war with itself; dif- 
 ferent passions and powers desiring to rule. 
 
 " The spiritual ruler within the mind is Reason; 
 its executive is the Will ; the subordinate forces are 
 the passions, which, like a turbulent democracy, 
 determine action by their influence upon the reason 
 and the will." Hamlet is only Prince of Denmark 
 — not King ; he ought to rule, but he does not. The 
 inner throne has no permanent ruler; sometimes 
 
 (i8) 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 19 
 
 Reason rules ; then passion ; then some other 
 influence ; now conscience, then circumstance ; now 
 the potential spiritual man, now the developed 
 natural man. 
 
 ' Hamlet ' is the tragedy of Doubt, the inner 
 tragedy of life, the outer representations of the 
 inner struggles of the interior life of Humanity. 
 Man is ' out of joint,' his faculties disarranged. 
 He is out of harmony with himself ; his will and 
 passions contend against his conscience and reason. 
 * There is something rotten in the State of Den- 
 mark,' something that has disarranged the faculties 
 of Man. Man does not obey conscience ; he 
 answers in the negative to the divine affirmative 
 within ; he chooses the wrong, and thus violates 
 the law of his being ; and he thus has a sense of 
 ill-desert, and feels that the nature of things is 
 against him, and cries : 
 
 *' The time is out of joint — O cursed spite, 
 That ever I was born to set it right ! " 
 
 But he is born without his consent into this condi- 
 tion, and if he would consent to follow the still 
 small voice within, he would be led into harmony 
 with himself and his environment. In one of his 
 sonnets, Shakespeare says : 
 
 •' Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
 Fool'd by those rebel powers that thee array, 
 Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, 
 Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? 
 Why so large cost, having so short a lease. 
 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? 
 Shall worms, inheritors of this excess. 
 Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end? 
 
30 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, 
 
 And let that pine to aggravate thy store ; 
 
 Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross ; 
 
 Within be fed, without be rich no more; 
 
 So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, 
 
 And death once dead, there's no more dying then." 
 
 " There may be a root of righteousness of life that is 
 deeper than the root of evil. Though it be not our discov- 
 ery, it may be discovered to us. The conviction of sin may 
 come with the conviction of righteousness, and with the 
 discrimination of evil, in the judgment, that is, the coming 
 of the light." 
 
 ' ' Through sin the will is unf ree, and is brought 
 into subjection to that which is external, and injury- 
 may be done to others in their relations in life. It 
 defeats personality, and thwarts the true develop- 
 ment of man. From the internal point of view^ 
 there are rudiments and survivals in the mind 
 which are to be excluded from that 7ne, whose free 
 action tends to progress ; that baneful strife tvhick 
 lurketh inborn in us is the foe of freedom ; this let 
 not a 7nan stir up, but avoid and fee. This is pre- 
 sented not only as the result of experience, but as 
 the resultant of the knowledge of human nature 
 derived from observation. The phrase, which will 
 hold its place on historical grounds, as descriptive 
 of those forces which hinder from action that me, 
 is the bondage of sin. Whatever may be our 
 theories, the science of theology asks no more than 
 to be supplied with these postulates ; and it may 
 hold that something deeper, yes, diviner in that me, 
 may be traced beneath rudiments and survivals ; 
 and still sin is alie^i to man, as it is an alienation 
 
The Sec7'et of Hamlet. 21 
 
 from God, and that baneful strife which is a foe to 
 freedo7n, which man is to avoid and flee, is another 
 conflict than the struggle for existence on this 
 earth, and out of it is that freedom wrought, which 
 is fulfilled in a life that does not have its consum- 
 mation in death." 
 
 When Hamlet confesses that he is mad, he speaks 
 of a moral madness. And in approaching the 
 causes of his deep thought, and, in the description 
 of the internal discord in Hamlet's soul, Shake- 
 speare goes deeper than the mere artist ; he reveals 
 his own thought, heart, and life, and one can almost 
 hear him say: "He that hath known Hamlet's 
 secret, hath known Shakespeare's." 
 
 Emerson says : " Shakespeare is the only biogra- 
 pher of Shakespeare, and even he can tell nothing, 
 except to the Shakespeare in us ; that is, to our 
 most apprehensive and sympathetic hour." Again 
 he says : "It was not until the nineteenth century, 
 whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, 
 that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wonder- 
 ing readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and 
 thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the 
 horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see." 
 
 " Hamlet is Man, the ideal type of that wondrous 
 assemblage of motive powers which are governed 
 by the will." In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare de- 
 scribes the struggle of generic man, whose will is 
 enforced by the will of the Supernatural Power, 
 struggling with the passions of his own nature in 
 anarchy, ambition, pride, revenge, love, and the 
 whole inner kingdom of passions — crying aloud 
 for separate dominion : 
 
22 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 •' Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
 And the first motion, all the interim is 
 Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
 The genius and the moral instruments 
 Are then in council : and the state of man, 
 Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
 The nature of an insurrection." 
 
 He who, wearied or stricken in the fight with 
 the powers of darkness, asks himself in a solitary- 
 place : ' Is it all for nothing? Shall we, indeed, 
 be overthrown ? ' he does find something which 
 may justify that thought. In such a moment of 
 utter sincerity, when a man has bared his owm soul 
 before the immensities and eternities, a presence in 
 which his own poor personality is shriveled into 
 nothingness arises within him, and says as plainly 
 as words can say : ' I am w^ith thee, and I am 
 greater than thou.' It may not concern one what 
 name, of many names, is given to this presence, if 
 it be not a mere word for which there is no reality, 
 and if it be not merely identified with the epheme- 
 ral life of humanity ; if it be a presence in and 
 with personality ; and if the personality of man be 
 not brought to nothingness, but lifted up, from 
 among the things which pass into nothingness, into 
 strength and freedom. "The deity in our bo- 
 soms," says Gervinus, " Shakespeare has bestowed 
 with intentional distinctne&s, even upon his most 
 abandoned villains, and that, too, when they deny 
 it. To nourish this spark, and not to quench it, is 
 the loud sermon of all his works." 
 
 " The burden of the imposed law of authority for 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 23 
 
 the government of human actions is not in the 
 straitness of the law, but in ourselves ; every law, 
 human or divine, must be weak through the flesh. 
 So long as we are merely trying to obey a rule, we 
 find that rule a burden ; but when we claim our 
 rights as new men, as created in Christ to good 
 works, as children of a Father in Heaven, we be- 
 come united with Him from whom laws proceed. 
 Obedience to them is recognized as a part of our 
 constitution ; disobedience is the unnatural, mis- 
 erable state." 
 
 Hamlet's unconscious cry is the cry of Humanity 
 for an absent Father ; it is the old desire of nations 
 for deliverance; for Christ, the Son of Man, in 
 whom may be seen the Father. When there comes 
 to the conscience the revelation of a reconciled and 
 reconciling God, of one who has manifested his 
 only begotten Son, bearing the burden which we 
 could not bear, taking away the sin, the moral 
 ' madness ' of the world, all is changed. That 
 which was sought in nothingness is found in a 
 Father. The death of self is the beginning of a 
 new life, of affections, energies, memories, hopes. 
 
 " There need be no disappointed ambition," says 
 Maudsley, " if a man were to set before himself a 
 true aim in life, and to work definitely for it ; no 
 envy, if he considered that it mattered not whether 
 he did a certain great thing, or some one else, if 
 only it were done ; no grief from loss of fortune, 
 if he estimated at its true value that which fortune 
 can bring him, and that which fortune can never 
 
24 The Secret of Ha7nlet. 
 
 bring him ; no wounded self-love, if he had learned 
 well the eternal lesson of life — self-renunciation." 
 ***** 
 Not only has Shakespeare veiled the meaning of 
 ' Hamlet,' in the name of the Prince ; but he gives 
 corroborating intimations in the preparation and 
 setting of the stage. He does this in a number of 
 his plays. In ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' the 
 place prophetic of the whole is a midnight wood, a 
 scene which all call a midsummer night's dream. 
 In 'As You Like It,' it is a daylight wood, with 
 spring breezes moving the half-clothed boughs ; a 
 scene and time about as one likes to see and enjoy. 
 In ' The Tempest ' it is a single weird island, 
 thrown into relief by the mysterious sea horizon, a 
 place suggestive of occult powers and persons. In 
 ji7ie^ Shakespeare sets every moral action into a 
 framework of corresponding physical likeness. 
 The tempest in King Lear's heart is linked to the 
 tempest of the elements ; the moonlight and the 
 distant music have a logical relation to the lovers' 
 hearts. In ' Macbeth ' the witches on the lonely 
 heath in 'fog and foul air,' are close to nature. 
 They begin their weird chant with ' Fair is foul, 
 and foul is fair,' in her indifference. They throw 
 into their seething cauldron, 
 
 "Eye of newt and toe of frog, 
 Wool of bat and tongue of dog, 
 Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting." 
 
 Macbeth calls to them out of the course of nature 
 in the same tone of moral indifference. Thus, 
 throughout, Shakespeare throws back into the 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 35 
 
 physical world the reflections of the moral acts 
 done within it, because he sees that in and behind 
 the physical there is a moral order on which they 
 repose. 
 
 Nature is the expression of moral realities ; the 
 physical is environed and contained by the spiritual. 
 The whole relation of man to nature runs up into 
 morals for its explanation : the uniformity of 
 natural law, when brought into contact with the 
 free will of man, means a fixed moral habit ; his 
 recurring natural wants tend to fix him in wise and 
 orderly ways that are more and higher than physi- 
 cal customs ; the uniformity of nature's forces and 
 operations have not only a moral significance, but 
 become sources and educators of moral habits. 
 Man is thus being trained as a moral being into a 
 certain affinity with the courses of nature ; the stars 
 rise and set in him ; the steadiness of gravitation is 
 reduced to a moral equivalent in his obedient heart. 
 This steadfast environment of natural law is simply 
 a plan and method, so far as it goes, for getting 
 man into a corresponding moral state — uniform but 
 free, and so tending to produce a fixed yet free 
 character, brought up at last to the nature of God 
 whose perfect freedom finds expression in the 
 uniformity of his laws. 
 
 Nature is the stage setting of the Eternal Dram- 
 aturgist ; the history of mankind, a vast and 
 sublime drama written in the invisible regions, and 
 enacted on earth, not by fictitious representations, 
 but through real events ; the personages of the 
 drama of life are true kings, emperors, heroes, and 
 
26 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 nations; the duels and gladiatorial fights are 
 gigantic wars : the object of these scenic represen- 
 tations is not an idle amusement of the spectators, 
 but the lasting benefit and improvement of the 
 human race. In this Drama of Life, Man hears 
 the command of his Father's Spirit imposing upon 
 him the commands of human duty ; and his life is 
 a struggling, hindered life, a conflict between Law 
 and Love. He is a Prince, and may be King, the 
 lower self crucified and dead, the true self may 
 then exercise dominion. 
 
 In ' Hamlet,' the visible stage slopes off into the 
 misty infinite, with a grey starless heaven over- 
 head, and Hades beneath ; the invisible world 
 painted in to complete the picture. 
 
 In the opening scene of ' Hamlet ' — the opening 
 scene of Life — the reality or the Supernatural is 
 manifested, and its effect is apparent in every word 
 and movement of the characters. There is an air 
 of mystery and a suggestion of awe in the opening 
 scene, revealing a representation of Elsinore, with 
 the agitated sentinel moving back and forth upon 
 the platform before the Castle. This is the physi- 
 cal and spiritual environment — the external coun- 
 terpart — of the inner mystery of Hamlet's soul. 
 He is in midnight darkness of mystery ; conscious 
 of the supernatural and affrighted with the ghostly 
 fears and suspicious thoughts, and feelings that 
 move across the inner stage of his heart. Francisco 
 reveals the inner feelings of Hamlet in the words, 
 
 ♦• * * 'tis bitter cold, 
 And I am sick at heart." 
 
 And then, "The keynote of the tragedy is struck 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 27 
 
 in the simple preludings of this common sentry's 
 midnight guard, to sound afterwards in ever- 
 spreading vibration through the complicated 
 though harmonious strains of Hamlet's own watch 
 through a darker and colder night than the senses 
 can feel." 
 
 ** Sick art thou — a divided will 
 Still heaping on the fear of ill 
 The fear of men, a coward still." 
 ***** 
 
 '* Who forged that other influence, 
 That heat of inward evidence, 
 By which he doubts against the sense?" 
 ***** 
 
 "' Ah ! sure within him and without. 
 Could his dark wisdom find it out, 
 There must be answer to his doubt." 
 
MOTTOES. 
 
 * * Foul deeds will rise, 
 Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. 
 
 The one remains ; the many change and pass ; 
 Heaven's light forever shines; earth's shadows fly; 
 Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
 Until death tramples it to fragments. 
 
 — Shelley, *'Adonais." 
 
 Time's glory is to calm contending kings. 
 To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light, 
 To stamp the seal of time in aged things, 
 To wake the morn and sentinel the night. 
 To vjrong the "wronger till he render right; 
 To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, 
 And smear with dust their glittering golden towers. 
 — Shakespeare, ** Rape of Lucrece." 
 
 * * 'tis bitter cold, 
 
 And I am sick at heart. 
 
 (28) 
 
III. 
 
 THE APPARITION. 
 
 The High Priest of English Literature has 
 introduced the subject of his thought, Man — ideal, 
 composite man — in the play of ' Hamlet.' It is a 
 representation of Man conscious of himself — his 
 higher and lower self; conscious of the world, not 
 himself — the spiritual and natural world ; and real- 
 izing that the higher and lower self are one person- 
 ality ; so the world of spirit and of nature are one 
 world. Hamlet represents the natural man under 
 the conscious pressure and power of the spirit 
 world : a human subject of Divine law, naturally 
 ' proud, revengeful, and ambitious.' He is the 
 Player, the Actor of Humanity ; the Revealer of 
 Shakespeare's conception of spiritual Man. He is 
 not a person, but a human instrument, a typical 
 vehicle for the expression of Shakespeare's final, 
 deepest view of life and destiny. 
 
 In 'King Lear,' Gloucester and Edmund repre- 
 sent respectively the old and the new faith of 
 Astrology ; so in all the writings of Shakespeare 
 his character and personal beliefs are revealed 
 through and represented by his noble characters. 
 But although everywhere felt, he is nowhere seen 
 in his plays. As he played the part of the Ghost 
 in Hamlet, so he is the spirit of all his creations, 
 
 (29) 
 
30 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 yet only appears occasionally, in his personal form 
 of belief and character. 
 
 An author is like in character the character he 
 causes us to love ; and the character of the litera- 
 sure produced at different periods of the author's 
 life. " As Shakespeare advances in years he 
 dwells upon the Unseen : conscience, personal 
 responsibility, the moral law, the great characters 
 of his tragedies ; and less and less, except as a foil, 
 upon the lower traits and the coarser in human 
 nature." 
 
 We love Hamlet, that concrete ' balanced criti- 
 cism of high intellectual power and subtle intensi- 
 ties of emotion not conjoined with sufficient execu- 
 tive capacity ; ' love Ophelia, and Horatio ; but can 
 we love Claudius, Polonius, or even Gertrude? 
 His faith is thus expressed in his Will: " I com- 
 mend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, 
 hoping and assuredly believing, through the only 
 merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made 
 partaker of life everlasting." 
 
 ***** 
 
 The rumor of the apparition, the appearance of 
 the Ghost, is wrapped in the larger rumor of war. 
 Preparations for attack fill the ears of ' the subject 
 of the land.' Claudius, the new king, has com- 
 passed his election, married the widow of his 
 brother, and the Court is overwhelmed with shame. 
 Hamlet has returned from Wittenberg College, and 
 is agitated, sorrowful, and horrified at the changes 
 wrought by time. 
 
 The common * honest soldier,' Francisco— the 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 31 
 
 chorus of Hamlet's heart — does not see the ghost 
 of the former King. The officers, Marcellus and 
 Bernardo, near the late King — the elder Hamlet — 
 have 'twice seen' the 'dreaded sight.' They 
 keep the news from those in station below them ; 
 will not, for reasons sufficiently obvious, speak of 
 the matter to King Claudius, Gertrude the Queen, 
 or Polonius the Lord Chamberlain. They hesitate 
 to tell Hamlet, whom they love, and believe should 
 be the occupant of the throne of Denmark, until 
 they are thoroughly convinced that it is not their 
 ' fantasy.' 
 
 To satisfy themselves and to convince Horatio, 
 the friend of Hamlet, Marcellus takes him at mid- 
 night to watch with Bernardo, and says to his 
 fellow-officer : 
 
 " Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy, 
 And will not let belief take hold of him 
 Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us ; 
 Therefore I have entreated him along 
 With us to watch the minutes of this night, 
 That if again this apparition comes, 
 He may approve our eyes and speak to it." 
 
 " Horatio. Tush, tush, 'twill not appear. 
 
 Bernardo. Sit down awhile; 
 And let us once again assail your ears, 
 That are so fortified against our story, 
 What we two nights have seen." 
 
 " Horatio. Well, sit we down, 
 And let us hear Bernardo speak of this. 
 
 Bernardo. Last night of all. 
 When yon same star that's westward from the pole 
 Had made his course to illume that part of heaven 
 Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, 
 The bell then beating one " 
 
32 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 The Ghost appears in the figure of the dead King. 
 Horatio, the scholar skeptic, though harassed with 
 ' fear and wonder,' challenges the apparition. It 
 makes no answer, seems ' offended ' and disappears. 
 Appearing again, and challenged again by Horatio 
 
 *• It lifted up its head, and did address 
 Itself to motion, like as it would speak; " 
 
 But the gaoler cock calls him and the kingly form 
 
 And then 
 
 Started like a guilty thing 
 Upon a fearful summons; " 
 
 Shrunk in haste away, 
 
 And vanished from our sight.' 
 
 What a sorrowful Ghost ! He seeks his student- 
 son Hamlet : he, and he alone, remains true to his 
 memory. A loving memory makes it possible for 
 Hamlet to hear his voice ; besides he can not trust 
 any of his court. Only Hamlet may hear his 
 message. Not Gertrude : " She has built a door- 
 less, windowless wall between them, and sees the 
 husband of her youth no more. Outside her 
 heart — that is the night in which he wanders, 
 while the palace windows are flaring, and the low 
 wind throbs to the wassail shouts; within, his 
 murderer sits by the v>^ife of his bosom, and in the 
 orchard the spilt poison is yet gnawing at the roots 
 of the daisies." No, the Ghost can see Gertrude, 
 but he can not show himself to her. Even the 
 anxious mourner does not always behold the spectre 
 of the beloved dead. No sorrow is more common 
 than the affliction of Margaret as described by 
 Wadsworth : 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 33 
 
 •' 'Tis falsely said 
 That there was ever intercourse 
 Betwixt the living and the dead, 
 For surelj then I should have sight 
 Of him I wait for day and night 
 
 With love and longings infinite." 
 
 Other conditions are necessary in order to see 
 beyond the veil : 
 
 " Dare I say 
 No spirit ever brake the band 
 That stays him from the native land, 
 
 Where first he walked when clasped in clay? 
 
 No visual shade of some one lost, 
 
 But he, the Spirit himself, may come 
 Where all the nerve of sense so numb; 
 
 Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost. 
 ***** 
 
 How pure at heart and sound in head 
 With what divine affections bold 
 Should be the man whose thought would hold 
 
 An hour's communion with the dead. 
 
 In vain shalt thou, or any, call 
 
 The spirits from their golden day, 
 Except like them, thou too canst say, 
 
 My spirit is at peace with all. 
 
 They haunt the silence of the breast, 
 Imaginations calm and fair. 
 The memory like a cloudless air, 
 
 The conscience as a sea at rest: 
 
 But when the heart is full of din, 
 
 And doubt beside the portal waits, 
 They can but listen at the gates. 
 And hear the household jar within." 
 
 The Ghost of the murdered King seeks revenge 
 — the revenge of a king and a Dane rather than 
 of a w^ronged man. He calls for public justice : 
 3 
 
34 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 not individual vengeance. The royal throne of 
 Denmark is occupied by a usurper, and the royal 
 bed has become dishonored. To put an end to 
 this the Ghost would bring the murderer to justice. 
 Death is a revealer of secrets ! There is a 
 deeper, personal wrong, for which he seeks no 
 revenge : it involves his wife ; and love desires only 
 the repentance more needful to the wronger than 
 the wronged. The Ghost charges Gertrude with 
 unfaithfulness, as the root of all his woes : 
 
 *' Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, 
 
 With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, 
 (O wucked wit and gifts that have the power 
 So to seduce !) won to his shameful lust 
 The will of my most seeming virtuous queen." 
 
 The fall of Gertrude was the beginning of all 
 his sorrows: "Through her his life was dis- 
 honored and his death violent and premature ; un- 
 huzeled, disappointed, unaneled, he woke to the 
 air — not of his orchard blossoms, but of a prison 
 house, the lightest word of whose terrors would 
 freeze the blood of the listener." 
 
 Love — love stronger than death dictates this 
 charge concerning the faithless Gertrude : 
 
 " Leave her to heaven. 
 And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, 
 To prick and sting her." 
 
 ' Leave her to heaven,' says Shakespeare, for well 
 he knows that if the fact without the form of 
 marriage, exists before 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 35 
 
 " All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
 With full and holy rite be ministered, 
 No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall 
 To make this contract grow ; but barren hate, 
 Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestow 
 The union of your bed with weeds so loathly 
 That you shall hate it both; therefore take heed 
 As Hymen's lamps shall light you." 
 
 And what tenderness causes the Ghost to exact, 
 with fourfold repetition, silence from Horatio and 
 Marcellus. 
 
 Poor Ghost — aerial, shadowy — the veiled form 
 of an almost ineffaceable sorrow ! He no more 
 appears in armor upon the walls, but in his gown 
 and in Gertrude's closet. This is his last appear- 
 ance. Invisible, yet he listens to the conversation 
 of Hamlet and Gertrude ; mistakes the tenor of her 
 looks ; fears the consequences, yet he can not com- 
 fort her; dares not, if he could, appear to her; the 
 thought of him is her one despair. The dread 
 command of the Ghost to Hamlet unexecuted as 
 yet, is only referred to by the apparition, visible to 
 Hamlet, invisible to Gertrude : 
 
 ** Do not forget this visitation 
 
 Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. 
 But, look, amazement on thy mother sits ; 
 O, step between her and her fighting soul; 
 Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. 
 Speak to her, Hamlet." 
 
 Poor Ghost! hindered, in his prison, can not — nay 
 dare not speak to Gertrude ; he must trust all things 
 to his hindered son still in the flesh, and who, like 
 
^6 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 the elder Hamlet, dare not tell the secrets of his 
 earthy prison house. 
 
 "For a few moments, sadly regardful of the 
 two, he stands — while his son seeks in vain to 
 reveal to his mother the presence of his father — a 
 few moments of piteous action, all but ruining the 
 remnant of his son's sorely harassed self-possession 
 — his whole concern his wife's distress, and neither 
 his own doom nor his son's duty; then, as if lost in 
 despair at the impassable gulf betwixt them, re- 
 vealed by her utter incapacity for even the imagi- 
 nation of his proximity, he turns away, and steals 
 out at the portal. Will his love ever lift him above 
 the pain of its loss? Will eternity ever be bliss, 
 ever be endurable to poor King Hainlet? And 
 Gertrude, will the fires ever cleanse her? These 
 questions await an answer that must not fall on 
 ears of flesh and blood." 
 
MOTTOES. 
 
 He is the half part of a blessed man, 
 Left to be finished by such as she ; 
 And she a fair divided excellence 
 Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. 
 
 — Shakespeare, '* King John." 
 
 Crushed hopes, 
 Blighted affections, benefits forgot, 
 A broken heart, and an untimely grave, 
 These form no wondrous tale : 'tis trite and common. 
 The lot of many, most of all of those 
 Who learn to crowd into a few brief years 
 Ages of feeling; as the o'er-charged pulse 
 Throbs high, and throbs no more i 
 
 (37) 
 
IV. 
 HAMLET AND OPHELIA. 
 
 ' Hamlet ' is a part of the ' book of life ; ' a 
 mysterious preparatory chapter of universal human 
 experience. His college training at Wittenberg 
 has not prepared him for life. At his ' commence- 
 ment ' he enters the University of Life, and begins 
 the hard struggle with the curricula of personal 
 experience. Experience is the great teacher of 
 Life : to touch the world at many points ; to come 
 into relation with many kinds of men ; to think, to 
 feel, and to act on a generous scale — these are 
 prime opportunities for growth. Shakespeare had 
 not only a deep knowledge of man, but knowledge 
 of men as ^vell. 
 
 Coleridge thought that the character of Hamlet 
 could be traced to his deep and accurate science in 
 mental philosophy, and that in order to understand 
 him it was essential to reflect on the constitution of 
 the human mind. 
 
 One must not, however, become the victim of 
 mere meditation, and lose the natural power of 
 action. *'The arts and sciences," says Winslow, 
 " alone have never yet civilized a nation, for they 
 are the products, and not the causes, of national 
 superiority. Moreover, the}^ concern the intellect 
 rather than the morals. Unhappily it must be 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 39 
 
 owned that piety, virtue, and self-control are not 
 the constant attendants of learning or splendid 
 genius. Something more potent than the mere 
 intellectual culture is required to be put in force 
 for the purpose of regulating the conduct of a 
 responsible being with a free will, like man, safely 
 across the stormy sea of life, from birth to death. 
 The moral sciences alone touch the relationships of 
 life. The intellectual is manifestly subordinate to 
 the spiritual. The spiritual prepares the way for 
 the intellectual, as the morning foreruns the day. 
 Without the supernatural gift of faith, the mind is 
 nothing but a hopeless mass of scientific darkness 
 and moral impurity, in continual conflict with 
 itself." 
 
 The Wittenberg College only instructed its 
 scholars ; it did not — could not educate them. 
 Hamlet was well instructed ; he was poorly edu- 
 cated ; for nothing is more dangerous than knowl- 
 edge to the mind without the capacity to make a 
 proper use of it. "An education that merely 
 instructs will encourage crime," continues Wins- 
 low. " One which co-ordinates the faculties of the 
 mind, which gives exercise to reason and judgment, 
 at the same time that it represses without ignoring 
 the instinctive part of man's nature, will elevate 
 his position in the scale of the creation, and turn 
 those faculties to the services of his fellow 
 creatures which otherwise would be employed to 
 their destruction." If the emotions be constantly 
 trampled down, and invariably subordinated to 
 reason, they will in time assert their claims, and 
 
40 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 break forth in insanity or crime; if they be con- 
 stantly indulged, the result will probably be the 
 same. *' Teach a man his duty to God, as well as 
 his obligations to his fellow men ; lead him to 
 believe that his life is not his own ; that disappoint- 
 ment and misery are the penalty of Adam's trans- 
 gression, and one from which there is no hope of 
 escaping ; and, above all, inculcate a resignation to 
 the decrees of Divine Providence. When life 
 becomes a burden, when the mind is sinking under 
 the weight of accumulated misfortune and no 
 gleam of hope penetrates through the vista of 
 futurity to gladden the heart, the intellect says : 
 * Commit suicide, and escape from a world of 
 wretchedness and woe.' The moral principle says : 
 ' Live ; it is your duty to bear with resignation the 
 afflictions that overv/helm you ; let the moral influ- 
 ence of your example be reflected in the characters 
 of those by whom you are surrounded.' " 
 
 Hamlet is a protest against the exclusive cultiva- 
 tion of the intellect, and a plea for co-ordinate heart 
 and head education. 
 
 Hamlet charges his habit of delay to 
 
 ** Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
 Of thinking too precisely on the event." 
 
 The ' craven scruple ' — the conscience which 
 renders him a coward — is the cause ; the oblivion is 
 the effect. Inaction affords relief to doubt, and 
 Hamlet desires to be sure he is right before he acts ; 
 whenever events convince, he is ready and willing 
 to act. 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 41 
 
 The subject of the play of Hamlet is the burden 
 of the mystery of life, and therefore the character 
 of Hamlet is purposely a mystery. Life must be 
 lived to be explained. 
 
 Goethe thought that Shakespeare meant to repre- 
 sent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul 
 unfit for the performance of it. It is true that 
 action in the form of deliberate revenge is to Hamlet 
 a questionable duty, peculiarly antipathetic to his 
 nature. But the great author of ' Wilhem Meister ' 
 ' looks too precisely ' on this view and fails to realize 
 that, with Hamlet — 
 
 " The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, 
 That ever I was born to set it right." 
 
 He recognizes that this world is one of moral 
 confusion and obscurity : especially the tiine in 
 which he is called ' to set it right.' 
 
 He is in love with Ophelia, and the two lovers 
 are in harmony with one another and with the 
 purest and highest impulses of their own hearts. 
 They are a pair of ' star-crossed lovers,' like Romeo 
 and Juliet^ who fell in an unequal strife, from the 
 circumstances of the outer world. Hamlet strug- 
 gles betwixt love and duty ; his malady is as deep- 
 seated in his sensibilites and in his heart as it is in 
 his brain. His intellect, however, together with 
 his deep and abiding sense of the moral qualities of 
 things, distinguishes him from Romeo. 
 
 Hamlet is quite different at the end of his short 
 life from what he was at the beginning of his real 
 life — which began at the opening of the play. He 
 is now in years of full manhood, a student of phi- 
 
42 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 losophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on the 
 things of life and death, cultured in everything 
 except the culture of active life. He is Shakespeare's 
 ideal man ; the beloved son of his genius, intro- 
 duced to the world through the baptism of a great 
 suffering — the death of his father — and driven into 
 the wilderness of life's temptations by the super- 
 natural voice from the spirit world, with its revela- 
 tion of horror, and command of revenge for the 
 dishonored majesty of Denmark. 
 
 When Horatio, a fellow student and friend of 
 Hamlet, tells him of the apparition of his father, 
 the strong will of the hero speaks : 
 
 '* If it assume mj noble father's presence, 
 I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape 
 And bid me hold my peace.'* 
 
 He keeps his resolution, for against the vehement 
 protestations of his friends he not only speaks to 
 the Ghost, but follows it : 
 
 " My fate cries out, 
 And makes each petty artery in this body 
 As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. 
 Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen ! 
 By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that let's me ! 
 I say away! — Go on; I'll follow thee." 
 
 The Ghost, who has a message for Hamlet only, 
 leads him to a secluded place and reveab the start- 
 ling truth of the unnatural alliance and murder, 
 coupled with the command of revenge, with these 
 restrictions : 
 
 ** But, however thou pursuest this act, 
 
 Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
 Against thy mother aught." 
 
The Secret of Hajnlet. 43 
 
 The supernatural will and command strengthens 
 the strong will of Hamlet, and he swears to per- 
 form the commandment for revenge and to forget 
 all things else : 
 
 " Remember thee! 
 Yea from the table of my memory 
 I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, 
 All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, 
 That youth and observation copied there ; 
 And thy commandment all alone shall live 
 Within the book and volume of my brain, 
 Unmixed with baser matter." 
 
 Horatio and Marcellus who have followed Ham- 
 let in fear, endeavor to get the revelation of the 
 Ghost, but Hamlet, who is strangely wrought upon 
 by the interview, desires solitude and time in order 
 to think out the method to pursue in fulfilling the 
 command of the Ghost : how he can accomplish 
 the mandate, without ' contriving aught ' against 
 his mother, and without ' tainting his mind.' He 
 feels his helplessness and need of prayer, and that 
 he must be about his father's business, which to 
 him has now become a duty — a duty that contends 
 against desire. To the entreaty of his friends for 
 the secret of the Ghost, he says : 
 
 " And so, without more circumstances at all, 
 I hold it fit that we shake hands and part ; 
 Tou^ as your business and desire shall point you, 
 For every man has business and desire, 
 Such as it is ; and for mine own poor part, 
 Look you, I'll go pray." 
 
 He feels that he can not go about his ' business and 
 desire,' except through the way of prayer. Ham- 
 
44 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 let has met before this, another spirit — for to him 
 Ophelia has not 'always lived upon the earth.' 
 He is a prince, an uncrowned king ; she his other 
 self, an uncrowned queen ; but from their first 
 meeting, these two have changed eyes. 
 
 ** He is the half part of a blessed man, 
 Left to be finished by such as she ; 
 And she a fair divided excellence 
 Whose fulness of perfection lies in him." 
 
 We do not see Hamlet as a lover, nor as Ophelia 
 first beheld him ; for the days when he importuned 
 her with love were before the opening of the 
 drama, before his father's spirit revisited the earth ; 
 but we behold him at once in a sea of trouble, of 
 perplexities, of agonies, of terrors. Without 
 remorse he endures all its horrors ; without guilt he 
 endures all its shame. He hates the crime he is 
 called upon to revenge ; revenge is abhorrent to his 
 nature, and he is consequently at strife with him- 
 self ; the supernatural visitation has perturbed his 
 soul to its inmost depths ; all things else, all inter- 
 ests, all hopes, all affections, appear as futile, when 
 the majestic shadow comes lamenting from its 
 place of torment ' to shake him with thoughts 
 beyond the reaches of his soul ! ' 
 
 His love for Ophelia, so utterly hopeless now ; 
 the grief of circumstances so wide and deep be- 
 tween them. He can not link his terrible destiny 
 with hers ; his great love forbids it : he can not re- 
 veal to het" — young, gentle, and innocent as she is — 
 the terrific influences which have changed the 
 whole current of his life and purposes. In his 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 4^ 
 
 distraction he overacts the painful part to which he 
 had tasked himself; he is like that judge of the 
 Areopagus who, being occupied with graver mat- 
 ters, flung from him. the little bird which had 
 sought refuge in his bosom, and with such angry- 
 violence that unwittingly he killed it. 
 
 ***** 
 Laertes, the brother of Ophelia, reveals his char- 
 acter by his warning judgment against Hamlet : 
 
 ** For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour, 
 Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, 
 A violet in the youth of primj nature, 
 Forward, not permanent; sweet, not lasting; 
 The perfume and suppliance of a minute ; 
 No more." 
 
 She replies in a tone of surprise : 
 
 ** No more, but so? 
 Laertes. Think it no more. 
 ***** 
 Perhaps he loves you now, 
 And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch 
 The virtue of his will ; but you must fear, 
 His greatness weighed, his -will is not his oivn. 
 For he himself is subject to his birth." 
 
 Immediately following this warning, the com- 
 mands of Polonius are received by Ophelia. 
 Polonius, the fault-finder in age — too often the 
 fault-doer in youth and manhood — with his world- 
 ly-wise maxims substantially forbids her ' from this 
 time forth,' to receive or even talk with ' the Lord 
 Hamlet.' 
 
 '* Ophelia. I shall obey, my lord." 
 
46 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Two months have passed — years almost to Ham- 
 let and Ophelia. Hamlet, to all save Horatio, is 
 mad — insane. There is, however, a ' method in 
 his madness.' He has, as the only fitting thing, 
 concluded to veil himself in mystery, waiting, 
 hoping, suffering, till his hour comes for action. 
 
 Before the interview with the Ghost, he was 
 filled with suspicion, shame, and grief, with 
 ' vailed lids,' longing to commune with his father, 
 and ascertain in advance the secrets behind the 
 scenery of nature and the grave. His mother 
 thus entreats him : 
 
 ** Do not forever with thy vailed lids 
 Seek for thy noble father in the dust." 
 
 Poor Hamlet, he hovered about the tomb of his 
 father, like his father's Ghost hovered about the 
 Royal Castle of Elsinore. And in his loneliness, 
 uncertainty, grief, and despair, he cries out in 
 agonizing soliloquy : 
 
 "O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, 
 Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! 
 Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
 His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! 
 How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 
 Seem to me all the uses of this world ! " 
 
 Referring to his mother, he cries : 
 
 '* Frailty, thy name is woman ! " 
 
 And expressing his fears and agony, concludes : 
 
 ** It is not, nor it can not come to good ; 
 But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue." 
 
 Hamlet could scarcely bear the presence of his 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 4-7 
 
 Uncle Claudius, and since the revelation of the 
 Ghost confirming his suspicions as felt by his ' pro- 
 phetic soul,' he resolves to appear more strange, 
 veiling his thoughts, purposes, and condition from 
 all save Horatio : for how else could he now de- 
 mean himself in the presence of the King and 
 Queen, and besides, it might prove advantageous to 
 him, and seemed to have the sanction of the Ghost ; 
 for he says : 
 
 "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
 
 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 
 
 But come; 
 
 Here, as before, never, so help you Mercy, 
 
 How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, 
 
 And perchance hereafter shall think meet 
 
 To put an antic disposition on, 
 
 That you, at such time seeing me, never shall, 
 
 With arms encumber'd thus, or this head shake; 
 
 Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase. 
 
 As ' Well, well, we know,' or ' We could, an if we would ;' 
 
 Or * If we list to speak,' or * There be an if they might,' 
 
 Or such ambiguous giving-out, to note 
 
 That you know aught of me : this not to do, 
 
 So Grace and Mercy at your most need help you. 
 
 Swear. 
 
 '■'■ Ghost. {Beneath.) Swear." 
 
 ***** 
 And poor Ophelia ! how she has struggled with 
 love and duty ; the command of her father and her 
 fear of her lover's insanity, and her love for him, 
 that longs to hear his voice, share his sufferings, 
 but can not. Conscious of Hamlet's loneliness, 
 by her own sympathetic feeling, and knowing that 
 in the lobby he walks, 'for hours together,' 
 
48 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 hoping as she believes to see her, his ' rose of 
 May,' who has received his letters and his ' solicit- 
 ings, as they fell out by time, by means, and place,' 
 but refused to answer them, denying her lover in- 
 terviews, or even explanations of her changed be- 
 havior. Hamlet realizes that it is because of her 
 father's influence, suggested it may be by Claudius ; 
 but his deepest sorrow results from the belief that 
 Ophelia doubts his love, which to the sensitive na- 
 ture of the Prince is more than an imputation of 
 his honor ; and this from her is almost unbearable, 
 and he closes one of his letters in his manner of ex- 
 temporizing poetry as follows : 
 
 ** Doubt thou the stars are fire; 
 Doubt that the sun doth move ; 
 Doubt truth to be a liar ; 
 But never doubt I love. 
 '* O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. 
 I have not art to reckon my groans ; but that 
 I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu. 
 '* Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is 
 to him, Hamlet." 
 
 This was evidently Hamlet's last letter to Ophe- 
 lia, and in it he in despair takes leave of her in the 
 word ' Adieu.' Days pass, and no response, and 
 at last, in desperation, he forces himself into her 
 presence. 
 
 ** Lord Hamlet — with his doublet all unbrac'd; 
 No hat upon his head ; his stockings foul'd, 
 Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ankle; 
 Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other; 
 And with a look so piteous in purport 
 As if he had been loosed out of hell 
 To speak of horrors — he comes before me." 
 
772^ Secret of Hamlet. 49 
 
 *■'■ Polonius. Mad for thy love. 
 
 Ophelia. My Lord, I do not know ; 
 But truly I do fear it. 
 
 Polonius. What said he .? 
 
 Ophelia. He took me by the wrist and held me hard ; 
 Then goes he to the length of all his arm, 
 And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow. 
 He falls to such perusal of my face 
 As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so ; 
 At last, a little shaking of my arm, 
 And thrice his head thus waving up and down. 
 He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound 
 As it did seem to shatter all his bulk 
 And end his being: that done, he let me go; 
 And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd, 
 He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; 
 For out o' doors he went without their help, 
 And, to the last, bended their light on me." 
 
 What a picture of the struggle of Hamlet's love 
 as it sought to change the purpose of his soul, in 
 the execution of his father's command. His knees 
 knocking each other! Is this the same Hamlet 
 who firmly followed the beckoning Ghost? What 
 a f hange ! ' ' There is more than the love of forty 
 thousand brothers in that hand grasp of the wrist, 
 in that long gaze at arm's length, in that force that 
 might but will not draw her nearer. And never a 
 word from this king of words ! His first great si- 
 lence ; the second is his death." 
 
 ***** 
 
 He leaves her, as she had left him, without a 
 word of explanation. A father's command, en- 
 forced by fears and suspicions, are the cause of 
 that action of Hamlet and Ophelia, each toward 
 the other. 
 4 
 
MOTTO. 
 
 " Two shall be born the whole wide world apart, 
 And speak in different tongues and have no thought 
 Each of the other's being and no heed; 
 And these o'er unknown seas to unknown lands 
 Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death ; 
 And all unconsciously, shape every act 
 And bend each wandering step to the one end — 
 That one day, out of darkness, they shall meet 
 And read life's meaning in each other's eyes. 
 
 And two shall walk some narrow way of life 
 
 So nearly side by side that, should one turn 
 
 Ever so little pace to right or left. 
 
 They needs must stand acknowledged face to face ; 
 
 And yet, with wistful eyes that never meet, 
 
 With groping hands that never clasp, and lips 
 
 Calling in vain to ears that never hear, 
 
 They seek each other all their weary days, 
 
 And die unsatisfied — and this is fate !" 
 
 {501 
 
HAMLET AND OPHELIA (Continued). 
 
 Shakespeare does not attempt to describe the 
 scene in which Hamlet gazes with hypnotic glare 
 into the face of the pure Ophelia. Only those 
 who have partially experienced the malady of 
 these two lovers could possibly understand the 
 description, even if it were possible to translate the 
 heart, and give sighs, tones, and looks expression 
 in words. What would Shakespeare's description 
 be to 'the million' but 'words, words, words?' 
 And so, he reports it in the impassioned speech of 
 Ophelia to her father, in explanation of her 
 ' affrighted looks.' What a struggle in the silent 
 gaze of these two lovers, as they looked long into 
 each other's eyes, across the deep wide gulf of 
 outward circumstances that separated them, hope- 
 lessly, so far as this world was concerned. Each 
 thinks the other to blame : Ophelia doubting Ham- 
 let's love and believing him insane ; Hamlet, because 
 of the Ghost's revelations, doubting womankind, 
 and fearing the atmosphere in which Ophelia lives 
 has contaminated 'the rose of May.' Ophelia's 
 attitude toward Hamlet is just as inexplicable to 
 him, as his actions are inexplicable toward Ophelia. 
 
 The struggle of the strong, subtile power of 
 silent looks is most suggestive. There is the reve- 
 
 (51) 
 
52 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 lation of purpose, power, and character in a look. 
 There are glances shot from human eyes that 
 trouble the beholder ! Guilt and dissimulation can 
 not bear the lingering, inquiring gaze of innocence 
 and purity. And what a power is there in a look 
 when grief turns to anger ; when ' despised love ' 
 itself becomes wrath ! 
 
 What marshalled forces struggle in life's con- 
 flicts, revealing themselves on the battle ground of 
 the human countenance — that weird ' changeful 
 symbol which God has hung in front of the unseen 
 spirit.' It is possible that Shakespeare intended 
 to give a sequel to Hamlet, following the fortunes 
 of the chief characters across the borderland of 
 this world ; but if he could not describe the meet- 
 ing of these two spirits in the struggle for suprem- 
 acy in this silent battle of love, agony, misunder- 
 standing, and despair, how could he attempt a 
 description of their meeting in that ' undiscovered 
 country,' beyond the grave? As it is, we are left 
 to imagine the struggle of inner glory as it trans- 
 figured the faces of the two lovers in their uncon- 
 scious conflict. 
 
 Dante says of Beatrice, as he saw her in the Par- 
 adiso, that — 
 
 ♦' She smiled so joyously, 
 That God seemed in her countenance to rejoice." 
 
 And his philosophy accounts for the external glory 
 as the expression of an internal spiritual effulgence. 
 It is the angel face in flesh and blood rarely, yet at 
 times met by those who have eyes to see. The 
 
The Seci'et of Hamlet. 53 
 
 radiance in Ophelia's face that finally overawed 
 Hamlet, can not be counterfeited. It was superior 
 to aesthetic or intellectual luminosity ; there was no 
 earthly look in it — all the higher faculties led by 
 conscience, harmoniously blended in the composite 
 look, that shines through the beautiful form of her 
 heaven-lighted face. 
 
 No wonder that the ' look so piteous in purport,' 
 of Hamlet, quailed before the look of injured 
 innocence, conscious purity, and wounded love of 
 Ophelia. No wonder her gaze transfixed at the 
 distance of 'the length of all his arm,' silently 
 with such ' perusal ' of her ' face as he would draw 
 it.' No wonder ' he raised a sigh so piteous and 
 profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and 
 end his being.' No wonder he loosed his grasp, 
 
 " And with his head over his shoulder turn'd, 
 He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; 
 For out o' doors he went without their helps, 
 And, to the last, bended their light on me." 
 
 What mysterious somnambulistic power ; but the 
 light in the face of Ophelia outshone and van- 
 quished the light in the face of Hamlet the Dane. 
 ***** 
 
 The mind of Hamlet after the silent struggle 
 with Ophelia, when he in a state of somnambulism 
 entered her apartment unannounced, can not better 
 be described than he does in his famous soliloquy. 
 The King who fears his ' turbulent and dangerous 
 lunacy,' consents to the plan of Polonius, whereby 
 Hamlet is to meet Ophelia in order that the King 
 and Polonius ' may of their encounter frankly 
 
54 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 judge, and gather by him as he is behaved, if 't be 
 the afflictions of his love or no that thus he suffers.' 
 Ophelia, at the suggestion of her father, pretends 
 to be reading a book, while the King and Polonius 
 are hid from view, but in hearing. Hamlet, ob- 
 livious of the presence of any one, soliloquizes : 
 
 ** To be or not to be — that is the question : 
 Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
 And by opposing end them? To die — to sleep- 
 No more ; and by a sleep to say we end 
 The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks, 
 That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation 
 Devoutly to be wished. To die — to sleep — 
 To sleep? Perchance to dream! ay, there's the rub: 
 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
 When we have shufl3ed off this mortal coil, 
 Must give us pause : there's the respect 
 That makes calamity of so long life; 
 For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
 The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, 
 The pangs of despised love, the law's delay. 
 The insolence of office, and the spurns 
 That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
 When he himself might his quietus make 
 With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear 
 To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
 But that the dread of something after death, 
 The undiscover'd country from whose bourne 
 No traveller returns, puzzles the will, 
 And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
 Than fly to others that we know not of ? 
 Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; 
 And thus the native hue of resolution 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 55 
 
 Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
 And enterprises of great pith and moment, 
 With this regard, their currents turn awry, 
 And lose the name of action. — Soft you now ! 
 The fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons 
 Be all my sins remember'd." 
 
 Ophelia. Good, my lord. 
 How does your honor for this many a day? 
 
 Hamlet. I humbly thank you; well, well, well. 
 
 Ophelia. My lord, I have remembrances of yours 
 That I have longed to redeliver; 
 I pray you now receive them. 
 
 Hamlet. No, not I ; 
 I never gave you aught. [tlid ; 
 
 Ophelia. My honour'd lord, I know right well you 
 And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd 
 As made the things more rich : their perfume lost. 
 Take these again ; for to the noble mind 
 Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 
 There, my lord. 
 
 Hamlet. Ha, ha! are you honest.? 
 
 Ophelia. My lord.? 
 
 Hamlet. Are you fair.? 
 
 Ophelia. What means your lordship? 
 
 Hamlet. That if you be honest and fair, your hon- 
 esty should admit no discourse to your beauty. 
 
 Ophelia. Could beauty, my lord, have better com- 
 merce than with honesty? 
 
 Hamlet. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will 
 sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd 
 than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his 
 likeness: this was sometimes a paradox, but now the 
 time gives it proof. I did love you once. 
 
 Ophelia. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. 
 
 Hamlet. You should not have believed me ; for vir- 
 tue can not so innoculate our old stock but we shall 
 relish of it : I loved you not. 
 
 Ophelia. I was the more deceived." 
 
56 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Hamlet believes that Ophelia has been contami- 
 nated by the arts of Claudius, and that she is even 
 now his willing agent ; and so in the subsequent 
 conversation with her, he warns her to fly from the 
 contaminations of this world — not by suicide, but 
 to a nunnery. 
 
 " Go thy way to a nunnery. Where's your father? 
 Ophelia. At home, my lord." 
 
 Hamlet does not believe that Polonius is at home ; 
 he has a suspicion that the King and his lord cham- 
 berlain are in hearing, and so he takes leave of 
 Ophelia in words intended for the ears of the King : 
 
 " I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are 
 married already, all but one, shall live ; the rest shall 
 keep as they are. To a nunnery go ! 
 
 Ophelia. O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown ! 
 The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword; 
 The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
 The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 
 The observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down 
 And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, 
 That suck'd the honey of his music vows, 
 Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, 
 Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; 
 That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth 
 Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me, 
 To have seen what I have seen, see what I see ! " 
 
 The King and Polonius come from their hiding 
 place, with somewhat different views of Hamlet. 
 
 ** King. Love ! his affections do not that way tend; 
 Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, 
 Was not like madness." 
 
 Polonius still thinks — 
 
 " The origin and commencement of his grief 
 Sprung from neglected love." 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 57 
 
 The King concludes to send Hamlet to England, 
 and so informs Polonius, in the presence of Ophelia. 
 Hamlet overhears the plan of the King. 
 
 ***** 
 
 "Ophelia believes Hamlet crazed; she is re- 
 pulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, when she 
 had bestowed her young heart with all its hopes 
 and wishes ; her father is slain by the hand of her 
 lover, as it is supposed, in a paroxysm of insanity : 
 she is entangled inextricably in a web of horror 
 which she can not even comprehend, and the result 
 seems inevitable." 
 
 " Of her subsequent madness," continues Mrs. 
 Jameson, " what can be said? What an affecting 
 — what an astonishing picture of a mind utterly, 
 hopelessly wrecked ! — past hope — past cure ! There 
 is the frenzy of excited passion — there is the mad- 
 ness caused by intense and continued thought — 
 there is the delirium of fevered nerves ; but 
 Ophelia's madness is distinct from these; it is not 
 the suspension, but the utter destruction of the 
 reasoning powers ; it is the total imbecility, which, 
 as medical people well know, frequently follows 
 some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is 
 frantic ; Lear is mad ; Ophelia is hisane. Her 
 sweet mind lies in fragments before us — a pitiful 
 spectacle ! Her wild, rambling fancies ; her aim- 
 less, broken speeches ; her quick transitions from 
 gayety to sadness, each equally purposeless and 
 causeless ; her snatches of old ballads, such as per- 
 haps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her 
 infancy — are all so true to the life that we forget to 
 
58 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 wonder, and can only weep. It belonged to 
 Shakespeare alone so to temper such a picture that 
 we can endure to dwell upon it : " 
 
 " Thoughts and afflictions, passion, hell itself. 
 She turns to favour and to prettiness." 
 
 ***** 
 The reality of the supernatural is posited and 
 expressed in the form of the appearance of the 
 Ghost. The spirit of Hamlet's father commands 
 him. The supernatural command appears as the 
 law of duty to the son. His nature struggles with 
 the imposed command from the other world. The 
 struggle is an inner struggle ; betwixt love and law. 
 Hamlet loves Ophelia ; and there are other difficul- 
 ties in the way that cause him to hesitate. He is 
 not at first sure that the Ghost is his father's; it 
 may be the devil : 
 
 ** The spirit that I have seen 
 May be the devil ; and the devil hath power 
 To assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and perhaps 
 Out of my weakness and my melancholy. 
 As he is very potent with such spirits. 
 Abuses me to damn me." 
 
 But, admitting the reality of the Ghost and its 
 commands, his nature shrinks from taking life, 
 much less human life. His conscience makes a 
 coward of him. At times he thinks he is the 
 heaven appointed avenger ; then he doubts, post- 
 pones, waits for circumstances to decide, or at 
 least, put him in a position that he must decide. 
 
 Every human life, real or ideal, results from 
 three factors : first, a nature originally determined 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 59 
 
 to the individual ; secondly, something freely 
 chosen ; and thirdly, something which comes from 
 circumstances. And Shakespeare in Hamlet, 
 desiring to represent in the character the inner 
 struggles of Humanity, the apotheosis of the 
 human conflict in life, as well as life itself, must 
 present it in the form of a person. He gives 
 Hamlet a nature ' originally determined ; ' places 
 him in such circumstances that he is called upon to 
 act, and freely choose a certain course of action. 
 
 The problems to be solved in the study of human 
 life and character are three : " Given the character 
 of a man and the conditions of life around him, 
 what will be his career? Or, given his character 
 and career, of what kind were his surroundings? 
 Character, career, circumstances; the relation of 
 these three factors to each other is severely logical. 
 From them is deduced all genuine history. Char- 
 acter is the chief element ; for it is both a result of 
 influences and a cause of results. 
 
 " In Hamlet, the career and circumstances are 
 plainly given ; but the character of the Prince has 
 only been dimly conceived by interpreters of the 
 Play. Phases and moods have been unduly empha- 
 sized, and a part magnified into the whole. The 
 play reveals the cautious, hesitating element of life, 
 that vacillates from Pessimism to Optimism ; that 
 postpones action until the capacity for action is 
 weakened, and the power of faith itself atrophied. 
 
 " Hamlet is a player, an actor ; life is his stage and 
 he plays many parts, illustrating moods and the 
 changes in his character — for the character cf 
 
6o The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Hamlet is changing and being moulded during the 
 progress of the play. He only appears insane ; 
 a ' method in his madness ' is surely recognized, 
 but as a player he is perfect : the actions of an 
 insane person and the characterization of insanity 
 upon the stage would to the beholder appear the 
 same. 
 
 *' Hamlet manifests a variety of mental states; 
 he is Shakespeare's mouth, speech — modulated in 
 the mental agitation of the hero, in the exhibition 
 of typical mental and moral struggles. He is not 
 a person, but humanity personated; the mental and 
 moral struggles, the vehicles of the thought — 
 Shakespeare's view and philosophy of life. It is 
 the conflict between the human will and passions ; 
 the spiritual struggle of every life. 
 
 " Jealousy controls Othello ; ambition, Macbeth ; 
 love, Romeo — in each case the will is overpowered 
 by the passion : in Hamlet, every passion opposes 
 the will ; but the will is reinforced by the imposed 
 will of the supernatural world, uttered in the form 
 and voice of his father's spirit, and the resultant 
 action is held within the sphere of the conflicting 
 powers. The lesson is of great importance — that 
 revelation and command from the spirit world that 
 is opposed by the inner revelation of the human 
 spirit, in its highest faculties, should not be obeyed. 
 
 " Life here is not to be explained, for in Hamlet 
 * the way of life ' is not revealed. The other 
 world, or rather the time and condition for the 
 solution of life, is not here. The Gospels are the 
 sequel to Hamlet ; or rather Hamlet is Shakespeare's 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 6i 
 
 plea for the necessity of the Gospel of Revelation, 
 that solves the mysteries of Life, by the revelation 
 and life of Him who was obedient to the Will of 
 the Father, tempted in all points like as we are, yet 
 without sin, without ' contriving aught ' against 
 any one, or ' tainting his mind.' 
 
 The Spirit that man should hear and obey is 
 the Spirit of the Father of Humanity, speaking in 
 the form of the Man Christ Jesus, ' This is my 
 beloved Son, hear Him.' Paul was Hamlet a lo 
 time ; but he was delivered from his ' body ^f 
 death ' and was victorious through faith in Chri 
 Hamlet is the concrete representation of life's 
 struggles, unaided by the Christianity of Christ. 
 Shakespeare experienced, observed, and realized 
 the struggle of life without Christ. The play of 
 Hamlet is a despairing cry for the revelation of and 
 necessity for the Christ-life. It is the confession 
 of the failure of philosophy in dealing with the 
 mystery of life. Man is a composite of passions, 
 faculties, and will. He is called upon to assert 
 inner dominion, to rule himself, by the imposed 
 command of the supernatural. What a tragedy is 
 life, when spent in contemplation! And what a 
 heavy burden life becomes when a profound sorrow 
 has robbed it of all charm ! 
 
 And the life of suppression — what a tragedy : 
 and what will be the character of the suppressed 
 life, when it at last expresses itself.'* 
 
MOTTO. 
 
 Man is the State, the Church is God in Man. 
 
 The end of Government is to unfold 
 
 The social into harmony, and give 
 
 Complete expression to the laboring thought 
 
 Of universal genius ; first to feed 
 
 The bodj, then the mind, and then the heart. 
 
 The Church is God's eternal life in man, 
 
 Which human creeds but limit and restrain. 
 
 Its rites, its customs, and its usages 
 
 Are inward breathings of inspiring truth, 
 
 In the Cathedral silences of the mind 
 
 And presence chambers, deep within the breast, 
 
 Where the Eternal Splendor bodies forth 
 
 His thought in workings of unbounded love. 
 
 Oh ! man alone is holy; God within 
 
 Man dwelleth as he doth not in the world ; 
 
 And God through man, re-harmonized and made 
 
 The type and image of the Infinite, 
 
 Shall yet reveal Himself as ne'er before. 
 
 The renovation of the race through love, 
 
 The renovation of the world through love. 
 
 The renovation of the State through love, 
 
 Is the great purpose of the Father-Soul ! 
 
 For this, all laws together move in one; 
 
 For this, all streams of thought converge in one ; 
 
 For this, the Seraphim in glory wait, 
 
 As once to greet Messiah, manger-born. 
 
 — Thomas L. Harris. 
 
 (62) 
 
VI. 
 
 HAMLET AND HORATIO. 
 
 In *' Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" we have the 
 profound personal thought of Shakespeare. The 
 great Interpreter of Human Nature often goes 
 deeper than the artist, revealing a personal convic- 
 tion and experience. His words justify the in- 
 scription under the bust in the old church at Strat- 
 ford : 
 
 *' In wisdom, a Nestor; in genius, a Socrates; in art, a 
 Virgil." 
 
 " In the plays of this great writer," says Munger, 
 *' there is revealed no sense of Christianity either 
 as a cause to be championed or as a prime factor in 
 human life. Still they are Christian because they 
 are so thoroughly on the side of humanity. If the 
 predominant motive of Shakespeare was sought in 
 his own lines, it would be the couplet in Henry V. : 
 
 ** ' There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
 Would men observingly distil it out; ' 
 
 a sentiment one with the Christian estimate of 
 this world and indicative of its process." 
 
 F. W. Robertson took the same view as revealed 
 in the couplet, or rather the words, ' soul of good- 
 ness in things evil,' and made it the sixth principle 
 on which he taught ; and ' observingly distilled it 
 out,' in his life and writings. 
 
 (63) 
 
64 The Secret of Ha^nlet. 
 
 Shakespeare resembles Henry V., more than any 
 of the characters of his plays. These two men 
 grew better as they grew older. Everywhere 
 Shakespeare is on the side of virtue and truth ; and 
 however he may have strayed in the early portion 
 of his life in London, he was not only an upright 
 and noble man for the main part, but a repentant 
 man and a man whose life was influenced by the 
 truth of Christianity. "His depth of capacity for 
 loving lay at the root of all his knowledge of men 
 and women, and all his dramatic pre-eminence. 
 The heart is more intelligent than the intellect." 
 
 '* He that hath love and judgment, too, 
 Sees more than any others do." 
 
 Tennyson recognizing this secret of Shakespeare's 
 knowledge of men and women, sings — "In Me- 
 moriam " — addressing the spirit of his vanished 
 friend : 
 
 " Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore, 
 
 Where thy first form was made a man : 
 
 I loved thee, spirit, and love; nor can 
 
 The soul of Shakespeare love thee more." 
 
 Love understands. It looks forth upon human 
 strife, and reads the spirit beneath the form : 
 
 " Who taught you this? 
 I learn'd it out of women's faces." 
 
 "The bond," says Plato, "which unites the 
 human to the divine is Love, and Love is the long- 
 ing of the Soul for Beauty ; the inextinguishable 
 desire which like feels for like, which the divinity 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 65 
 
 within us feels for the divinity revealed to us in 
 Beauty. Beauty is Truth." 
 
 Shakespeare believed, long before Elizabeth 
 Doten wrote, that : 
 
 " By a power of thought unknown, 
 Love shall ever seek its own. 
 Sundered not by time or space, 
 With no distant dwelling-place, 
 Soul shall answer unto soul. 
 As the needle to the pole. 
 Leaving grief's lament unsaid, 
 ' Gone is gone, and dead is dead.' " 
 
 And read in the face of Nature the Reconciling 
 Spirit : 
 
 ** God of the Granite and the Rose! 
 
 Soul of the Sparrow and the Bee ! 
 The mighty tide of Being flows 
 
 Through countless channels. Lord, from Thee. 
 It leaps to life in grass and flowers. 
 
 Through every grade of being runs. 
 Till from Creation's radiant towers 
 
 Its glory flames in stars and suns." 
 
 Shakespeare saw, moreover, that the well-being 
 of a man can not be secured except he partakes of 
 the ills of life, ' the penalty of Adam.' In "As 
 You Like It," the banished Duke tells his courtiers 
 that their exile is a part of their moral training ; 
 
 " Are not these woods 
 More free from peril than the envious court? 
 Here we feel not the penalty of Adam — 
 The season's difference, as the icy fang 
 And churlish chiding of the winter's wind.? 
 Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, 
 
 5 
 
66 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say — 
 This is no flattery; these are counsellors 
 That feelingly persuade me what I am. 
 Sweet are the uses of adversity.'''' 
 
 This is the lesson so hard for the Hamlets of this 
 world to learn ! It takes time to learn the ' uses of 
 this world ; ' the use of all history, or the forces 
 that produce all the changes in time — there is a 
 philosophic reason for it also, according to 
 Shakespeare, who tells us that : 
 
 ** Time's glory is to calm contending kings, 
 To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light. 
 To stamp the seal of time in aged things. 
 To wake the morn and sentinel the night, 
 To -wrong the ivronger till he render right; 
 To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, 
 And smear with dust their glittering golden towers." 
 
 The historical cycle continues till the potential 
 harvest in the solving thought and deed is reaped : 
 ' To wrong the wronger till he render right.' This 
 is the deep philosophy of time — its historical and 
 personal cycles are measured, and men are at last 
 undeceived, for Shakespeare tells us that 
 
 •• The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
 Make instruments to scourge us : 
 The dark and vicious place where thee he got 
 Cost him his eyes." 
 
 And the dying villain recognizing the harvest 
 time of his reaping, says : 
 
 *' Thou hast spoken right; 'tis true: 
 
 The wheel is come full circle; I am here." 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 67 
 
 Hamlet represents a great mind, brooding over 
 the burden and mystery of life ; reason standing at 
 the limits of knowledge ; genius touching with 
 trembling hand the thin veil that separates it from 
 insanity : a mind that moves along the wrong way 
 and at last standing at a door of the spirit world 
 unlawful to open, and there soliloquizing — the 
 unconscious self speaking and translating its fears 
 in the strange words : 
 
 " To be, or not to be; that is the question: 
 Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles. 
 And, by opposing, end them?" 
 
 These lines reveal the secret of Hamlet's troubles. 
 To him in his misfortune, ' To be, or not to be,' 
 was the question, perpetually making its unwel- 
 come inquiry, at irregular intervals. The death of 
 his father and the hasty marriage of his mother, 
 together with the attending circumstances, caused 
 Hamlet to explore deeper than ever the abstract 
 world of contemplation, where he dwelt, perhaps 
 too long, even before his prospects were darkened 
 by the death of the elder Hamlet. Contemplation 
 must be balanced by activity. 
 
 The son of a King pursuing his metaphysical 
 studies at college, courted, sought, and envied ; 
 happy, as well as one of his temperament and 
 standing could be ; loving innocence, purity, 
 and beauty, as embodied in the person and life of 
 Ophelia — his life is changed with the change of 
 
68 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 circumstances. The King's orphan feels unlike 
 the King's son. 
 
 The mystery of Hamlet lies in the mystery of 
 the subject he endeavors to understand. He is 
 preoccupied with himself ; he does nothing for any 
 one ; lives for himself, and therefore fails to see the 
 * uses of this world,' and reaps the negative result 
 of his pessimism and inactive life. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Are the chief characters in the play incarnations 
 of faculties of Man? Subjective feelings and 
 sentiments translated and embodied in objective 
 personalities? This view with caution may throw 
 light upon the subject. 
 
 In Hamlet, Shakespeare has revealed the charac- 
 ter of the Prince, as well as he understood it. 
 Hamlet's mind is startled at the pre-natal move- 
 ments of its psychical powers. The prophetic 
 faculty — the inner sight — that at best sees ' through 
 a glass darkly,' and yet at times is conscious of the 
 spirit world, and still demands corroborating con- 
 firmations of the senses, as convincing proof of the 
 correctness of its vision, is developed by contem- 
 plation, disappointment, and bereavement. And 
 Hamlet is the incarnation of this faculty in the 
 soul, at a stage of its development when it pre- 
 dominates the other faculties, after a crisis and 
 struggle with them. He was a favored child of 
 nature, so far as endowments were concerned, a 
 'prince among the privileged,' highly cultured, 
 and secretly exercising and endeavoring to prepare 
 himself for a surer understanding of the mystery 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 69 
 
 of life, by following the hints of old writers, 
 whose writings were inaccessible to the masses. 
 *'I am not inclined to doubt," says Max Muller, 
 *' the testimony of trustworthy witnesses, that by 
 fasting and by even more painful chastening of the 
 body, the mind may be raised to more intense 
 activity. Nor can I resist the evidence that by 
 certain exercises, such as peculiar modes of regula- 
 ting the breathing, keeping the body in certain 
 postures, and fixing the sight on certain objects, a 
 violent exaltation of our nervous system may be 
 produced which quickens our imagination and 
 enables us to see and conceive objects which are 
 beyond the reach of ordinary mortals." This was 
 Hamlet's passion ; he sought happiness in the 
 pursuit of occult knowledge and mysteries. 
 
 The close relation of the mind to breathing is a 
 part of the experience of every thoughtful student. 
 In reading, whenever a brilliant idea is presented, 
 breathing involuntarily ceases, in a perceptible 
 degree. 
 
 Horatio, the fellow-student and friend of Hamlet 
 — himself the incarnation of a subjective faculty, 
 perplexed sympathetically by grief — represents 
 judgment and caution, influenced by tradition and 
 education. Polonius represents the will growing 
 weaker, as the man contemplates and hesitates in 
 action, and is slain by passion in the absence of 
 judgment. Hamlet — affection in bereavement, in 
 one of his moods — sees the object of love, and 
 conversing with Horatio — judgment— exclaims : 
 
7o The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 '* My father! methinks I see my father. 
 Horatio. O where, my lord? 
 Hamlet. In my mind's eye, Horatio. 
 Horatio. I saw him once ; he was a goodly king. 
 Hamlet. He was a man, take him for all in all, 
 I shall not look upon his like again." 
 
 The true estimate of a true son of a true father. 
 Hamlet realized that the flesh is a veil that hinders 
 perception of things beyond : 
 
 '* O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, 
 Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! " 
 
 expresses a desire of his that grows in intensity. 
 If that can not be, he would know for himself, by 
 escaping from the veil of flesh, but he is deterred 
 by the conviction that the ' Everlasting had fix'd 
 His canon against self -slaughter.* The uses of 
 the world seem ' weary, stale, and uprofitable.' 
 
 The prophetic faculty, latent in every soul, was 
 also developed in Hamlet. He could read character 
 and thought, as revealed in looks, tones, words, and 
 acts of others. His soul was sensitive to the unseen 
 world. He knew that there were ' More things in 
 heaven and earth than philosophy dreamed.' He 
 felt the presence of his departed father ; and the 
 guilt of the guilty king, and the inner fears of his 
 mother, subtly announced themselves in a confused 
 way to his sub-consciousness, and from thence rising 
 into consciousness in form of suspicion and fear, 
 for: 
 
 " Mind may act upon mind, though bodies be far divided ; 
 For life is in the blood, but souls communicate unseen; 
 For the soul hath its feelers, 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 71 
 
 Cobwebs floating on the wind, 
 
 That catch events in their approach with sure and apt 
 presentiment." 
 
 The possibility of soul-sight while in the body is 
 suggested, when Hamlet is represented as seeing 
 his father's spirit. Hearing from the Ghost the 
 truth in the matter of his death, his suspicions are 
 confirmed and translated, causing him to exclaim : 
 " O my prophetic soul!" He recognizes the form 
 and features of his father, but is skeptical : 
 
 ** The spirit that I have seen may be the devil ; " 
 
 and to satisfy himself on this point, he says : 
 
 ** I'll have grounds 
 More relative than this; the play's the thing 
 Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." 
 
 He determined to notice the effect produced upon 
 the King when witnessing the dramatic show of the 
 death of his father as revealed to him by the Ghost. 
 As a result of this trial he catches ' the conscience 
 of the King,' who leaves the players abruptly, and 
 plans for sending Hamlet to England, with murder- 
 ous designs upon the life of the Prince. 
 
 Hamlet and Horatio are true friends. 
 
 ** Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man 
 As e'er my conversation cop'd withal." 
 ' Horatio. O, my dear lord — 
 Hamlet. Nay, do not think I flatter, 
 For what advancement may I hope from thee, 
 That no revenue hast but thy good spirits, 
 To feed and clothe thee?" 
 
y2 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 '* Dost thou hear? 
 Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, 
 And could of men distinguish, her election 
 Hath seal'd thee for herself: for thou hast been 
 As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; 
 A man that fortune's buffets and rewards 
 Hath ta'en with equal thanks : and blest are those 
 Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled 
 That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger 
 To sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man 
 That is not ^assion^s slave^ and I will wear him 
 In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. 
 As / do thee.'''' 
 
 Horatio is Hamlet's ideal of man. His name, 
 like that of Hamlet, begins with the letter ' H.' 
 Shakespeare has intimated his character and temper- 
 ament in the name given him and whose character- 
 istics Hamlet has just described. 
 
 * Oratio,' the word for discourse or flow of speech, 
 breath — life — esoterically signifies in the name 
 Horatio, a man whose life flows on smoothly towards 
 the great ocean of life — eternity. He is not ' pas- 
 sion's slave,' but free, of cool judgment, and while 
 all the characters of the play — chief characters — 
 die by accident, or as a result of circumstances, each 
 reaping that which each has sown, ' the wheel 
 comes full circle,' and all but Horatio pass off the 
 stage of action and go behind the scenes of this 
 world, and the curtain of nature falls upon the King 
 and Queen, Laertes and Hamlet. 
 
 Hamlet, Horatio, Ophelia — all have the ' H ' in 
 their names — purposely signifying that there is an 
 affinity between them — elements of life and charac- 
 ter that accounts for the love and friendship of the 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 73 
 
 three. None of the other characters of the play 
 have this letter ' H ' in their names. 
 
 ^ ^fC *^ 5jC ?JC 
 
 Hamlet dying, says to Horatio : 
 
 ** Horatio, I am dead; 
 
 Thou livest ; report me and mj cause aright 
 
 To the unsatisfied. 
 
 Horatio. Never believe it; 
 I am more an antique Roman than a Dane : 
 Here's yet some liquor left. 
 
 Hamlet. As thou'rt a man, 
 Give me the cup: let go; bj heaven, I'll have 't. 
 O God ! — Horatio, what a wounded name, 
 Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind nie ! 
 If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile. 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
 To tell my story." 
 
 Hamlet gives Fortinbras his ' dying voice ' in 
 the coming election, recognizing that Denmark 
 will elect a king ; bids Horatio tell him so ; ' the 
 rest is silence,' and Hamlet is dead! 
 
 '■''Horatio. Now cracks a noble heart. 
 Good-night, sweet prince. 
 And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! " 
 
 Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, the English Am- 
 bassador, and others appear upon the scene of 
 death. The Ambassador says : 
 
 ** The sight is dismal ; 
 And our affairs from England come too late : 
 The ears are senseless that should give us hearing. 
 To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd, 
 That Rosencrants and Guildenstern are dead. 
 Where should we have our thanks .? 
 
74 T^'^(^ Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Horatio. Not from his mouth, 
 
 Had it the ability of life to thank you : 
 He never gave commandment for their death. 
 But since, so jump upon this bloody question, 
 You from the Polack wars, and you from England, 
 Are here arriv'd, give orders that these bodies 
 High on a stage be placed to the view : 
 And let me speak to the yet unknowing world 
 How these things came about : so shall you hear 
 Of carnal^ bloody^ and umtatziral acts, 
 Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause, 
 And in the upshot, purposes mistook 
 Fallen on the inventors' heads. 
 
 Fortinhras. Let four captains 
 
 Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; 
 For he was likely, had he heen J>ut on, 
 To h.2ive proved most royally ; and for his passage 
 The soldier's music and the rites of war 
 Speak loudly for him." 
 
 Martin Cooke thinks that Shakespeare hints, 
 through this speech of Fortinbras, that Hamlet was 
 a "Player, acting the part that typifies Humanity, 
 in a play that sets forth Man's spiritual life in 
 Worldly condition under the pressure of the law of 
 the Supernatural." "Here, then," he continues, 
 " is an actor within an actor ; a play within a play ; 
 and a drama of the inner man." 
 
 The play closes with the ' dead march :' and so 
 in this life, we move with the funeral dirge to the 
 grave, with mystery, agony, and fear, longing to 
 learn the truth this side the grave — that can only 
 be known beyond — for fjzind can not wholly antici- 
 pate experience, especially a wholly new experience. 
 
MOTTO. 
 
 Biron. What is the end of study? let me know. 
 
 King. Why, that to know which else we should not know. 
 
 Biron. Things hid and barr'd, you mean from common 
 sense ? 
 
 King. Ay, that is study's god-like recompense. 
 
 Biron. Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain, 
 Which with pain purchased, doth inherit pain : 
 As, painfully to pore upon a book, 
 To seek the light of truth; while truth the while 
 Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look: 
 Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; 
 So, ere you find when light in darkness lies, 
 Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes. 
 
 — Shakespeare, "Love's Labor Lost." 
 
 (75) 
 
VII. 
 THE SECRET OF HAMLET. 
 
 We have seen that the mystery of Hamlet is the 
 incarnation of Shakespeare's larger vision turned 
 upon the burden and mystery of life. A deeper 
 insight into the deeper evils of the world, arising 
 from the darker passions, such as treachery and 
 revenge, greeted the symmetrical growth of the 
 vision of evil, a fuller perception of the deeper 
 springs of goodness in human nature, of the great 
 virtues of invincible fidelity and unwearied love. 
 
 .In Hamlet the central problem is a profoundly 
 moral one. It is the supreme internal conflict of 
 good and evil amongst the central forces and higher 
 elements of human nature, as appealed to and de- 
 veloped by sudden and powerful temptations, smit- 
 ten by accumulated wrongs, or plunged in over- 
 whelming calamities. As the result, we learn that 
 there is something infinitely more precious in life 
 than social ease or worldly success — nobleness of 
 soul, fidelity to truth and honor, human love and 
 loyalty, strength and tenderness, and trust to the 
 very end. In the most tragic experiences this fidelity 
 to all that is best in life is only possible through the 
 loss of life itself. 
 
 With the explanation above, and the key pro- 
 posed to unlock the mystery of Hamlet, let us pro- 
 
 (76) 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 77 
 
 ceed to the task of trying the key to the different 
 departments and moods of the hero, as they present 
 themselves in the progress of the play. 
 
 The opening scene of the play furnishes the key- 
 note of the tragedy. Francisco, the soldier-sentry, 
 being relieved of his midnight watch, expresses his 
 thanks, and continues : 
 
 «« 'Tis bitter cold, 
 And I am sick at heart." 
 
 The freezing of Hamlet's nature, and the darker 
 night of his life-watch is given in this secret chorus 
 of the departing sentinel. The platform before the 
 Castle at Elsinore is guarded by sentinels. Den- 
 mark is threatened ; danger without and fears within. 
 A Ghost crosses the platform, like the great fear 
 that flits across the bosom of Hamlet the Dane. 
 Marcellus and Bernardo, the officers, have seen it, 
 and presented their vision to judgment — Horatio, 
 who does not ' let belief take hold of him,' attrib- 
 uting the vision, 'twice seen' by the officers, to 
 their ' fantasy.' But the 'Ghost' confronts judg- 
 ment, producing ' fear and wonder,' but not con- 
 viction, in Horatio. He is a ' scholar ' — educated 
 judgment — and is considered competent to interro- 
 gate the apparition. The judgment is a close 
 friend, to be relied upon as Horatio could be relied 
 upon by Hamlet. Horatio challenges the Ghost ; 
 it seems 'offended,' moves out of sight, and the 
 challenger ' trembles and looks pale,' knowing that 
 it ' bodes some strange eruption to the state.' While 
 judgment is perplexed, it prepares itself for further 
 vision by tradition, that says : 
 
78 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 ••In the most high and palmy state of Rome, 
 A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, 
 The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead 
 Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets." 
 
 The Ghost, appearing again, interrupts the voice 
 of tradition, but immediately makes its exit, at the 
 crowing of ' the cock, that is the trumpet of the 
 morn.' The scene closes with the belief on the 
 part of Horatio that the 'spirit, dumb' to them, 
 will speak to Hamlet, and he is to be acquainted 
 with the vision. The sense and judgment receive 
 no spirit messages ; these faculties are not in cor- 
 respondence with the realm of spirits, and the 
 Ghost has no message for Marcellus, Bernardo, or 
 Horatio. 
 
 In the second scene, in a room of state in the 
 Castle, the King and Queen attempt to comfort 
 Hamlet, unconscious of the fact that, by the mys- 
 terious means of telepathy, they have revealed to 
 the sub-liminal self of Hamlet their fears and 
 guilty knowledge of facts they think hidden for- 
 ever. The message, unconsciously and involun- 
 tarily given, announces itself in a semi-confused 
 manner at the terminus of the line, and Hamlet 
 can not at this time read it accurately. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Left alone, he soliloquizes on his troubles, when 
 he is accosted by Horatio, who with Marcellus and 
 Bernardo come to tell him of the appearance of the 
 Ghost. "Coming events cast their shadows be- 
 fore," and these friends have not yet performed 
 their ' duty,' until the invisible telepathic wire pre- 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 79 
 
 sents the information concretely to the mental vision 
 of Hamlet, who exclaims : 
 
 " M7 father ! methinks I see my father ! " 
 Horatio tells him of the apparition. Hamlet 
 thinks it 'strange,' and is 'troubled;' but after 
 enjoining secrecy about the Ghost, and promising 
 to meet them on the platform ' 'twixt eleven and 
 twelve,' his friends leave him, and the scene closes 
 with Hamlet's words : 
 
 " My father's spirit in arms ! All is not well ; 
 I doubt some foul play; would the night were come ! 
 Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise, 
 Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes." 
 ******* 
 
 At the appointed time, Hamlet, Horatio, and 
 Marcellus are upon the platform, awaiting the 
 appearance of the Ghost. It appears, and Hamlet 
 
 speaks : 
 
 " What may this mean, 
 That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
 Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon. 
 Making night hideous ; and we fools of nature 
 So horridly to shake our disposition 
 With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? 
 Say, why is this.? wherefore? what should we do?" 
 
 The Ghost beckons Hamlet. Horatio — judgment 
 — fears for the Prince, and forbids his following 
 the apparition : 
 
 "Do not, my lord. 
 Hamlet. Why, what should be the fear? 
 
 I do not set my life at a pin's fee ; 
 ^ And for my soiil^ what can it do to that, 
 Being a thing immortal as itself? 
 It waves me forth again; I'll follow it." 
 
8o The Secret of Hai7ilet. 
 
 Judgment — Horatio — still protests, but Hamlet 
 feels that ' fate ' calls him and follows the Ghost. 
 
 ^^Horatio. He waxes desperate with imagination. 
 Marcellus. Let's follow; 'tis not fit thus to obey him. 
 Horatio. Have after. — To what issue will this come.? 
 Marcellus. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. 
 Horatio. Heaven will direct it. 
 
 Marcellus. Nay, let's follow him." 
 
 ***** 
 
 The revelation of the Ghost to Hamlet in the 
 fifth scene, but confirms his suspicions. He is 
 determined to ' revenge ' his father's ' murderous 
 death,' but the Ghost requests him to use restric- 
 tive methods : 
 
 ** But, however thou pursuest this act, 
 
 Taijit not thy mindy nor let thy soul contrive 
 Against thy mother aught.''^ 
 
 Hamlet realizes that — 
 
 " The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, 
 That ever I was born to set it right." 
 
 He refuses to tell his friends what the Ghost 
 revealed to him. He will not tell now, and when 
 he does, only Horatio can he trust. They are 
 sworn not to reveal what they have seen, and 
 Horatio is reminded that — 
 
 ** There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 
 
 And both are warned not to notice him in the 
 future, should he appear strange in his conversa- 
 tion or conduct, and the first act of the play closes 
 with Hamlet's words urging the hesitating friends, 
 
The Seci'ct of Hamlet, 8i 
 
 Horatio and Marcellus, to go into the castle 
 together : 
 
 " Nay, come, let's go together." 
 
 Hamlet is still with judgment and the senses — 
 takes these with him from the platform : can he 
 keep them under his control? 
 
 * * * * » 
 
 In Act n, Scene i, Ophelia tells Polonius of 
 Hamlet's mysterious actions and somnambulistic 
 pantomime in her presence. Evidently he had left 
 his senses and judgment behind, and in a state 
 of somnambulism enacted one of his dreams in 
 person and in the presence of the subject of his 
 dreams — Ophelia! The subjective dream tragedy 
 of his psychic condition found objective realization 
 in the love tragedy of Hamlet and Ophelia in her 
 closet, although unremembered by the Prince when 
 he descended to the plane of reason and the senses. 
 Polonius and Ophelia both conclude that it is ' the 
 very ecstasy of love.' 
 
 There is a 'method in his madness,' and in 
 Scene 2 the King speaks of ' Hamlet's transfor- 
 mation,' having heard through Ophelia about his 
 strange behavior. This in part was Hamlet's 
 desire, notwithstanding the strange behavior was 
 an expression of an inner subjective condition. 
 Hamlet loved Ophelia, but the weakness of his 
 mother influenced his love for womankind, and she 
 no longer ' delights ' him. Besides Ophelia, in 
 obedience to her father, had in a sense repulsed his 
 love. He has pretended madness and lived in the 
 6 
 
82 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 psychic world above the plane of the senses so 
 long that he passes from one state to the other 
 almost unconsciously. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Psychometry, clairvoyance, and clairaudience 
 are perhaps only one faculty in various stages of 
 development, and the phenomena of hypnotism 
 and telepathy are combined in its fuller develop- 
 ment. Hamlet was a psychometrest. This was 
 his secret. He had developed the psychic side of 
 the physical senses. The sense of touch, distrib- 
 uted over the whole surface of the body through 
 the nervous system, is the least developed of all the 
 senses. This sense is more sensitive in some parts 
 of the body than others. Its marvellous possibili- 
 ties of development in the hands, are evidenced by 
 expert silk buyers and money handlers. The silk 
 buyer, merely by touch, instantly knows the weight 
 and fineness of a dozen pieces of cloth hardly 
 distinguishable to the eye. Girls in the mints 
 detect under-weight or over-weight in the coin as 
 it passes through their hands. "Post-mortem 
 examinations of the bodies of the blind reveal the 
 fact that in the nerves at the ends of the fingers, 
 well defined cells of gray matter had formed, iden- 
 tical in substance and in cell formation with the 
 gray matter of the brain." 
 
 The earth is surrounded by the atmosphere ; and 
 so every individual is surrounded by an aura of its 
 own. Hamlet could feel the character, when in 
 the aura of the individual. In the philosophy 
 of Horatio there were only two things, mind and 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 83 
 
 matter ; but in that of Hamlet, there were three. 
 To him there was an inner atmosphere, the ether — 
 an inner air — a soul medium — the medium of intui- 
 tion. The intuition, like the intellect, may be 
 developed by education, environment, and by 
 exercise. Harmony between the elements of one's 
 own nature, and harmony of the individual nature 
 with the thought or person to be perceived psycho- 
 logically, is essential for thought-transference and 
 communion. Love creates and sustains this har- 
 mony. Concentration and vibratory motion and 
 practice is all that is essential in adding knowledge 
 or strength to the faculty of intuition. A greater 
 or less rapidity of vibration in the sound waves 
 causes the different notes of music ; and in fact all 
 consciousness on the physical and psychical planes 
 comes to us in waves— vibrations of sound, light, 
 heat, or cold. And these vibrations according to 
 their rapidity produce the different notes of music ; 
 the different colors and temperatures. The har- 
 mony of line and dimension as these relate to each 
 other, reveals to the sight the perfect form. The 
 perfection of every living organism depends upon 
 the harmony of its vibrations. The same law in 
 regard to vibrations acts in causing health or disease, 
 joy or sorrow, life or death. The harmony of pro- 
 portion of nitrogen to oxygen results in pure air ; 
 disturb the harmony by increasing the nitrogen or 
 decreasing the oxygen, and the air is impure. In 
 the last analysis of the human body, it is composed 
 of oxygen and nitrogen. And the proportions of 
 oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen in the body of an 
 
84 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 individual at any one time, are not only an absolute 
 indication of bodily health, but will indicate his 
 spiritual condition also. 
 
 "The character and development of the ego 
 itself determines the composition of the body, and 
 the proporti6ns of oxygen and nitrogen will be 
 blended in exact relative proportions with the good 
 and evil in the nature of man. Every good 
 thought increases the proportion of oxygen, as a 
 deep breath does, and lessens that of nitrogen, 
 making the body finer and more beautiful. Every 
 evil thought or impulse that is indulged increases 
 the nitrogen, and has the reverse effect on body 
 and soul. Hamlet lived in this ' fourth dimen- 
 sion ' of space ; this was his secret, known by 
 himself and Horatio only. 
 
 * -X- * * * 
 
 " He has ' bad dreams,' is ' dreadfully attended,' 
 looks upon the world as a ' prison,' and concludes 
 that there is ' nothing either good or bad, but- 
 thinking makes it so ; ' and to him, thinking as he 
 does, ' Denmark is a prison.' 
 
 " The courtiers of the King, sent for in order to 
 fathom the ' mystery of Hamlet,' appear. 'Com- 
 ing events cast their shadows before,' and Hamlet 
 feels their mission, telling them that ' there is a 
 kind of confession in their looks;' 'I know the 
 good King and Queen have sent for you.' 
 4fr * * * * 
 
 " Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were school- 
 fellows of Hamlet, and should have been his friends. 
 To them he is only the Hamlet they once knew — the 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 85 
 
 gentleman, the scholar. Hamlet is to them only- 
 Hamlet's shadow." 
 
 '•' Who is it that can tell me who I am? " asks 
 King Lear ; and the fool answers " Lear's shadow." 
 
 Hamlet sees through the purpose of his school- 
 fellows : 
 
 " Nay, then I have an eye of you." 
 
 They are the King's spies, and are between him and 
 the great purpose of his life. 
 
 *' 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes 
 Between the pass and fell incensed points 
 Of mighty opposites." 
 
 He suppresses his feelings, and with a tone of con- 
 scious intellectual superiority, says : 
 
 *' What a piece of work is man ! 
 How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! 
 In form and moving how express and admirable ! 
 In action how like an angel ! 
 In apprehension how like a god ! 
 The beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! 
 And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" 
 * •» * * * * * 
 
 In the scene with the players, Hamlet is ' judi- 
 cious, wise, and witty.' He is only 'mad north- 
 northwest ' — only in one direction ; ' when the 
 wind is southerly he knows a hawk from a hand- 
 saw.' How to accomplish the mandate of the 
 Ghost and to satisfy himself of the truth of the 
 charge against Claudius, is uppermost in his mind. 
 He suddenly conceives a method, inspired by the 
 presence of the players : " Dost thou hear me, old 
 friend; can you play the Murther of Gonzago?" 
 
86 The Secret of Ha^nlet, 
 
 Assured that he can play the piece, Hamlet pro- 
 poses to ' revenge ' and punish the King, and make 
 the players tell all, ' for they are the abstract and 
 brief chroniclers of the time.' He proposes to 
 turn the play into a ' mouse-trap,' to ' catch the 
 conscience of the King.' Alone, he soliloquizcG, 
 expressing the silent meditations of his heart. He 
 concludes, with a fixed purpose : 
 
 " I'll have these players 
 Play something like the murder of my father 
 Before mine uncle : I'll observe his looks; 
 I'll tent him to the quick; if he but blush, 
 I know my course. The spirit that I have seen 
 May be the devil ; and the devil hath power 
 To assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and perhaps 
 Out of my weakness and my melancholy, 
 As he is very potent with such spirits, 
 Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds 
 More relative than this; the play's the thing 
 Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." 
 
MOTTOES. 
 
 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
 And then is heard no more : it is a tale 
 Told hy an idiot, full of sound and furj. 
 Signifying nothing. — Shakespeare, 
 
 Lovers and women have such seething brains. 
 Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 
 More than cool reason ever comprehends. 
 The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 
 Are of imagination all compact. 
 
 — Shakespeare. 
 
 (87) 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY. 
 
 About, my brain ! I have heard 
 That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, 
 Have by the very cunning of the scene 
 Been struck so to the soul that presently 
 They have proclaimed their malefactions; 
 For murther, though it have no tongue, will speak 
 With most miraculous organ. — Hamlet. 
 
 Hamlet has Horatio's confidence, and has con- 
 fided to him — and to him only — the secret of the 
 Ghost : 
 
 *' There is a play to-night before the King; 
 One scene of it comes near the circumstance 
 Which I have told thee of my father's death." 
 
 He takes great satisfaction in the ' one scene ' — 
 the ' mouse-trap ' — with which he hopes to resolve 
 all his doubts in reference to 
 
 ** Carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts," 
 
 and in anticipation of the denouement^ his spirits 
 are elevated. Fun and pathos are revealed in his 
 wild speeches. He excuses the invitation of his 
 mother to sit by her during the play, and lies down 
 at the feet of Ophelia. The King and Queen and 
 courtiers are waiting for the play to begin. The 
 players are ready. Hamlet and Horatio are watch- 
 ing the King. The dumb-show enters. 
 
 (88) 
 
The Secret of Hamlet 89 
 
 "A King and Queen come upon the improvised 
 stage very lovingly ; the Queen embracing him, 
 and he her. She kneels, and makes show of prot- 
 estation unto him. He takes her up, and declines 
 his head upon her neck ; lays him down upon a 
 bank of flowers ; she seeing him asleep leaves him. 
 Anon comes in a fellow, takes off his crown, 
 kisses it, pours poison in the King's ears, and exit. 
 The Queen returns, finds the King dead, and makes 
 passionate action. The Poisoner, with some two 
 or three Mutes, comes in again, seemingly to 
 lament with her. The dead body is carried away. 
 The Poisoner wooes the Queen with gifts ; she 
 seems loath and unwilling a while, but in the end 
 accepts his love." 
 
 The dumb-show recalls the revelation of the 
 Ghost to Hamlet : 
 
 ♦' 'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, 
 A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark 
 Is by a forged process of my death 
 Rankly abus'd; but know, thou noble youth, 
 The serpent that did sting thy father's life 
 Now wears his crown. 
 
 Hamlet. O my prophetic soul ! 
 
 My uncle ! 
 
 Ghost. Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, 
 With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts — 
 O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power 
 So to seduce ! — xvon to his shameful lust 
 The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen." 
 
 *' Sleeping within my orchard, 
 My custom always in the afternoon. 
 Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, 
 With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, 
 
90 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 And in the porches of my ears did pour 
 The leprous distilment." 
 
 ** Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand 
 Of life, of crown, of Queen, at once dispatched." 
 
 The dumb-show reproduces the murder of the 
 elder Hamlet by his brother Claudius, and his 
 wooing of Gertrude : 
 
 ^* Ophelia. Belike this show imports the argument of 
 the play? * 
 
 [Enter Prologue.] 
 
 Hamlet. We shall know by this fellow; the players can 
 not keep counsel; they'll tell all. 
 
 Prologue. For us, and for our tragedy, 
 
 Here stooping to your clemency, *) 
 
 We beg your hearing patiently. {Exit. 
 
 Hamlet. Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring.? 
 Ophelia. 'Tis brief, my lord. 
 Hatnlet. As woman's love. 
 
 {Enter txvo Players, King and ^ueen.] 
 Player King. Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone 
 Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed ground, [round 
 
 And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen 
 About the world have times twelve thirties been. 
 Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands 
 Unite commutal in most sacred bands." 
 
 Hamlet, in these lines of the player king, is 
 impersonating the elder Hamlet, and his reference 
 to the fact that he and Gertrude had been married 
 ' full thirty ' years. Thirty times — once a year — 
 had ' PhcEbus' cart gone round Neptune's salt wash 
 and Tellus' orbed ground.' The sun had gone 
 round the world thirty times, and the moon had 
 with ' borrowed sheen ' accompanied him. And 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 91 
 
 80, in the lines of the player queen, Hamlet imper- 
 sonates Gertrude : 
 
 ^^ Player ^ueen. So many journeys may the sun and moon 
 Make us again count o'er e'er love be done ! 
 But, nvoe is me^ you are so sick of late^ 
 So far from cheer and from yonr former state, 
 That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust, 
 Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must: 
 For women's fear and love holds quantity, 
 In either aught, or in extremity. 
 Now, what my love is, proof hath made you know. 
 And as my love is sized, my fear is so : 
 Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear. 
 Where little fears grow great, great love grows there, [too; 
 
 Player King. Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly 
 My operant powers their functions leave to do : 
 And thou shalt live in this fair world behind, 
 Honour'd, beloved; and haply one as kind 
 For husband shalt thou 
 
 Player ^ueen. O, confound the rest! 
 
 Such love must needs be treason in my breast; 
 In second husband let me be accurst ! 
 None wed the second but who kill'd the first. 
 
 Hamlet. {Aside.) Wormwood, wormwood ! 
 
 Player ^ueen. The instances that second marriage move 
 Are base respects of thrifty but none of love; 
 A second time I kill my husband dead. 
 When second husband kisses me in bed." 
 
 This language of the Queen reminds one of the 
 conversation of Horatio and Hamlet : 
 
 " Horatio. My lord, I came to see your father's funeral. 
 
 Hamlet. I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student ; 
 I think it was to see my mother's wedding. 
 
 Horatio. Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. 
 
 Hamlet. Thrift, thrift, YioxdXioV 
 
g2 The Secret of Ha^nlct. 
 
 This * play' within the ' play of Hamlet,- is an 
 intimation that ' Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ' is 
 an ' inner drama ' of the 'inner life.' The heart 
 of Hamlet is always prominent ; his thoughts, 
 purposes, and condition are the chief matters of 
 concern. Hamlet, Ophelia, and Horatio are to- 
 gether in the audience of the ' play ' within the 
 play. Ophelia is entirely innocent of Hamlet's 
 purpose in the play ; but he and Horatio are watch- 
 ing the King. The King and Queen, Polonius, 
 Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern are together. The 
 audience itself, in its relative position, is a dumb- 
 show of the realities of the play of Hamlet. 
 
 Shakespeare tells us that the ' purpose of playing 
 is to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature ; to 
 show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, 
 and the very age and body of the time, his form 
 and pressure.' 
 
 *' But in these cases, 
 We still have judgment here; that we but teach 
 Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return 
 To plague the inventor; this even-handed justice 
 Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice 
 To our own lips." 
 
 This ' scene ' is to Claudius a mirror of the past ; 
 an ' abstract and brief chronicle ' of his past mur- 
 derous acts. The deeds done pass before us in 
 similitude — the very image of the past rises unex- 
 pectedly before us ; we reap what we sow ! 
 
 Human actions are immortalized by light ; 
 thoughts by electricity; and words by ethereal 
 vibrations. Man writes his own pictorial book of 
 
The Secret of Ha7tilet, 93 
 
 life, and also writes an ' inner book of life ' within 
 his book of life. He, in his consciousness, reads 
 the ' inner book,' is startled when an external page 
 of his personal autobiography passes before his 
 gaze. 
 
 ♦* Player King. I do believe you think what now you speak. 
 
 But what we do determine oft we break. 
 
 Purpose is but the slave to memory, 
 
 Of violent birth, but poor validity ; 
 
 Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, 
 
 But fall unshaken when they mellow be. 
 
 Most necessary 't is that we forget 
 
 To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt; 
 
 What to ourselves in passion we propose. 
 
 The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. 
 
 The violence of either grief or joy 
 
 Their own enactures with themselves destroy: 
 
 Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament' 
 
 Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident. 
 
 This world is not aye, nor 't is not strange 
 
 That even our loves should with our fortunes change, 
 
 For 't is a question left us yet to prove, 
 
 Whether love lead fortune or else fortune love. 
 
 The great man down, you mark his favorite flies; 
 
 The poor advanc'd makes friends of enemies. 
 
 And hitherto doth love on fortune tend ; 
 
 For who not needs shall never lack a friend, 
 
 And who on want a hollow friend doth try 
 
 Directly seasons him his enemy. 
 
 But, orderly to end where I begun. 
 
 Our wills and fates do so contrary run 
 
 That our devices still are overthrown. 
 
 Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own : 
 
 So think thou wilt no second husband wed. 
 
 But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead. 
 
 Player ^ueen. Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light ! 
 Sport and repose lock from me day and night ! 
 
94 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 To desperation turn my trust and hope ! 
 An anchor's cheer in prison be my scope! 
 Each opposite that blanks the face of joy 
 Meet what I would have well and it destroy! 
 Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, 
 If once a widow, ever I be wife I 
 
 Ha7nleL If she should break it now ! 
 
 Player King. 'Tis deeply sworn ; 
 Sweet, leave me here awhile : 
 My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile 
 The tedious day with sleep. {Sleeps.) 
 
 Player ^ueen. Sleep rock thy brain; 
 
 And never come mischance between us twain ! " 
 
 The player queen leaves the stage ; Gertrude 
 thinks ' The lady protests too much ; ' Claudius 
 asks if there is not offense in the argument ; Ham- 
 let says, ' No offence in the world.' 
 
 *' [Enter Lticianus.] " 
 
 Hamlet has told the King that he calls the play 
 ' the mouse-trap,' and as Lucianus enters he be- 
 comes impatient for him to begin — ' Come : the 
 croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.' 
 
 " Lucianus. Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and 
 
 time agreeing; 
 Confederate season, else no creature seeing; 
 Thou mixture rank of midnight weeds collected. 
 With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected. 
 Thy natural magic and dire property, 
 On wholesome life usurp immediately. 
 
 {Pours the poison into the sleeper^ s ear.] 
 
 Claudius rises, and cries : 
 
 •' Give me some light! — away! " 
 The mouse-trap has closed in upon him ; the con- 
 science of the King rises within him, and the dark- 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 95 
 
 ness of his murderous act overwhelms him. All 
 leave except Hamlet and Horatio ; and they are 
 both now satisfied that the Ghost revealed the 
 truth. King Claudius is in great anger, ' marvel- 
 lous distempered ; ' Gertrude, ' in most great 
 affliction of spirit,' in her closet, desires Hamlet 
 not to retire until she can speak to him alone. His 
 ' behaviour has struck her into amazement and 
 admiration.' The court is in great excitement. 
 Polonius and the King have previously arranged 
 that after the ' play ' Gertrude is to ' all alone 
 entreat him to show his grief.' Polonius is to 
 secrete himself in the room and hear the conference 
 between Hamlet and ' his queen mother,' If this 
 plot fails, Hamlet is to be sent to England, or 
 confined, as the King thinks best. 
 
 ** If she find him not, 
 To England send him, or confine him where 
 Your wisdom best shall think." 
 
 Hamlet expresses his contempt of the King 
 openly to his creatures ; Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
 stern quail before his sarcasm ; he desires to be 
 alone ; dismisses all ; his mind is now made up ; he 
 is ready to revenge : 
 
 ** 'Tis now the very witching time of night, 
 
 When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out 
 
 Contagion to this world ; now could I drink hot blood, 
 
 And do such bitter business as the day 
 
 Would quake to look on. Soft ! now to my mother. 
 
 O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever 
 
 The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom; 
 
 Let me be cruel not unnatural. 
 
96 The Secret of Hajnlet. 
 
 I will speak daggers to her, but use none ; 
 M7 tongue and soul in this be hypocrites : 
 How in my words soever she be shent, 
 To give them seals never, my soul, consent! " 
 
 Hamlet leaves the hall, and Polonius, who has 
 been shadowing him, hastens to tell Claudius. 
 The King and his courtiers, Rosencrantz and 
 Guildenstern, have hastily arranged to send Hamlet 
 to England, and these two have just left the King, 
 when Polonius tells him hurriedly : 
 
 *' My lord, he's going to his mother's closet. 
 Behind the arras I'll convey myself. 
 To hear the process; I'll warrant she'll tax him home: 
 And as jca said, and ivisely was it said, 
 'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, 
 Since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear 
 The speech, of vantage. Fare you well, my liege; 
 I'll call upon you ere you go to bed. 
 And tell you what I know." 
 
 Polonius hastens to the closet of the Queen to 
 hear the interview between Hamlet and ' his queen 
 mother.' Poor ' foolish prating knave ' — ' good 
 old man ; ' unconsciously he has made his last 
 ' adieu ' to Claudius. And Ophelia — poor inno- 
 cent Ophelia, whose destiny is linked in sorrow 
 with the destiny of Hamlet — the last words while 
 yet sane was her exclamation at the ' play,' ' The 
 King rises ! ' These were her last words except 
 the unrecorded conversation between her and her 
 father, overheard, it may have been, by Horatio, 
 and by him hastily conveyed to Hamlet. The 
 conversation confirms what Hamlet already knew 
 of his forced visit to England. 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. ^*j 
 
 And Hamlet, detained by Horatio s message, 
 saddened by Ophelia's sorrows, concludes to make 
 an end of the author of all his trouble, and for this 
 purpose enters his room, just as the conscience- 
 stricken Claudius retires and kneels in prayer — still 
 wanting ' light.' Hamlet refuses to kill the King 
 at prayer ; his weakness overbalances for the time 
 his purpose ; he postpones his revenge. The 
 prayer of Claudius, like ' physic ' for the sick, only 
 prolongs his ' sickly days.' 
 
 ** My mother stays — 
 This physic but prolongs thy sickly days." 
 
 Hamlet leaves the King and turns toward the 
 closet of ' his queen mother.' In the scene with 
 the Queen, Hamlet vindicates his own sanity : 
 
 ** It is not madness 
 That I have uttered : bring me to the test, 
 And I the matter will re-word ; which madness 
 Would gambol from." 
 
 This is Shakespeare's test of sanity. 
 
 '• Mother, for love of grace, 
 Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, 
 That not your trespass but my madness speaks." 
 
 Here Hamlet reveals his secret, and we are called 
 upon to ask ourselves what we would do under the 
 circumstances. Put yourself in Hamlet's place! 
 
 Polonius dies by an accident instead of his ' bet- 
 ters.' The ' wretched, rash, intruding fool ' is sent 
 into the presence — not of Claudius, but the elder 
 Hamlet, his former King. And this by a ' sudden 
 7 
 
98 772^ Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 impulse, and not a determinate action of the will. ' 
 He scarcely regrets the accident : 
 
 " Take thy fortune ; 
 Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger." 
 
 This scene is a mouse-trap also — it catches the 
 conscience of the Queen. Hamlet exhibits in 
 dumb-show the image of the elder Hamlet, and 
 Claudius — another ' play ' within the flay — which 
 wrings her heart, while he upbraids her of her 
 guilt. 
 
 '* Have you eyes? 
 Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, 
 And batten on this moor? " 
 
 The guilty Queen cries out in despair : 
 
 *' O Hamlet, speak no more: 
 Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, 
 And there I see such black and grained spots 
 As will not leave their tinct." 
 
 His mind is eased by his colloquy with his 
 mother. The Ghost appears to whet his ' almost 
 blunted purpose,' but nothing is done. He weeps 
 over Polonius : 
 
 ** For this same lord, 
 I do repent; but Heaven hath pleas'd it so, 
 To punish me with this and this with me^ 
 That I must be their scourge and minister." 
 
 Next he startles the Queen ; his intellect is again at 
 its subtleties : 
 
 " I must to England; you know that? 
 ^ueen. Alack, 
 
 I had forgot; 't is so concluded on. 
 
The Secret of Hainlet, 99 
 
 Hamlet. There's letters seal'd, and my two school- 
 fellows — 
 Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd — 
 They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way; 
 And marshal me to knavery. Let it work; 
 For 't is the sport to have the engineer 
 Hoist with his own petard; and 't shall go hard 
 But I will delve one yard below their mines, 
 And blow them at the moon." 
 
 He casts himself like a feather upon the great 
 wave of fate — he embraces the events that mar- 
 shalled him ' to knavery.' He is confident of his 
 cause ; courts the issue ; believes that he pierces 
 through the darkness of his fate : 
 
 ** I see a cherub, that sees," 
 
 is his reply to the King as to his purposes in send- 
 ing him to England. The ' divinity that shapes 
 his end ' will take care of him ; the ' cherub sees ' 
 and will aid. He leaves for England ; not forget- 
 ting him whose — 
 
 " Form and cause conjoined ; preaching to stones, 
 Would make them capable; " 
 
 but still meditating instead of acting. 
 
 *' O, from this time forth, 
 My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth ! " 
 
 his sudden conclusion as he follows his guards 
 toward the ship that sails for England. 
 
MOTTOES. 
 
 I see a cherub that sees them. — Hamlet. 
 
 Behold, thou art pilot of the ship, and owner of that 
 
 freighted galleon, 
 Competent, with all thy weakness, to steer into safety 
 
 or be lost: 
 Compass and chart are in thy hand : roadstead and 
 
 rocks thou knowest; 
 Thou art warned of reefs and shallows ; thou beholdest 
 
 the harbour and its lights. 
 
 — TUPPER. 
 
 At St. Helena, in his last illness, one morning, Napo- 
 leon started up and exclaimed, in dreary delirium: ** I 
 have just seen my good Josephine, but she would not 
 embrace me. She disappeared at the moment when I was 
 about to take her in my arms. She was seated there. 
 She is not changed. She is the same, full of devotion to 
 me. She told me we were about to see each other again, 
 never more to part. Did you see her ? " 
 
 — Abbott's *' Napoleon Bonaparte," Vol. ii, ch. 34. 
 
 (100) 
 
IX. 
 
 HAMLET AND THE CHERUB. 
 
 The voyage on the sea, with its change of air 
 and active excitement had a beneficial effect upon 
 Hamlet. In his letter to Horatio he says : 
 
 *' Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very 
 war-like appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves 
 too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour; in the 
 grapple I boarded them : on the instant they got clear of 
 our ship; so I alone became their prisoner. They have 
 dealt with me like thieves of mercy : but they knew what 
 they did ; I am to do a good turn for them. Let the King 
 have the letters I have sent; and repair thou to me with as 
 much speed as thou wouldst fly death. I have words to 
 speak in thine ear will make thee dumb ; yet are they much 
 too light for the bore of the matter. These good fellows 
 will bring thee where I am. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 
 hold their course for England : of them I have much 
 to tell thee. Farewell. 
 
 ** He that thou knowest thine, 
 
 *' Hamlet." 
 
 Hamlet's letter to the King, sent by the sailors, 
 gives his explanation for his ' strange and sudden 
 return.' 
 
 * High and mighty: 
 *' You shall know I am set naked on your kingdom. 
 To-morrow shall I beg leave to see your kingly eyes ; when 
 I shall, first asking your pardon thereunto, recount the 
 occasion of my sudden and more strange return." 
 
 (lOl) 
 
I02 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 The King does not understand the letter. He 
 wonders as to the reality or possible deception in 
 the matter, helplessly asking advice from Laertes, 
 who has in secret returned from France : 
 
 ** What should this mean? Are all the rest come back? 
 Or is it some abuse, and no such thing? " 
 
 The * Cherub ' of Hamlet reminds one of the 
 ' Demon ' of Socrates, that forewarned him of 
 dangers. And by the reference, Shakespeare 
 suggests that the oracles of antiquity were not all 
 impostures. His theory of human nature is briefly 
 outlined as follows : 
 
 1. "Man is a duality, consisting of an organ- 
 ized spiritual form, evolved coincidently with and 
 permeating the physical body, and having corre- 
 sponding organs and development." 
 
 2. " Death is the separation of this duality, and 
 effects no change in the spirit, morally or intellec- 
 tually." 
 
 3. " Progressive evolution of the intellectual and 
 moral nature is the destiny of individuals ; the 
 knowledge, attainments, and experience of earth 
 life forming the basis of spirit life." 
 
 4. "Spirits can communicate through properly 
 endowed mediums. They are attracted to those 
 they love or sympathize with, and strive to warn, 
 protect, and influence them for good by mental 
 impression, when they can not effect any more 
 direct communication ; but, as follows from the 
 fact that death effects no change in the spirit, 
 morally or intellectually, their communication will 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 103 
 
 be fallible, and must be judged and tested just as 
 we do those of our fellow men." 
 
 5. ** In this life, Man is in every act and 
 thought helping to build up a ' mental fabric ' 
 which will be and will constitute himself more com- 
 pletely after the death of the body than it does 
 now. Just as this fabric is well or ill built, so 
 will our progress and happiness be aided or re- 
 tarded. Just in proportion as we have developed 
 our higher intellectual and moral nature, or starved 
 it by disuse and by giving undue prominence to 
 those faculties which secure us mere physical or 
 selfish enjoyment, shall we be well or ill fitted for 
 the new life we enter on. Men are best educated 
 by being left to suffer the natural consequences of 
 their actions." 
 
 '♦ I am thy father's spirit; 
 Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, 
 And for the day confined to fret in fires, 
 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
 Are burnt and purged away." 
 
 If the soul is not liberated in the ' days of 
 nature,' it will still be ' hindered ' in its ' prison- 
 house ' beyond the grave. 
 
 " But that I am forbid 
 To tell the secrets of my prison-house, 
 I could a tale unfold whose lightest word 
 Would harrow up thy soul." 
 
 Horatio having received the letters from Hamlet, 
 ' the ambassador that was bound for England,' 
 hastily ' finds means to the King,' through Claudia, 
 who gives the letters to the King's messenger: 
 
I04 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 " Come, I will make jou way for these letters ; 
 And do 't the speedier, that you may direct me 
 To him from whom you brought them." 
 
 Horatio, in company with the sailors, eagerly 
 obeys Hamlet's urgent command : ' Repair thou to 
 me with as much speed as thou wouldst fly death.' 
 The friend of the Prince finds him alone — unat- 
 tended — as he had'written in his letter to the King. 
 The two friends, after conversing, approach the 
 churchyard, and are in hearing of the clowns, who 
 are digging a grave for the ' fair Ophelia ' — Ham- 
 let's 'rose of May,' his 'cherub that sees' the 
 ' purposes ' of the King. Hamlet thinks the 
 clown has ' no feeling of his business ; ' if he did, 
 he would not sing ' at grave-making.' He com- 
 ments upon the ' skulls ' thrown up by the ' grave- 
 digger ; ' speaks to the man digging the grave ; 
 replies to his repartee, and asks : 
 
 •* How long hast thou been a grave-maker? 
 
 Cloivn. Of all the days i' the year, I came to 't that day 
 that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras. 
 
 Hamlet. How long is that since ? 
 
 Cloivn. Can not you tell that? every fool can tell that: 
 it was the very day that young Hamlet was born ; he that is 
 mad, and sent into England. 
 
 Hamlet. Ay, marry; why was he sent into England? 
 
 Clown. Why, because he was mad; he shall recover his 
 wits there; or, if he do not, it's no great matter there. 
 
 Hamlet. Why? 
 
 Cloivn. 'Twill not be seen in him there; there the men 
 are as mad as he. 
 
 Hamlet. How came he mad ? 
 
 Cloivn. Very strangely, they say. 
 
 Hamlet. How strangely? 
 
 Cloivn. Faith, e'en with losing his wits." 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 105 
 
 Hamlet philosophizes on death as suggested by 
 the skull of Yorick, whom he has known twenty- 
 three years before. He passes from grave to gay, 
 in his conversation with Horatio, about Alexander 
 and Caesar, improvising poetry, until the King, 
 Queen, priests, courtiers, and others of the funeral 
 procession approach the now finished grave, with 
 the body of Ophelia. After his surprise at hearing 
 of the death of his lover, the scene at the grave, 
 the struggle with Laertes, he is quieted by Horatio ; 
 and in the large hall of the castle, Hamlet explains 
 to Horatio his experience on the ship with the 
 attendant circumstances : 
 
 Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, 
 That would not let me sleep : methought I lay 
 Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly — 
 (And praised be rashness for it; let us know, 
 Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, 
 When our deep plots do pall ; and that should teach us 
 There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough-hew them how we will) 
 
 Horatio. That is most certain. 
 
 Hamlet. Up from my cabin, 
 
 My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark 
 Groped I to find out them ; had my desire ; 
 Finger'd their packet; and, in fine, withdrew 
 To mine own room again : making so bold, 
 My fears forgetting manners, to unseal 
 Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio — 
 O royal knavery ! — an exact command, 
 Larded with many several sorts of reasons. 
 Importing Denmark's health and England's too, 
 With, ho ! such bugs and goblins in my life, 
 That, on the supervise, no leisure bated, 
 No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, 
 My head should be struck off. 
 
io6 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Horatio. Is 't possible? [leisure. 
 
 Hamlet. Here's the commission; read it at more 
 But wilt thou hear me how I did proceed? 
 
 Horatio. I beseech you." 
 
 ***** 
 Hamlet divined the King's purpose in sending 
 him to England from the first. Hence, on ship- 
 board, he has a vague apprehension of mischief. 
 He can not sleep. He dreams that he is a prisoner 
 in irons, springs from his bed, and v^^hile in a 
 state of somnambulism gropes in the dark in 
 search of his guards — Guildenstern and Rosen- 
 crantz — finds their packet, withdraws to his own 
 room again, unseals the packet, reads ' their grand 
 commission,' in which he finds ' an exact com- 
 mand ' for his decapitation on his arrival in Eng- 
 land. Having his father's signet in his purse, he 
 devises a new commission, with a command to the 
 King of England to put the two courtiers to death ; 
 subscribes the commission, seals it, and puts it 
 where he found the packet. The sleeping courtiers 
 knew not the change, and the next day the sea 
 fight occurred, and ' in the grapple ' Hamlet 
 boarded the pirate ship and became the prisoner 
 of the pirates. The two ships separating, Guild- 
 enstern and Rosencrantz sail to England and are 
 executed according to Hamlet's commission, while 
 the pirates, as a result of a bargain, set Hamlet on 
 the soil of Denmark. 
 
 Horatio regrets the fate of the two courtiers, but 
 Hamlet's conscience feels no remorse : 
 
 •* Thej are not near mj conscience; their defeat 
 Does by their own insinuation grow." 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 107 
 
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did not distinctly 
 know the purpose of their commission. If they 
 had known it, they would have turned back, after 
 the separation of Hamlet from them. Hamlet 
 expected to go with them to England, until the 
 pirate ship was boarded by him, and he was thus 
 separated from them. The crisis in Hamlet's life 
 had come ; he is forced to act ; the cherub warns ; 
 he is ' pushed by unseen hands ; ' it is ' Heaven's 
 ordinant.' Says Werder : 
 
 " As surely as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 
 deliver their letter, his head falls. That letter^ 
 then, they must not be allowed to deliver; they 
 7nust deliver a different one. But do you say he 
 could have spared them? he could have written 
 something that would endanger neither him nor 
 them? Does he know or can he discover from 
 them so that he may depend upon their word, how 
 far they are cognizant of the purport of their 
 errand? Whether they are not charged with some 
 oral message? What if they should contradict 
 what he might write of a harmless character? 
 What if the King of England, being in doubt, 
 should send back to Denmark for further directions, 
 detain all three, and then, as surely was to be 
 expected, put Hamlet to death? No, there is no 
 expedient possible, no evasion, no choice between 
 thus or otherwise. He must sacrifice them, and 
 even without allowing them time to confess — mzist 
 do this even. For, if only they are allowed time 
 for confession, after they are seized and made sen- 
 sible of their position, there is no foreseeing what 
 turn things may take for him." 
 
io8 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 And so Hamlet's after-observation embodies a 
 great truth : 
 
 ** 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes 
 Between the pass and fell-incensed points 
 Of mighty opposites." 
 
 Werder thus explains the diplomatic words of 
 Hamlet: "Whoever, from his position, or from 
 his zeal and officiousness, undertakes the office of 
 carrying the letter and Hamlet to England, must 
 suffer whatever of harm to himself may be con- 
 nected with such an errand. The business is dan- 
 gerous ; such affairs always are. The baseness of 
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is their ruin : they 
 promenade, so to speak, in the sphere of a fate 
 which involves damnation without scenting or 
 wishing to scent the sulphur. When such a king 
 bears rule, his servants are always exposed to the 
 very worst that can befall ; and at any moment 
 their ruin may come through circumstances and 
 causes, from which nothing may seem more remote 
 than the catastrophe : for the main thing is over- 
 looked, because it is always present, even the 
 ground on which all concerned live and move, 
 upon which all rests, and which is itself Destruc- 
 tion. Whoever serves such a king, and without 
 any misgiving of his crime, serves him with ready 
 zeal ; upon him Hell has a claim ; and if that claim 
 be made good, he has no right to complain. — These 
 are things in which Shakespeare knows no jesting, 
 because he is so great an expounder of the Law, 
 the Divine Law ; and he holds to it as no second 
 poet has done." 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 109 
 
 Horatio is surprised at the revelation of the 
 King's purposes toward Hamlet, who nov/ feels it 
 incumbent upon himself to mete out justice to the 
 usurping Claudius. He now has the evidence, the 
 written evidence of his murderous designs upon the 
 Prince of Denmark : he can now meet both the 
 King and the public with justifying proof of his 
 guilt. 
 
 The crisis is at hand, for the King will soon hear 
 of the issue of the business in England — the death 
 of his courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 
 Hamlet is ready ; ' the interim ' will give him time 
 for thought ; if not, the ' cherub ' will warn, and at 
 any rate he is determined. He is sorry of the 
 encounter with Laertes at the grave of Ophelia, 
 and confesses that the ' grief ' of her brother put 
 him ' into a towering passion.' 
 
MOTTO. 
 
 Hamlet. O, I die, Horatio; 
 The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit: 
 I can not live to hear the news from England ; 
 But I do prophesy th' election lights 
 On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice; 
 So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less, 
 Which have solicited \Dies.\ 
 
 Horatio. The rest is silence : 
 
 Now cracks a noble heart. — Goodnight, sweet Prince; 
 And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest ! 
 
 — Shakespeare, " Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." 
 
 (ito) 
 
X. 
 
 DEATH OF HAMLET. 
 
 Hamlet discriminates, as does Shakespeare him- 
 self throughout his works, between fate and for- 
 tune. Fate seems to him inevitable and invincible 
 destiny ; fortune presides over the smaller variations 
 of life. Fate is constant and continuous, while 
 fortune is mobile and fluctuating. Hamlet respects 
 and fears fate ; he manifests contempt for fortune : 
 
 ** This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange 
 
 That even our lives should with our fortunes change." 
 
 He starts with the theory that he is born to be 
 his father's avenger, and to restore order and jus- 
 tice in Denmark : 
 
 ** The time is out of joint: O cursed spite 
 That ever I was born to set it right ! " 
 
 His power of thought hinders him, and even the 
 decrees of fate are questioned, brooded upon, and 
 distrusted. He describes his mental conflict in his 
 own lines : 
 
 ** Our wills and fates do so contrary run 
 That our devices still are overthrown, 
 Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own." 
 
 Sometimes he resolves to let the tragedy which 
 he foresees solve itself as it will. Even Hercules 
 could not alter the predestined course of events : 
 
 (III) 
 
112 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 •• Let Hercules himself do what he may, 
 
 The cat will mew, the dog will have his day." 
 
 Indiscretion is sometimes better than contrivance : 
 
 ** Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well 
 
 When our deep plots do pall ; and that should teach us 
 There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough-hew them how we will." 
 
 Horatio thinks he will lose the wager, but the 
 Prince is confident of success : 
 
 *' I shall win at the odds. 
 But thou wouldst not think how ill all 's 
 Here about my heart; but it is no matter." 
 
 The villainous plot of Claudius and Laertes, the 
 poisoned rapier, and the cup, and the coming 
 events, are felt by the unsuspecting Prince ; but he 
 refuses the offer of Horatio to postpone the trial of 
 skill with Laertes : ' ' Not a whit ; we defy augury ; 
 there is a special providence in the fall of a spar- 
 row. If it be now, 'tis not to come ; if it be to 
 come, it will not be now ; if it be not now, yet it 
 will come : the readiness is all." 
 
 Horatio, as the friend of the Prince, shares his 
 prominent qualities. He possesses a lively imagi- 
 nation, but under better control than that of his 
 friend. He is in sympathy with what might be 
 termed the Hamletic philosophy. His reply to 
 Bernardo's question in the opening scene: 'Is 
 Horatio there? ' reminds one of Hamlet's signature 
 of his letter to Ophelia : ' Thine while this ma- 
 chine is to him.' Horatio's ' a piece of him ' and 
 Hamlet's ' machine ' are alike in the suggestion of 
 dichotomy of personality. 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 113 
 
 The incidents of the combat and the final denoue- 
 ment of the drama are quite in accord with Ham- 
 let's character in the rest of the play. He remains 
 to the last undecided as to his great purpose. His 
 mother's death by drinking the poisoned goblet, 
 Laertes' dying confession of his uncle's treachery 
 — these are at last the impelling causes that induced 
 him to stab his uncle. But it is clear they are 
 purely accidental. . . As he himself designated 
 it, the whole affair was but a ' chance ' — an event 
 as devoid of any plan, plot, or prearrangement as 
 any fatality could well be. The King and Queen 
 reap together the harvest of death. Claudius dies 
 by Hamlet's hand. The King forced his destiny. 
 Hamlet's great purpose has been achieved. His 
 *mind is not tainted,' neither has he 'contrived 
 against his mother aught.' Claudius has unwit- 
 tingly poisoned Gertrude, and in part caused the 
 death of Laertes as well as himself. "No less 
 than four murders lay at his door, yet Hamlet 
 thinks that his assassination of the murderer may 
 need a kindly construction." And so he exhorts 
 his friend to set him right with the world : 
 
 '* O, good Horatio, what a wounded name, 
 
 Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me," 
 
 words which partially explain the vacillation and 
 doubt of his past life. Hamlet's character — his 
 desire to do right — accounts for his hesitation. He 
 is a skeptic in action until the very last. "The 
 consummation of the plot has been brought about 
 by a series of accidents and entirely irrespective of 
 
 8 
 
114 -^^^^ Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 his design or volition, and he reflects on the issue 
 with his accustomed vacillation and uncertainty." 
 
 "Men must act often in critical conjuntions by 
 the same iron law of necessity that compels them 
 to live. Great actions or purposes, like great 
 truths, are not always certainly based." Besides, 
 some minds are naturally impatient of coercive 
 action, just as others dislike prescribed beliefs. 
 And as actions are fatal, if regarded as decisive 
 events, men are pardonable, if they become cau- 
 tious. Actions, like definitive beliefs, are pregnant 
 with large results. 
 
 The assassination of Claudius, before his guilt 
 and villainy could be established, would have sub- 
 jected Hamlet to the charge of treason and murder. 
 To attempt to justify such an event to his mother 
 or the Danish nation on the sole evidence of a sup- 
 posed spectral appearance would have been absurd. 
 There would have been no method or sense even, 
 in such madness. "It would have been at once 
 ascribed to his own ambition — an act of revenge on 
 his uncle for anticipating his own ascension to the 
 throne." Hamlet never could have assassinated 
 Claudius, in the absence of proof that could be 
 demonstrated to the world. He represents justice 
 against crime, human right against arbitrary tyr- 
 anny, truth against falsehood. 
 
 The dying Laertes justifies Hamlet in the death 
 of Claudius : 
 
 " He is justly served; 
 It is a poison temper'd by himself. — 
 Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet; 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 115 
 
 Mine and mj father's death come not upon thee, 
 Nor thine on me. 
 
 Hamlet. Heaven make thee free of it ! I follow thee. 
 I'm dead, Horatio. — Wretched Queen, adieu ! — 
 You that look pale and tremble at this chance. 
 That are but mutes or audience to the act. 
 Had I but time, as this fell-sergeant, Death, 
 Is strict in his arrest — O, I could tell you. 
 But let it be. — Horatio, I am dead ; 
 Thou livest : report me and my cause aright 
 To the unsatisfied. 
 
 Horatio. Never believe it: 
 I am more an antique Roman than a Dane : 
 Here's yet some liquor left. 
 
 Hamlet. As thou'rt a man. 
 
 Give me the cup: let go; by Heaven, I'll have 't. 
 O God, Horatio ! what a wounded name. 
 Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! 
 If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart. 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile. 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
 To tell my story." 
 
 Young Fortinbras arrives from Poland, and the 
 ambassadors of England also appear upon the scene 
 of death. Hamlet dies before he hears the news 
 from England ; but gives his ' dying voice ' for 
 Fortinbras as King of Denmark. 
 
 The elder Hamlet killed the elder Fortinbras, of 
 Norway, in battle, and made conquest of his lands. 
 Young Hamlet gives young Fortinbras his ' dying 
 voice,' all his rights as the successor of the crown 
 of Denmark. 
 
 "The Danish crown is partly elective, partly 
 hereditary ; that is to say, elective within the circle 
 of a particular family and kindred. Gertrude was 
 
Ii6 The Secret of Haiiilet. 
 
 the child of the former King; and Hamlet's father 
 was brought within the circle of eligibility by his 
 marriage with her. The Queen, who because of 
 her hereditary right, is described as ' the imperial 
 jointress of this warlike State,' being now dead, 
 and also her only heir, the Prince of Denmark, 
 there is no one of the family to become successor 
 to the Kingdom." 
 
 Hamlet recognizes that young Fortinbras has 
 ' some rights ' in the Kingdom, gives his ' voice ' in 
 his favor. And Horatio thinks the ' voice '-desire 
 of Hamlet will influence the Danes to choose For- 
 tinbras as King of Denmark. The Ambassador 
 from England, referring to the bloody scene, says : 
 
 " The sight is dismal; 
 And our affairs from England come too late : 
 The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, 
 To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd ; 
 That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. 
 Where should we have our thanks?" 
 
 Horatio, the administrator of the mystery of 
 Hamlet, who alone possesses the truth of the change 
 of the 'commission' by Hamlet, replies, referring 
 to King Claudius : 
 
 " Not from his mouth 
 Had it th' ability of life to thank you; 
 He never gave commandment for their death. 
 But since, so jump upon this bloody question, 
 You from the Polack wars, and you from England, 
 Are here arrived, give order that these bodies 
 High on a stage be placed to the view ; 
 And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world 
 How these things came about : so shall you hear, 
 
The Secret of Hatnlet, 117 
 
 Of carnal^ bloody, and unnatural acts ; 
 Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; 
 Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause* 
 And, in this upshot, purposes mistook 
 Fall'n on the inventors' heads : all this can I 
 Truly deliver." 
 
 Horatio's reference to * carnal,' bloody, and un- 
 natural acts is explained by the revelation of the 
 Ghost of the elder Hamlet to the Prince of Den- 
 mark, and by him communicated to Horatio. It 
 refers to Gertrude's unfaithfulness — her alliance 
 with Claudius, her husband's brother — the sin that 
 brought forth death : the death of the elder Hamlet 
 by the hand of Claudius, his brother. The ' acci- 
 dental judgments,' 'casual slaughters,' ' deaths put 
 on by cunning and forced cause,' refer to the ' acci- 
 dental ' death of Polonius, the execution of Rosen- 
 crantz and Guildenstern, the insanity and acciden- 
 tal death of Ophelia, the poisoning of Gertrude ; 
 the 'purposes mistook fall'n on the inventors' 
 heads ' — Claudius and Laertes — their treachery and 
 death, and finally the death of the Prince of Den- 
 mark. 
 
 Fortinbras is eager to hear Horatio, and desires 
 * the noblest ' called ' to the audience : ' 
 
 ** Let us haste to hear it, 
 And call the noblest to the audience. 
 For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune : 
 I have some rights of memory in this Kingdom, 
 Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me. 
 
 Horatio. Of that I shall have cause also to speak, 
 And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more — 
 But let this same be presently perform'd. 
 
ii8 The Secret of Hainlet. 
 
 Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance. 
 On plots and errors, happen. 
 
 Fortinbras. Let four captains 
 
 Bear Hamlet, like a soldier to the stage; 
 For he was likely, had he been put on, 
 T' have proved most royally: and, for his passage, 
 The soldiers' music and the rites of war 
 Speak loudly for him, — 
 Take up the bodies. — Such a sight as this 
 Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. — 
 Go, bid the soldiers shoot." 
 
 *' Hamlet has gained the haven for which he 
 longed so often ; yet without bringing guilt on 
 himself by his death : no fear that his sleep should 
 have bad dreams in it now. Those whom he loved, 
 his mother, Laertes, Ophelia, have all died guilt- 
 less or forgiven. Late and under the strong com- 
 pulsion of approaching death, he has done, and 
 well done, the inevitable task from which his 
 gentle nature shrank. 
 
 "Why then, any further thought, in the awful 
 presence of death, of crimes, conspiracies, ven- 
 geance.? Think that he has been slain in battle, 
 like his sea-king forefathers ; and let the booming 
 cannon be his mourners." 
 
MOTTO. 
 
 Adam gave the name, when the Lord had made his 
 
 creature, 
 For God led them in review, to see what man would 
 
 call them. 
 As they struck his senses, he proclaimed their sounds, 
 A name for the distinguishing of each, a numeral by 
 
 which it should be known : 
 He specified the partridge by her cry, and the forest 
 
 prowler by his roaring. 
 The tree by its use, and the flower by its beauty, and 
 
 everything according to its truth. 
 
 — TUPPKR. 
 
 (X19) 
 
XI. 
 HORATIO AND OPHELIA. 
 
 Shakespeare has intimated the characteristics 
 of Horatio and Ophelia in the secret meaning of 
 their names. The significant ' H ' is in the names 
 Hamlet, Horatio, and Ophelia. The presence of 
 this consonant in these names is evidently inten- 
 tional, as is the absence of that letter in the names 
 of the rest of the persons in the play. These three 
 persons have an affinity for each other. Horatio is 
 the friend of Hamlet and Ophelia, and Hamlet 
 and Ophelia are lovers. 
 
 We have seen the definition of the consonant H. 
 It represents a human spirit, or spirit-life. The 
 rest of Horatio's name defines the character of this 
 friend of Hamlet and Ophelia. ' Oratio ' signifies 
 ' discourse,' ' breath,' ' flow of speech ;' and Hora- 
 tio is a person w^hose eloquent and smooth flowing 
 life goes on uninterrupted and unhindered, quite 
 a contrast to the hindered life of his friend Hamlet. 
 
 Horatio is a noble character ; a clear, calm head 
 and a good heart ; not a ' slave of passion ; ' but 
 one whose personal life could only be described as 
 a living oration. Horatio means ' uncertain,' 
 * cautious.' He and Hamlet are friends and fellow- 
 students, and this ' scholar-skeptic,' the embodi- 
 
 (120) 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 121 
 
 merit of philosophy and morality, is Hamlet's ideal 
 of manhood : 
 
 '■^Hamlet. Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man 
 As e'er my conversation coped withal. 
 
 Horatio. O, my dear lord. 
 
 Hamlet. Nay, do not think I flatter ; 
 
 For what advancement may I hope from thee, 
 That no revenue hast but thy good spirits, [flatter'd? 
 
 To feed and clothe thee.? Why shouldst the poor be 
 No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, 
 And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee 
 Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou near? 
 Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, 
 And could of men distinguish, her election 
 Hath seal'd thee for herself: for thou hast been 
 As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; 
 A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards 
 Hath ta'en with equal thanks : and blest are those 
 Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, 
 That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger 
 To sound what stop she please. Give me that man 
 That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
 In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, 
 As I do thee!" 
 
 The esoteric meaning of Ophelia suggests her 
 character in a poetic way. There is a primary and 
 a secondary meaning hidden in the name. ' Ope ' 
 means 'open;' ' helios ' means 'the sun,' and 
 Ophelia would mean literally an 'open sun,' or 
 ' sunshine.' 
 
 The secondary meaning refers to her mental 
 Ophelia, or aphelia, and describes her condition 
 when ' divided from herself and her fair judgment.' 
 No word describes the character of Ophelia but 
 'sunshine.' She is the 'sunshine' of Hamlet's 
 
123 The Secret of Ha?nlct. 
 
 life, and this name ' lights up ' some of the dark 
 phrases of the play. To illustrate : when the King 
 says to Hamlet : 
 
 '■'■King. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? 
 Hamlet. Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun." 
 
 In this reply Hamlet has a three-fold meaning. 
 His first meaning is an intended antithesis to the 
 King. He opposes 'sun' to 'clouds.' 'In the 
 sun ' meant proverbially ' out of the house or 
 home,' that is, homeless; and Hamlet, since the 
 death of his father and marriage of his mother to 
 Claudius, regards himself as ' in the sun ' — ' with- 
 out the charities of home and kindness, exposed to 
 the social inclemencies of the world.' 
 
 But the answer is intended not only for the King 
 and Queen, but for Polonius and Laertes. The 
 father and brother of Ophelia — who is the ' sun- 
 shine ' of the court — look with suspicion upon 
 Hamlet's attentions to Ophelia, and they doubtless 
 understood the reference. Claudius addresses 
 Hamlet as 'my son,' and Hamlet replies in an 
 undertone : 'A little more than kin and less than 
 kind.' Claudius is ' a little more than kin,' being 
 his uncle, and, by marriage, his father : he is twice 
 kin. And he is also ' less than kind ' because of 
 the unnatural marriage — against nature, as Hamlet 
 regards it. Shakespeare is partial to the primitive 
 use of words : 'And God said, Let the earth 
 bring forth the living creature after his kind,' after 
 his nature : so ' less than kind ' would mean unnat- 
 ural. The reference of Hamlet to ' sun ' may also 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 123 
 
 have been a sarcastic answer to ' son,' as used by 
 the King. 
 
 Ophelia is the only ' sunshine ' that can dispel 
 the cloud and darkness of Hamlet's life. Polonius 
 speaks to Ophelia in reference to Hamlet : 
 
 " 'Tis told me, he hath very often of late 
 Given private time to you ; and you yourself 
 Have of your audience been most free and bounteous." 
 
 Hamlet speaks from the standpoint of Polonius, 
 when in reference to the ' private time ' given to 
 Ophelia, he makes reference in his words : 
 
 ** I am too much i' the sun." 
 
 Ophelia is referred to by Laertes, her brother, as 
 the ' rose of May,' and the philosophy of her 
 brother accounts for her mental sun going from its 
 sane orbit into its aphelia state : 
 
 '* Nature is fine in love; and where 'tis fine 
 It sends some precious instance of itself 
 After the thing it loves." 
 
 The mental sun of Ophelia shines no more in the 
 court; it has followed 'after the thing it loves,' 
 and is in a state of aphelia. "The violence her 
 feelings suffered in the constrained repulse of her 
 lover after she had ' suck'd the honey of his music 
 vows ; ' her tender grief at his subsequent condi- 
 tion, which is all the greater that she thinks herself 
 the cause of it; the shock of her father's sudden 
 and violent death — the father whom she loves with 
 such religious entireness — and this by the hand of 
 that same lover, and in consequence of the madness 
 into which, as she believes, her own action has cast 
 
124 "-^^^ Secret of IIa?nlet. 
 
 him ; all these causes join in producing her lapse of 
 reason, and all reappear more or less in what comes 
 from her afterwards. Her insanity is complete, 
 unconscious, and such as it is said never ends but 
 with the sufferer's death. There is no method in 
 it : she is like one walking and talking in her sleep, 
 her mind still busy, but its sources of activity all 
 within ; literally ' incapable of her own distress.' " 
 
 Ophelia in Greek means a ' serpent,' and from 
 the standpoint of Hamlet, at a certain crisis of his 
 life, the ' rose of May,' the ' sunshine of the court,' 
 has become a ' serpent-temptress ' to the ' Prince of 
 Denmark : ' for there is nothing good or bad, but 
 thinking makes it so. 
 
 Hamlet has received the revelation of the super- 
 natural command to restore order in the ' Kingdom 
 of Denmark.' But the imposed law of duty is 
 accompanied by the injunction : 
 
 *' But, howsoever thou pursues! this act, 
 
 Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
 Against thy mother aught." 
 
 Time and manner are left to Hamlet ; only he is 
 to keep himself from crime and dishonor : his 
 revenge must be righteous and according to the 
 demands of justice, not personal. His character is 
 the key to his conduct under the difficulties of his 
 situation. It is not a matter between Hamlet and 
 Claudius; the people of Denmark have rights 
 involved in the question. Hamlet feels the neces- 
 sity of his acts being in accordance with justice 
 and the imposed conditions of judgment. The 
 honor of Denmark must be restored : but the 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 125 
 
 Prince of Denmark must not further dishonor the 
 Kingdom by personal revenge. Hamlet's feeling 
 on the point of honor is shown in his dying 
 moments when he says : 
 
 ** O good Horatio ! what a wounded name, 
 Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me ! 
 If ever thou didst hold me in thy heart, 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
 To tell my story." 
 
 Ophelia appears to Hamlet as a ' serpent- 
 temptress,' to keep him from carrying out the law 
 of duty imposed by the supernatural command of 
 his father. He now thinks Ophelia an instrument 
 of Claudius, and this accounts for his words and 
 treatment of her in the scene where she desires to 
 return his ' remembrances ' — gifts. 
 
 Claudius means ' lame,' ' defective : ' 
 
 " So, oft it chances in particular men, 
 
 That for some vicious mole of nature in them. 
 
 As, in their birth — wherein they are not guilty, 
 
 Since nature can not choose his origin, — 
 
 By the o'ergrowth of some complexion. 
 
 Oft breathing down the pales and forts of reason ; 
 
 Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens 
 
 The form of plausive manners, that these men, — 
 
 Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, 
 
 Being nature's livery, or fortune's star, — 
 
 Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace, 
 
 As infinite as man may undergo — 
 
 Shall in the general censure take corruption 
 
 From that particular fault; the dram of leav'n 
 
 Doth all the noble substance of 'em sour, 
 
 To his own scandal." 
 
126 The Secret of Ha77ilet. 
 
 The revelation of the elder Hamlet throws light 
 upon Claudius. He is the 'serpent,' the 'sensual- 
 ist,' the ' deceiver, ' seducer,' ' liar : ' 
 
 ** Now, Hamlet, hear: 
 'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, 
 A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark 
 Is by a forged process of my death 
 Rankly abused; but know, thou noble youth. 
 The serpent that did sting thy father's life 
 Now wears his crown." 
 
 Claudius alienated Gertrude, the Eve of the 
 elder Hamlet's paradise, and poisoned him in his 
 own garden while asleep, and compassed the 
 election to the throne of Denmark. 
 
 Esoterically, Shakespeare intends by this history 
 in the drama — the genesis revelation of the Ghost 
 — that that affection of our nature which disposes 
 us to delight in the gratification of sense, if listened 
 to and obeyed will deprive us of our kingship, and 
 usurp the ' throne of inner dominion ' in the ' king- 
 dom within.' That love and lust are near akin — 
 outwardly brothers, but not really so ; as different 
 
 as 
 
 " Hyperion to a satyr." 
 
 And that lust always murders love : discrowns and 
 usurps the kingdom of man : 
 
 '* For thou dost know, O Damon, dear, 
 This realm dismantled was 
 Of Jove himself; and now reigns here 
 A very, very — pajock." 
 
 Hamlet in the above improvised poetical address 
 to his friend Horatio, calls him Damon, and says 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 127 
 
 that the realm of Denmark was dismantled of a 
 king who had the majesty of Jove, and that the 
 reigning king is but ' a very, very — pajock.' 
 
 In Shakespeare's time the ' pajock ' — peacock — 
 had a very bad character. It was the accredited 
 representative of inordinate pride and envy, as 
 well as of unnatural cruelty and lust — the Claudius 
 among the fauna. 
 
 Man's moral nature includes in its possibilities all 
 animal dispositions ; and as any one of them ac- 
 quires an undue predominance, so the man is 
 described. The animals are each a distinct incar- 
 nation of one human quality. Man is the embodi- 
 ment of all animal qualities and characteristics : he 
 is the comprehensive aggregate of all. Man is at 
 present a self-discordant being. His moral nature 
 — what is it but a growling menagerie? Or, to 
 use the expressive language of Paul : ' ' The flesh 
 lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against 
 the flesh, for these are contrary the one to the 
 other." Plato sets forth this same truth in his 
 allegory of the Winged Steeds : the one of noble 
 breed soaring heavenward; the other of ignoble, 
 plunging earthward. And Shakespeare : 
 
 " The state of man, 
 Like a little kingdom, suffers then 
 The nature of an insurrection ! " 
 
 The Claudius in Man rules, the inner realm is 
 dismantled, and the ideal man is called upon as a 
 prince to assert moral order, and in the heaven- 
 ordained way ascend the ' throne of inner domin- 
 ion.' Claudius must be dethroned and Hamlet 
 
128 The Secret of Ha?7tlet. 
 
 enthroned ; not by annihilating the passions, but by- 
 transfiguring them. The Hamlet within must obey 
 the Hamlet without. He is the Prince, the poten- 
 tial King. He must be about ' his father's busi- 
 ness,' and in his father's way, transfigure the 
 instinct of accumulation into moral acquisition ; 
 ambition into philanthropy ; vengeance into for- 
 giveness — literally overcoming evil with good. 
 
 T> ^f> •t^ 5jC ?JC 
 
 Furness says of Hamlet : " No one of mortal 
 mould (save Him ' whose blessed feet were nailed 
 for our advantage to the bitter cross') ever trod 
 this earth, commanding such absorbing interest as 
 this Hamlet, this mere creation of a poet's brain. 
 No syllable that he whispers, no word let fall by 
 any one near him, but is caught and pondered as 
 no words ever have been, except of Holy Writ. 
 Upon no throne built by mortal hands has ever 
 ' beat so fierce a light ' as upon that airy fabric 
 reared at Elsinore." But Furness failed to see the 
 reason of the universal interest. Hamlet is the 
 ideal of genius, the heir apparent to the throne of 
 inner dominion, the dramatic personification of the 
 Saviours of life, the Messiah of the mental world, 
 the prince of the personal cosmos, whose advent 
 causes the thrones of earth trouble, and through 
 whose struggle moral order is asserted and 
 achieved. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 The outward disposition of the audience in the 
 * play within the play,' reveals the truth of an 
 inner drama. It is Hamlet's ' mouse-trap ' to 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 129 
 
 catch the ' royal mouse ' — ' the conscience of the 
 King.' Hamlet is at the feet of Ophelia, and 
 Horatio is near Hamlet. The outward relation of 
 * nearness ' reveals the inner reality of ' friendship ' 
 and ' love ' — Hamlet is at the feet of Ophelia. The 
 King, Queen, and officers of state are opposite the 
 trio of friends. They are in reality opposed, in 
 thought and sympathy. The scene of the murder 
 of the elder Hamlet passes before the eyes of the 
 King. That scene is ever before the inner eye of 
 the King. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Claudius is unmasked, and Hamlet is convinced 
 of the honesty of the ' Ghost.' In an interview 
 with his mother, he catches the conscience of the 
 Queen, kills her Minister of State, and the result 
 of the recent happenings is the insanity and death 
 of Ophelia. Her mental sun declines, and she, in 
 a state of mental aphelia, dies. 
 
 Hamlet is sent to England, his ' cherub ' delivers 
 him, and the evil intended for him by the King 
 recoils upon the heads of his two courtiers. 
 
 *' The sight is dismal ; 
 And our affairs from England come too late : 
 The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, 
 To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd, 
 That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. 
 Where should we have our thanks?" 
 
 Horatio promises to tell ' the unknowing world 
 how these things came about : ' 
 
 9 
 
I JO The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 *' Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; 
 Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; 
 Of deaths put on bj cunning and forc'd cause. 
 And in the upshot, purposes mistook 
 Fallen on the inventors' heads." 
 
 Hamlet has played his part ; he leaves the visible 
 stage, and goes into the world where he finds 
 answers to the questions that agitated him here — 
 'the rest is silence.' 
 
MOTTOES. 
 
 The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
 
 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 
 
 And in imagination bodies forth 
 
 The forms of things unknown; the poet's pen 
 
 Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
 
 A local habitation and a name. 
 
 Miranda. How came we ashore? 
 Prospero. By Providence divine. 
 
 — The Tempest. 
 
 Admir'd Miranda, 
 Indeed, the top of admiration. 
 
 At the first sight 
 They have changed eyes. 
 
 And like the baseless fabric of this vision. 
 
 The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself — 
 
 Yea, all which it inherit — shall dissolve, 
 
 And like this insubstantial pageant faded 
 
 Leave not a rack behind. — The Tempest. 
 
 (i3t) 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE SEQUEL TO HAMLET. 
 
 '*The Tempest," says Campbell, " has a sort of 
 sacredness as the last work of a mighty workman. 
 Shakespeare, as if conscious that it would be his 
 last, and as if inspired to typify himself, has made 
 his hero a natural, a dignified, and benevolent ma- 
 gician, who could conjure up spirits from the vasty 
 deep, and command supernatural agency by the 
 most seemingly natural and simple means. And 
 the final play of our poet has magic indeed ; for, 
 what can be simpler in language than the courtship 
 of Ferdinand and Miranda, and yet what can be 
 more magical than the sympathy with which it 
 subdues us? Here Shakespeare himself is Prospero, 
 or rather the superior genius who commands both 
 Prospero and Ariel. But the time was approaching 
 when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff, and 
 tc bury it fathoms in the ocean. 
 
 'Deeper than did ever plummet sound.' That 
 staff has never been, and never will be recovered. 
 And Ulrici has said, " 'The Tempest ' is the com- 
 pleting companion-piece of the ' Winter's Tale,' 
 and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' " 
 
 ****** 
 
 Shakespeare embodies the principal superstitions 
 of his age in several dramas : Fairies are represented 
 (132) 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 133 
 
 in A Midsummer Night's Dream' — ghostly visi- 
 tants in ' Hamlet ' — witches and night-hags in 
 * Macbeth ' — aerial spirits and necromancers in 
 *The Tempest.' The lessons of 'The Tempest' 
 are — the mutability of regal sway, the blessedness 
 of forgiveness, and the happiness of that man who 
 can say — 
 
 *' My mind to me a kingdom is." 
 
 ****** 
 
 'The Tempest ' is a projected condition of affairs 
 beyond the grave, where results of causes in life are 
 realized. Prospero, as the name indicates, is Hu- 
 manity typified in the realized glory of achievement. 
 Struggle is over with the ' hindered ' Hamlet, and 
 he is now no longer in adversity, but a prosperous 
 person, still pursuing his occult studies, the ruler in 
 the realm of Mind. Thought is personified as the 
 supreme force, in Prospero who controls the en- 
 chanted island and rules in the realm of Mind. 
 
 Hamlet in his ' hindered ' state, before he became 
 Prospero, was ever shaken with ' thoughts beyond 
 the reaches of our souls.' ' Why is this ? wherefore ? 
 what should we do ? ' These queries of the higher 
 self — the potential Prospero, were continually de- 
 manding solution. 
 
 After death Hamlet as Prospero upon his rightful 
 throne ' transported and wrapt in secret studies,' 
 ' neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated to closeness 
 and the bettering of his mind with that which 
 o'erprised all popular rate.' Now Hamlet has his 
 powers, the sign of which is the mantle. 
 
 Victor Hugo says that " the ' Midsummer Night's 
 
134 ^^^^ Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Dream ' depicts the action of the invisible world on 
 man, but ' The Tempest ' symbolizes the action of 
 man on the invisible world. In the poet's youth, 
 man obeys the spirits. In the poet's ripe age, the 
 spirits obey man." Hamlet is controlled by the 
 spirit world — its influence is upon him ; but when he 
 rises through death as Prospero, he controls the 
 spirits. 
 
 Psychology suggests that living thought becomes 
 a real embodiment which may be perceived by the 
 finer senses. 'And their works do follow with 
 them,' the literal rendering of the Greek in the 
 classic passage of the Revelation of St. John, would 
 also suggest the possibilities of living deeds. Cali- 
 ban — a metathesis for Cannibal — the Claudius carried 
 by judgment from guilty rule of one world to abject 
 slavery in another ; a real judgment metathesis of 
 character and personality, suggests the final gloss to 
 the teaching of all Shakespeare's dramas ; ' What- 
 soever a man soweth that also shall he reap.' ' In 
 esoteric thought the perfected being must be an 
 equal blending of the masculine and feminine,' and 
 in ' Prospero, the gentle, refined element of mother- 
 hood, blended with sublime dignity and strength,' 
 is realized. 
 
 In the world of time and sense the ' hindered ' 
 Hamlet caught a glimpse of the ' cherub that sees ;' 
 but above the limitations of time and space, ' his 
 child is to him a cherubim infusing him with forti- 
 tude from heaven,' and ' he gave to her the richest 
 dower of inheritance — knowledge, with purity of 
 heart and purpose.' The Ophelia of Hamlet be- 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 135 
 
 comes the cherubic Miranda of Prospero. The re- 
 pentant Polonius appears as the ' good Gonzalo,' 
 the ' true preserver ' and ' loyal sir.' 
 
 Prospero — Shakespeare's ultimate ideal man — 
 ♦♦ sits 'mongst men like a descended God." 
 
 He is no longer the ' hindered ' Hamlet, but the 
 ruler of the enchanted world beyond the shore line 
 of eternity. 
 
 Miranda with the relics of an Ophelia conscious- 
 ness asks : 
 
 ** How came we ashore? 
 
 Prospero. By Providence Divine. 
 
 Miranda. Had I not 
 
 Four or five women once that tended me ? 
 
 Prospero. Thou hadst, and more, Miranda: but how is it 
 That this lives in thy mind ? What seest thou else, 
 In the dark backward and abysm of time ? 
 If thou rememberest aught ere thou cam'st here, 
 How thou cam'st here thou may'st." 
 
 ******* 
 
 And Caliban with a Claudius consciousness of the 
 past wrong-doing, suggests future evil along the 
 line of the guilty past. Speaking of Prospero, he 
 says : 
 
 ^'■Caliban. Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him 
 I' the afternoon to sleep : then thou may'st brain him." 
 
 This from Caliban suggests the words of the elder 
 Hamlet : 
 
 ** Sleep within my orchard, 
 My custom always in the afternoon." 
 
 All the characters in ' Hamlet, Prince of Den- 
 mark,' * passing through nature to eternity,' reap- 
 pear in the ' Tempest.' 
 
136 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 *^ Ariel. You are three men of sin, whom Destiny 
 (That hath to instrument this lower world 
 And what is in 't) the never-surfeited sea 
 Hath caused to belch up ; and on this island, 
 Where man doth not inhabit: you, 'mongst men. 
 Being most unfit to live. 
 
 But remember, 
 For that's my business to you, that you three 
 From Milan did supplant good Prospero; 
 Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it. 
 Him and his innocent child : for which foul deed 
 The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have 
 Incens'd the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures. 
 Against your peace. 
 
 Gertrude is now the Sycorax of 'The Tempest,' 
 and still holds Claudius — Caliban — in bondage as a 
 slave-son. As Claudius ruled Hamlet, so Prospero 
 rules Caliban. 
 
 ****** 
 
 " Solemn are the words that the spirit speaks to 
 the three men of sin, who from Milan did supplant 
 good Prospero. He comes forth from his cell in his 
 magic robes. Ariel is by his side. It is the sixth 
 hour of the day, when the enchanter had promised 
 that the spirit's work should cease. In the progress 
 of that work the spirit has caught something of 
 human sympathies. If you now behold, says Ariel, 
 those upon whom your charm so strongly works, 
 your affections would become tender. Hast thou, 
 says Prospero, which art but air, a touch, a feeling 
 of their afflictions, and shall not myself, one of their 
 kind, be kindlier moved than thou art? Go release 
 them. Solemn is the invocation which precedes 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 137 
 
 Prospero's renunciation of his rough magic ; and 
 solemn is the scene in which those who have been 
 distraught are gradually disenchanted. As the 
 charm dissolves apace, they hear the story of Pros- 
 pero's wrongs ; and at length the rightful Duke of 
 Milan stands before them in the garb of a former 
 time. The King of Naples entreats pardon. Pros- 
 pero forgives even that most wicked sir, whom he 
 will not call brother. Then comes the last surprise. 
 The interior of Prospero's cell is disclosed, and 
 there Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess in 
 the security and ease of a life-long affection, after 
 an acquaintance of three hours. The benevolent 
 enchanter has worked out his most Christian victory 
 over evil, and has secured the happiness of his dear 
 beloved; and now to Milan, where every third 
 thought shall be a thought of his grave." 
 
 ****** 
 
 In the shipwreck of the Apostle Paul, Shake- 
 speare finds suggestions for 'The Tempest.' 
 
 "And when it was determined that we should sail 
 into Italy, they delivered Paul and certain other 
 prisoners unto one named Julius, a centurion of 
 Augustus' band." " But not long after there arose 
 against it a tempestuous wind, called Euroclydon. 
 And when the ship was caught and could not bear 
 up into the wind, we let her drive. And running 
 under a certain island which is called Clauda, we 
 had much work to come by the boat. And we being 
 exceedingly tossed with a tempest, the next day 
 they lightened the ship. And when neither sun nor 
 Stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest 
 
138 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was 
 taken away." (Acts xxvii : 1-44.) 
 
 The Angel (Ariel) cheered Paul, and assured 
 him that all on board should be saved, but the ship 
 would be lost. ' Howbeit we must be cast upon a 
 certain' island.' 'And falling into a place where 
 two seas met (Time and Eternity), they ran the 
 ship aground.' 'And the rest, some on boards and 
 some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it 
 came to pass, that they escaped all safe to the 
 land.' 
 
 The numan body is wrecked where two seas 
 meet (time and eternity), but the passenger escapes 
 and lives in a higher spiritual body. ' The wheel 
 comes full circle,' and the judgment, 'metathesis,' 
 can not be escaped, ' for we must all give account 
 for the deeds done in the body ' — ship of the 
 human spirit. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Life is a ' sea of troubles ; ' death, the storm and 
 ' Tempest ' of Life, is a place where two seas — time 
 and eternity — meet, and this, to every human 
 spirit, is the occasion of the wreck of the body — 
 ship of humanity. This esoteric truth is the soul 
 of the exoteric facts of Paul's shipwreck and the 
 Tempest of Shakespeare. The relation is too ob- 
 , vious to require more than to call attention to the 
 fact. 
 
 Antonio the usurper — with Alonzo, King of 
 Naples, his son Prince Ferdinand, his brother 
 Sebastian, and many courtiers — had put to sea for 
 the purpose of visiting in Tunis, a city of northern 
 Africa, a daughter of the King of Naples. Pros- 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 139 
 
 pero, by his art, and by the instrumentality of cer- 
 tain spirits of the island — the chief agent among 
 these immaterial existences being a tricksy little 
 spirit called Ariel — raises a tempest, by the violence 
 of which the royal voyagers are thrown upon this 
 lonely island, its only human inhabitants being 
 Prospero and his daughter Miranda. The vessel is 
 stranded ; the death-shrieks of the passengers and 
 crew are heard ; all appears to be lost, and ' a thou- 
 sand furlongs of sea would be gladly exchanged for 
 an acre of barren ground.' 
 
 Miranda and Prospero stand at the entrance of 
 the Cell, watching the effects of the Tempest 
 which his power has raised. The fears of Miranda 
 are allayed, and her 'piteous heart' quieted by 
 
 Prospero : 
 
 •* The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touched 
 The very virtue of compassion in thee, 
 I have, with such precision in mine art, 
 So safely ordered that there is no loss- 
 No, not so much perdition as a hair 
 Betide to any creature in the vessel, 
 What thou heard'st cry, what thou saw'st sink. 
 Sit down; 
 For thou must now know further." 
 
 Prospero tells Miranda of the past : 
 ** Twelve years since, 
 Miranda — twelve years since — 
 Thy father was the Duke of Milan, 
 And— a Prince of power. 
 
 Miranda. Oh, the Heavens ! 
 
 What foul play had we that we came from thence ? 
 Or blessed was 't, we did? 
 
 Prospero. Both, both, my girl : 
 By foul play, as thou say' st, were we heaved thence— 
 But blessedly helped hither ! " 
 
140 772^ Seci'ct of Hamlet. 
 
 He continues, speaking of his false brother, and 
 * thy uncle, called Antonio :' 
 
 ^^Prospero. I, thus neglecting worldly ends, in my 
 false brother 
 Awaked an evil nature; hence, his ambition growing, 
 He needs will be Absolute Milan. 
 Me, poor man ! my library was dukedom large enough.'* 
 
 He tells Miranda how she preserved him from 
 despair : 
 
 *■'■ Prosper o. Oh, a cherubim 
 Thou wast, that didst preserve me. 
 Miranda. How came we ashore.? 
 Prospero. By Providence divine." 
 
 He then explains that he has taught her : 
 
 ** Here have I, thy schoolmaster, 
 Made thee more profit than other princes can. 
 That have more time for vainer hours, 
 And tutors not so careful. [pray you, sir — 
 
 Miranda. Heavens thank you for't! And now I 
 For still 'tis beating in my mind — your reason 
 For raising this sea-storm.?" 
 
 Prospero gives only the explanation that fortune 
 favors him and has brought his enemies to the 
 shore. Then using his hypnotic power he says : 
 
 •' Here cease more questions. 
 Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness. 
 And give it way : I know thou can not choose. 
 {Miranda sleeps. y^ 
 
 Like a ball of fire, Ariel, the gentle and familiar 
 spirit, wheels down to give an account of the tem- 
 pest, and of his circumspective care for the royal 
 passengers and crew. 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 141 
 
 ^* Ariel. Not a soul 
 
 But felt a fever of the mad, and played 
 Some tricks of desperation. All (but mariners) 
 Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, — 
 When all afire with me, the King's son, Ferdinand, 
 With hair up-staring (then like reeds, not hair). 
 Was the first man that leaped ; and cried, * Hell is empty, 
 And all the devils are here.' 
 
 Prospcro, Why, that's my Spirit! " 
 
 Prospero (the elder Hamlet) recognizes Ferdi- 
 nand (the younger Hamlet) : 
 
 "Why, that's my spirit! 
 But are they, Ariel, safe? 
 
 Ariel. The King's son I have landed myself.'* 
 
 Next, Ariel, as a sea-nymph, is about to perform 
 Prospero's commission, and to compel the attention 
 of the rescued Ferdinand. Invisibly, Ariel hovers 
 around the Prince, and sings strange intelligence of 
 his drowned father. 
 
 The enchanted music captivates the young Prince 
 (Hamlet) to follow. Ariel conducts him to the 
 cave, where Prospero (elder Hamlet) and Miranda 
 (Ophelia) are now standing : 
 
 '■*■ Prospero. The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, 
 And say what thou seest yond'. 
 
 Miranda. What is't? A spirit? I might call him 
 A thing divine, for nothing natural 
 I ever saw so noble." 
 
 Ferdinand (young Hamlet) stands wrapt in equal 
 admiration. The spell-bound Prince obeys, willing 
 
1^2 The Secret of Hainlet, 
 
 to endure the imprisonment which is inaugurated 
 by love. But the aim of Prospero almost justified 
 the temporary wrong. It is by the marriage of 
 Miranda and Ferdinand that he is not only to in- 
 sure his own restoration to the dukedom, but to 
 secure for his daughter her lost honors, and to res- 
 cue his native land from disgraceful vassalage to a 
 foreign power. 
 
 '• We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of; and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 ******* 
 
 Humanity, in its struggles, is typified in Hamlet, 
 Prince of Denmark. The elder Hamlet, young 
 Hamlet, Ophelia, and Horatio are all used in 
 typifying the struggle of man in "this lower 
 world." So in the world after the tempest, Pros- 
 pero, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Miranda are used to 
 represent the glory of realized achievement. 
 
 ^'•Alonzo. I long 
 
 To hear the story of your life, which must 
 Take the ear strangely. 
 
 Prospero. I'll deliver all; 
 
 And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales, 
 And sail so expeditious, that shall catch 
 Your royal fleet far off. My Ariel — chick — 
 That is thy charge ; then to the elements — 
 Be free, and fare thou well ! 
 
 Now my charms are all o'erthrown, 
 And what strength I have's my own, 
 Which is most faint: now, 'tis true, 
 I must be here confined by you. 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 143 
 
 Or sent to Naples. Let me not, — 
 Since I have my dukedom got, 
 And pardoned the deceiver, — dwell 
 In this base island, by your spell; 
 But release me from my bonds, 
 With the help of your hands. 
 Gentle breath of yours my sails 
 Must fill, or else my project fails — 
 Which was to please. Now, I want 
 Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; 
 And my ending is despair. 
 Unless I be relieved by prayer, — 
 Which pierces so, that it assaults 
 Mercy itself, and frees all faults. 
 As you from crimes would pardoned be, 
 Let your indulgence set me free." 
 
INDIRECTION. 
 
 Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle 
 
 suggestion is fairer; 
 Rare is the rose-burst of dawn, but the secret that clasps 
 
 it is rarer ; 
 Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes 
 
 it is sweeter; 
 And never was poem yet writ but the meaning outmastered 
 
 the meter. 
 
 Never a daisy that grows but a mystery guideth the 
 
 growing; 
 Never a river that flows but a majesty scepters the flowing; 
 Never a Shakespeare that soared but a stronger than he 
 
 did enfold him; 
 Nor ever a prophet fortells but a mightier seer hath 
 
 foretold him. 
 
 Back of the canvas that throbs the painter is hinted 
 
 and hidden ; 
 Into the statue that breathes the soul of the sculptor is 
 
 bidden ; 
 Under the joy that is felt lie the infinite issues of feeling; 
 Crowning the glory revealed is the glory that crowns the 
 
 revealing. 
 
 Great are the symbols of being, but that which is symboled 
 
 is greater; 
 Vast to create and uphold, but vaster the inward creator. 
 Back of the sound broods the silence, back of the gift 
 
 stands the giving; 
 Back of the hands that receive thrill the sensitive nerves 
 
 of receiving. 
 
 Space is as nothing to spirit, the deed is outdone by the 
 
 doing; 
 The heart of the wooer is warm, but warmer the heart of 
 
 the wooing; 
 And up from the pits where these shiver, and up from the 
 
 heigiits where those shine. 
 Twin voices and shadows swim starward, and the essence 
 
 of life is divine. 
 
 (X44) 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 Genius is partial in its treatment of life to the 
 epic and dramatic form of expression. Homer and 
 Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and 
 Shakespeare and Goethe were dramatists. Life in 
 action is best treated in the epic or dramatic form. 
 The representations of life upon the elevated stage 
 finds its complement in the elevated speech of the 
 drama, for the drama deals with ideal persons, and 
 the speech needs to be elevated above the tone of 
 ordinary life. 
 
 Hamlet's instruction to the player reveals the 
 "purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first 
 and now, was and is to hold, as it were, the mirror 
 up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn 
 her own image, and the very age and body of the 
 time his form and pressure." But nature is not the 
 same in the mirror ; the reflection of the mirror 
 ' lends enchantment to the view,' and so the mirror- 
 reflection of the stage — the elevated tone — ' blank 
 verse ' — is the most suitable glass to receive the 
 silvering of the genius-mind behind it. 
 
 Philosophy finds the ultimate meaning of the 
 universe under the notion of the ego ; poetry looks 
 through the worlds of time and space as through 
 the sublime symbol to the eternal beauty ; morality, 
 as the victorious struggle of the personal soul after 
 righteousness, discovers God through life. " These 
 
 lO (145) 
 
146 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 three great expressions of the human spirit must 
 ever remain, but the greatest of the three is the 
 vital and victorious moral movement." 
 
 Shakespeare's Hamlet is full of the deepest phi- 
 losophy and poetry of indescribable beauty, and 
 the ' victorious moral movement ' as it struggles, 
 overcomes, and finally asserts moral order, achiev- 
 ing its glorious destiny, is expressed characteris- 
 tically as the dramatic form of representation. 
 Hamlet is the drama of life, the tragedy of hu- 
 manity, the voyage of the human spirit in its body- 
 ship through the sea of life, sometimes in calm 
 waters reflecting the heavens above, then in dark- 
 ness a very sea of troubles. Hamlet is man — every 
 man : 
 
 " Behold, thou art pilot of the ship, and owner of that 
 
 freighted galleon, 
 Competent, with all thy weakness, to steer into safety 
 
 or be lost: 
 Compass and chart are in thy hand : roadstead and 
 
 rocks thou knowest; 
 Thou art warned of reefs and shallows ; thou beholdest 
 
 the harbor and its lights." 
 
 Hamlet is the ' enchanted view ' of the dramatic 
 voyage of humanity through the sea of life. Ten- 
 nyson in ' The Play,' thus speaks of the mystery of 
 life: 
 
 Act first — this earth, a stage so gloomed with woe 
 You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
 
 And yet be patient. One playwright may show, 
 In some fifth act, what this wild drama means," 
 
 "The phenomena of spiritual life," says Lyman 
 Abbott, " are complex. They can not be divided 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 147 
 
 into compartments. Life is like an ocean voyage : 
 to-day the sea is glass, to-morrow it is lashed into 
 fury by a cyclone. The scientist may study the 
 causes of the cyclone, and even accurately define 
 the vehemence of wind necessary to constitute one ; 
 but the dramatist describes now the beauty of the 
 calm, now the grandeur of the tempest, and neither 
 draws nor recognizes the sharp lines which separate 
 light winds from a stiff breeze, or a stiff breeze 
 from a tornado. In every man, saint and sinner 
 alike, is an element of lawlessness. The imperfect 
 impulses are not brought wholly into subjection to 
 the law of Christ. The best of men is partly a 
 wild animal not wholly tamed. Doubtless there 
 are some men of so low a standard of life that 
 conflict between the higher and lower nature is 
 almost wholly unknown, because the higher nature 
 has never been sufficiently developed to assert 
 itself; others of so impassionate a nature, of im- 
 pulses so feeble, that a rational self-interest finds 
 no difficulty in always maintaining an unquestioned 
 ascendency ; still others so born and bred, with 
 such natural equilibrium of nature that the anguish 
 and the exhilaration of spiritual conflict are alike 
 absolutely unknown to them. But he who has by 
 nature both 'strong passions and high ideals, both 
 intense impulses and a vigorous and exacting con- 
 science, will know periods of intensity of conflict 
 between the two ; with sometimes the dread depres- 
 sion of defeat, and sometimes the unutterable joy 
 of victory. Such a man, of intense nature and 
 variant moods, and consquent changeful phases of 
 
148 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 experience, will pass by sudden transition from 
 calm to tempest, and from tempest to calm again." 
 
 ** This is mere madness : 
 And thus a while the fit will work on him ; 
 Anon, as patient as the female dove, 
 When that her golden couplets are disclosed. 
 His silence will sit drooping." 
 
 The first state of the soul is that of innocence. 
 Whatever dormant capacity for good or evil there 
 may be in the babe, there is in him neither vice nor 
 virtue. The drama of the Garden of Eden is 
 repeated in every life. Every babe is an Adam. 
 Every Adam is a Hamlet. Thus it is that law, the 
 direct end of which is to develop virtue out of in- 
 nocence by strife, affords a vantage-ground for sin ; 
 it becomes an instrument of sin. Progress upward 
 and progress downward go on together in the his- 
 tory of the race : the one by obedience, the other 
 by disobedience. It is this double progress under 
 law which deceives men ; and according as one 
 looks on the better side of life, the evolution of 
 virtue through obedience, or on the worse side of 
 life, the evolution of vice through disobedience, 
 is he optimist or pessimist. Out of this (naval) 
 battle of life, between the higher nature (facul- 
 ties) that perceives the law of the divine life, and 
 the impulses which can only learn obedience 
 through strife and suffering, grow the mystery, 
 fragmentariness, the unsatisfactory results of life. 
 The law belongs to man as a child of God ; it is 
 spiritual. But man still retains in him elements of 
 an untamed nature : and these he suffers to rule 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 149 
 
 him, and their rule ' is the rule of anarchy and 
 lawlessness.' 
 
 " Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
 And the first motion, all the interim is 
 Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
 The genius and the mortal instruments 
 Are there in council : and the state of man, 
 Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
 The nature of an insurrection." 
 
 DANISH SOURCE OF PLOT. 
 
 The ultimate source of the plot of Hamlet is 
 the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus (i. e., 
 ' the Lettered '), Denmark's first writer of import- 
 ance, who lived at the close of the twelfth century. 
 The tale of Hamlet, contained in the third and 
 fourth books, is certainly the most striking of all 
 Saxo's mystical hero-stories, quite apart from its 
 Shakespearian interest, and Goethe's recognizing 
 its dramatic possibilities, thought of treating the 
 subject dramatically on the basis of Saxo's narra- 
 tive. It is noteworthy that already in the fifteenth 
 century the story was well known throughout the 
 North, * trolled far and wide in popular song;' 
 but its connection with the English drama was due 
 to the French version given in Belleforest's Histo- 
 ries Tragiqucs^ the Hamlet story first appearing in 
 the fifth volume, published in 1570. 
 
 Few studies in literary origins are more instruc- 
 tive than to examine how the ' rich, barbarous tale ' 
 of the Danish historian has become transformed 
 into the great soul tragedy of modern literature. 
 
150 The Secret of Hafnlet, 
 
 In Saxo's Amleth we have at least the framework 
 of Shakespeare's Hamlet : the murder of the father 
 by a zealous uncle, the mother's incestuous marriage 
 with the murderer, the son's feigned madness in 
 order to execute revenge, these are the vague 
 originals of Ophelia and Polonius ; the meeting of 
 mother and son, the voyage to England, all these 
 familiar elements are found in the old tale. But 
 the ghost, the play-scene, and the culmination of 
 the play in the death of the hero as well as of the 
 objects of his revenge, these are elements which 
 belong essentially to the machinery of the Eliza- 
 bethan drama of vengeance. 
 
 GREEK SOURCES OF PLOT. 
 
 In Greek legendary history, Agamemnon is the 
 son of Atreus, King of Mycenae, and the most 
 powerful ruler in Greece. He led the Greek expe- 
 dition against Troy, and on his return was slain, 
 according to Homer by yEgisthus, according to 
 yEschylus by his wife Clytemnestra, who was 
 incited to the deed partly by jealousy of Cassandra, 
 and partly through fear on account of her adultery 
 with ^gisthus. It may be that Shakespeare had 
 in mind Agamemnon as the suggestion of Hamlet 
 the elder. King of Denmark. Agamemnon is the 
 greatest of the tragedies of yEschylus. The scene 
 is laid in Argos, in the palace of Agamemnon, at 
 the time of the King's return from the capture of 
 Troy; the catastrophe is the murder (behind the 
 scenes) of Agamemnon and Cassandra (whom he 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 151 
 
 has brought captive with him) by the Queen Cly- 
 temnestra, urged by her paramour ^gisthus. 
 
 In the ' Electra ' of Sophocles, Man is repre- 
 sented as forced in personal career by the Maerae, 
 the Greek goddesses of fate. Homer uses the name 
 in the singular as of a single divinity, and also in 
 the plural. Ho also calls them the ' spinners of the 
 thread of life.' By Hesioid they are spoken of 
 both as daughters of Night and as daughters of 
 Zeus and Hermis. They were represented as three 
 in number: Clotho (the spinner), Lachasis (dis- 
 poser of lots), and Atropos (the inevitable). The 
 first spins the thread of life, the second fixes the 
 length, and the third severs it. Agamemnon was 
 King of Mycenae ; ^gisthus was an adopted son of 
 Atreus, Agamemnon's father. ^gisthus slew 
 Agamemnon and married with Clytemnestra, his 
 queen. Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, 
 mourned her father's death, and denounced the 
 marriage of her mother with yEgisthus. Orestes 
 (suggestive of Horatio in Hamlet), brother of 
 Electra, bidden by the god of Delphi (suggestive 
 of the Ghost of Hamlet's father) to revenge his 
 father's death, sought out and slew the murderer. 
 The interview between Electra and Clytemnestra, 
 her mother, suggests the interview between Hamlet 
 and his ' queen-mother.' 
 
 Orestes hesitates like Hamlet, and defers the 
 death of ^gisthus for the same reason that Hamlet 
 defers the death of Claudius : 
 
 ^^ Orestes. Go thou within, and quickly. Now our strife 
 Is not of words, but for thy life itself. 
 
153 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 y^gisthus . Whj dost thou force me in? If this be right, 
 What need of darkness? Why not slay at once? 
 
 Orestes. Give thou no orders, but where thou didst slaj 
 My father, go, that thou too there mayst die. 
 
 u^gisthns. Dost think I'll flee? 
 
 Orestes. Thou must not die the death thou wouldst desire, 
 I needs must make it bitter." 
 
 The Chorus protests against the mourning of 
 Electra for her father : 
 
 * Thou, O Electra, take good heed, wast born 
 Of mortal father; mortal, too, Orestes; 
 Yield not too much to grief. To suffer thus 
 Is common lot of all." 
 
 In Hamlet, the Queen thus protests : 
 
 ** Do not forever with thy veiled lids, 
 Seek for thy noble father in the dust. 
 Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die, 
 Passing through nature to eternity. 
 
 Hamlet. Aye, madam, it is common." 
 
 Electra bewails the fact that she must own the 
 guilty Clytemnestra as her mother ; so Hamlet says : 
 
 " You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife; 
 And would it were not so ! — you are my mother." 
 
 Electra, like Hamlet, uses words of double 
 meaning. She also, like the Prince of Denmark, 
 suspects the intentions of the King and Queen. 
 Electra's sister says : 
 
 *' All I know 
 Myself, I'll tell thee; for their purpose is. 
 Unless thou ceasest from thy wailings loud. 
 To send thee where thou nevermore shalt see 
 The light of day." 
 
 Electra speaks of the hesitation of Orestes : 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 153 
 
 " For he, still ever meaning to effect 
 
 Some great achievment, brings to nothingness 
 All mj hopes here, and all mj hopes far away. 
 
 And Hamlet, who seems to embody characteris- 
 tics of both Electra and Orestes, is continually 
 condemning himself for the same fault of procras- 
 tination. 
 
 The Chorus encourages Electra : 
 
 ''''Chorus. Take heart, my child, take heart; 
 Mighty in Heaven He dwells, 
 Zeus, seeing, guiding all." 
 
 Hamlet suggests this : 
 
 " There's a divinity that shapes our ends. 
 Rough-hew them how we will." 
 
 In Hamlet, Shakespeare refers to the Chorus^ a 
 term used specifically in the ancient Greek drama : 
 
 '^''Hamlet. This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King. 
 Ophelia, You are as good as a chorus^ my lord. 
 
 The chorus occupied in the theater a position be- 
 tween the stage and the auditorium, and Hamlet in 
 reality was the chorus of the ' play within the play.' 
 
 ROMAN SOURCES OF THE PLOT. 
 
 Man from the Roman point of view was also 
 ruled by the gods into self-denial for the State. 
 Aneas is a typical Roman, and in the ' ^neid, 
 Virgil represents his Prince, endowed with noble 
 qualities of mind and body : 
 
 *' A very god in face and chest," 
 
 suggesting Shakespeare's hero who was : 
 
154 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 ** The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's eje, tongue, sword, 
 The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
 The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 
 The observed of all observers." 
 
 In classical legend, Aneas is a Trojan prince, 
 son of Anchises, King of Dardania and Aphrodite, 
 who, according to Roman tradition, settled in 
 Latium and became the ancestral hero of the 
 Roman people. This hero, driven by a storm on 
 the coast of Africa, is hospitably received by Dido, 
 Queen of Carthage, to whom he relates the fall of 
 Troy and his wanderings. An attachment between 
 them is broken by the departure of Aneas, in 
 obedience to the will of the gods, and the suicide 
 of Dido follows. After a visit to Sicily, Aneas 
 lands at Cumae in Italy. In a descent to the 
 infernal regions he sees his father, Anchises, and 
 has a prophetic vision of the glorious destiny of 
 his race as well as the future heroes of Rome. 
 
 Palinurus, the pilot ot the fleet of Aneas, and 
 his fate, when a human guide was indispensable, 
 suggests Polonius, the ' pilot ' of the ship of Den- 
 mark — ship of state, and his fate, when King 
 Claudius needed him most. Aneas is introduced 
 by Virgil in the midst of dire calamities. The 
 King is murdered and the hopes of the Prince are 
 blasted. 
 
 The Ghost of Hector appears and is addressed by 
 Aneas : 
 
 *• O day-star of Dardanian land! 
 
 O faithful heart, unconquered hand ! 
 What means this lingering? From what shore 
 Comes Hector to his home once more? 
 * * * * * 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 155 
 
 What cause has moved that clear, calm mien ? 
 Or why those wounds, so ghastly green? " 
 
 In answer, Aneas receives the supernatural com- 
 mand : 
 
 ** The gods of her domestic shrines 
 That country to your care consigns ; 
 Receive them now, to share your fate ; 
 Provide them warriors strong and great. 
 The city's walls, which heaven has willed, 
 Beyond the seas you yet shall build." 
 
 Shakespeare introduces his Prince amidst like 
 surroundings. His royal father had been 
 
 " Of life, of crown and queen at once dispatched," 
 
 the state * dismantled,' and the Ghost of the elder 
 Hamlet, in reply to his distracted son, who, asking 
 concerning his appearance and what he himself 
 should do, gave him a revelation and command 
 which was as sacred to Hamlet as the command of 
 Hector to Aneas. 
 
 Virgil's prince left his home and wandered long, 
 devoted himself entirely to the execution of the 
 command of Hector's ghost. And Hamlet 
 promises : 
 
 *♦ Yea, from the table of my memory 
 ril wipe away all trivial fond records. 
 All saws of books, all forms, all pressure past. 
 That youth and observation copied there ; 
 And thy commandment all alone shall live 
 Within the book and volume of my brain, 
 Unmixed with baser matter." 
 
 Aneas and Hamlet both court death as a refuge 
 from sorrow. Aneas cries : 
 
156 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 " O, happy, thrice and yet again, 
 Who died at Troy like valiant men, 
 
 E'en in their parents' view! 
 O Diomed, first of Greeks in fray. 
 Why press'd I not the plain that day. 
 
 Yielding my life to you, 
 Where stretched beneath a Phrygian sky, 
 Fierce Hector, tall Sarpedon lie : 
 Where Simois tumbles 'neath his wave ^ 
 
 Shields, helms, and bodies of the brave?" 
 
 Hamlet prays : 
 
 ** O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt. 
 Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! 
 Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
 His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! " 
 
 Aneas, in the court of Dido, the Carthagenian 
 queen, is represented as wraped in clouds by the 
 power of the goddess. His presence, purposes, 
 and intentions are known only to himself and his 
 friend Achates. They see the Queen and courtiers 
 and their comrades, but are unseen by them. 
 Virgil says : 
 
 ** But Venus either traveler shrouds 
 With thickest panoply of clouds. 
 That none may see them, touch nor stay. 
 Nor, idly asking, breed delay." 
 
 Shakespeare veils Hamlet in clouds as he wan- 
 ders from the presence of his father's Ghost to the 
 court of Claudius. The veil conceals him from the 
 King and Queen and from all except his friend 
 Horatio. And Claudius, expressing his fears as to 
 Laertes, says : 
 
 •' Her brother is in secret come from France; 
 Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds V 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 157 
 
 Marcellus says : 
 
 " Thou art a scholar: speak to it, Horatio," 
 
 implying an acquaintance with the Latin language, 
 the only appropriate language in which to address 
 a ghost, according to the popular superstition. 
 The ghost of Sichaeus appears to Dido : 
 
 '* And shows, to aid her on her way. 
 His buried treasures, stores untold 
 Of silver and of massy gold." 
 
 And Horatio says, in his address to the Ghost of 
 the elder Hamlet : 
 
 •* Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life 
 Extorted treasure in the womb of Earth, 
 For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, 
 Speak of it; stay, and speak." 
 
 Aneas is prompted by his father's ghost : 
 
 ** Now sable night invests the sky. 
 When lo ! descended from on high 
 The semblance of Anchises seemed 
 To give him counsel as he dreamed." 
 
 And the Ghost of Hamlet's father says : 
 
 " This visitation 
 Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose." 
 
 Horatio speaks of ' stars with trains of fire ' in 
 the list of omens ' precurse of fierce events,' and 
 Virgil tells of Acestes shooting in the air 
 
 •* to show 
 His veteran skill and sounding bow. 
 ***** 
 E'en in the mid expanse of skies 
 The arrow kindles as it flies, 
 
158 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 Behind it draws a fierj glare, 
 Then wasting, vanishing in the air: 
 So stars, dislodged, athwart the night 
 Careen, and trail a length of light." 
 
 Horatio refers to himself : 
 
 ** No. I am more an antique Roman than a Dane," 
 
 and shows his acquaintance with Roman tradition 
 in his reference to omens, ' a little ere the mightiest 
 Julius fell.' 
 
 The pious Aneas, like Hamlet, never tires in 
 praising his father. Each seeks an interview with 
 his father's ghost, and receives almost identical 
 revelations from the dead. Anchises tells the 
 * secrets of his prison-house ' to his son Aneas : 
 
 " Nay, when at last the life has fled, 
 And left the bodj cold and dead, 
 E'en then, there passes not away 
 The painful heritage of clay; 
 Full many a long contracted stain 
 Perforce must linger deep in grain, 
 So penal sufferings they endure 
 For ancient crime to make them pure ; 
 Some hang aloft in open view 
 For winds to pierce them through and through 
 While others purge their guilt deep-dyed 
 In burning fire or whelming tide." 
 
 The elder Hamlet says to his son : 
 
 •* I am thy father's spirit; 
 Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, 
 And for the day confined to fast in fires, 
 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
 Are burnt and purged away." 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 159 
 
 He is not at liberty, as Anchises, to tell the 
 * secrets ' of his ' prison-house : ' 
 
 '' But that I am forbid 
 To tell the secrets of my prison-house, 
 I could a tale unfold whose lightest word 
 Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, 
 Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, 
 Thy knotted and combined locks to part. 
 And each particular hair to stand on end. 
 Like quills upon the fretful porcupine." 
 
 Aneas courted, loved, and would have wedded 
 Dido but for the command of the ghost of Hector. 
 Dido, the Queen, suicides, evidencing her insanity, 
 and Aneas, when attended by the sybil in the 
 lower regions, meets the spirit of Dido, and thus 
 explains the cause of his reluctant flight : 
 
 By Heaven, by all that dead men keep 
 In reverence here 'mid darkness deep, 
 Against my Tvill, ill-fated fair, 
 
 I parted from your land. 
 The gods at whose command to-'day 
 Through these dim shades I take my way, 
 Tread the waste realms of sunless blight 
 And penetrate abysmal night, 
 They drove me forth." 
 
 Hamlet courted, loved, and would have wedded 
 with Ophelia but for the command of his father's 
 Ghost. Ophelia's life ended by her own act in 
 insanity, resulting from Hamlet's conduct toward 
 her. He would have followed her into the shades 
 below and ' buried quick ' within her grave, would 
 have attested his devotion and proved to Ophelia's 
 spirit that his love was true, and that he forsook 
 
i6o The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 her, not because he did not love, but because the 
 execution of the command of his father's Ghost 
 demanded it. 
 
 The play that ' pleased not the million,' treated 
 of Virgil's hero, for Hamlet says : 
 
 *' One speech in it I chiefly loved, 'twas 
 
 Aneas' tale to Dido — the great story within a story." 
 
 Then, in fulfillment of Shakespeare's plan to write 
 a play within a play of ' Hamlet,' follows the 
 Prince's resolution to have a play before the King. 
 The last seen of Aneas, Turnus is prostrate on 
 the ground before him : 
 
 ♦' Rolling his eyes, Aneas stood. 
 
 And check'd his sword, athirst for blood, 
 
 Now faltering more and more he felt 
 
 The human heart within him melt, 
 
 When round the shoulder wreathed in pride 
 
 The belt of Pallas he espied. 
 
 And sudden flash'd upon his view 
 
 Those golden studs so well he knew. 
 
 Which Turnus from the stripling tore 
 
 When breathless on the field he lay. 
 
 And on his breast in triumph wore, 
 
 Memorial of the bloody day. 
 
 Soon as his eyes had gazed their fill 
 
 On that sad instrument of ill. 
 
 Live fury kindling every vein, 
 
 He cries with terrible disdain : 
 
 ' What ! in my friend's dear spoil arrayed 
 
 To me for mercy sue ? 
 
 * 'Tis Pallas, Pallas guides the blade : 
 From your curs'd blood his injured shade 
 
 Thus takes the atonement due.' 
 Thus as he spoke, his sword he drave 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. i6i 
 
 With fierce and fiery blow 
 Through the broad breast before him spread : 
 The stalwart limbs grow cold and dead : 
 One groan the indignant spirit gave, 
 Then sought the shades below." 
 
 Laertes makes his confession and Hamlet shouts : 
 
 " The point 
 Envenomed too ! There, venom, to thj work !" 
 
 He stabs the King and dies. 
 
 Shakespeare evidently had in mind Orestes, the 
 typical Greek, ' driven to deeds of vengeance by 
 the powers above ; ' and also Aneas, the typical 
 Roman, ' compelled by his ghost — commanded 
 filial conscience to yield his own desires and serve 
 the state.' These originals are the Boaz and 
 Jachin pillar-types, of men on which man — the 
 ideal, composite man — the temple of humanity- 
 Hamlet — rests. 
 
 DRAMA OF LIFE. 
 
 In the Drama of Life, Man hears the command of 
 his Father's Spirit imposing upon him the law of 
 human duty ; and his life is a struggling, hindered 
 life, a conflict betwixt the higher and lower natures. 
 He is a Prince, and may be King, the lower self — 
 the inner Claudius deposed — the natural man cruci- 
 fied and dead, the true self may arise to ' newness of 
 life,' assert moral order, and ascend the throne of 
 Inner Dominion. But the way to the Kingdom is 
 narrow ; obstacles — the world (of rotten Denmark) 
 — the flesh (too, too solid flesh) and the devil must 
 II 
 
1 62 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 be overcome ; a great struggle is involved. Besides, 
 the struggle is to be lawful ; w^e are not to blame 
 heredity, but assert moral order in a world of evil : 
 
 *' But, howsoever thou pursuest this act 
 Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
 Against thy mother aught." 
 
 ELSINORE. 
 
 In ' Hamlet,' the visible stage slopes off into the 
 misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead 
 and hades beneath ; the visible world painted in to 
 complete the picture. This is a miniature of the 
 stage-setting of Nature, in the great Drama of 
 Humanity, and also, an outer representation of the 
 inner condition of Hamlet's heart — the inner Elsi- 
 nore of universal experience. And El-sin-or-e! is 
 this world a battle ground in which God, Sin, and 
 Evil strive for dominion? And is there an inner 
 Elsinore — the human heart — where Good and Evil 
 forces contend for the throne of inner dominion ? 
 
 GHOST OF THE ELDER HAMLET. 
 
 The Supernatural is represented by the Ghost in 
 Hamlet. The Spirit of the Elder Hamlet seeks his 
 son. He has no communication for Marcellus nor 
 Horatio. Esoterically, Shakespeare suggests his 
 philosophy and psychology, and therefore, he does 
 not allow the Ghost to speak to Marcellus, who in 
 the Tragedy is simply an officer under authority, 
 and represents the ' senses ' — one who lives on the 
 
The Secret of Hafftlet. 163 
 
 plane of the senses. Horatio dwells on the higher 
 plane of reason. He is the close friend of Hamlet, 
 and Marcellus reports to Horatio, and not directly 
 to the Prince. The human reason is the medium 
 betwixt sense and soul. If Man sees an apparition, 
 the sense (of sight) reports to the reason, and Man 
 thinks about the sight. The Ghost makes no reply 
 to Horatio — reason ; it has a message only for Ham- 
 let. It is the Conscience in Man that knows the 
 Supernatural, and hears the immediate voice of the 
 Spirit. 
 
 Shakespeare takes three men dwelling upon three 
 distinct planes — Marcellus, Horatio, and Hamlet — to 
 outwardly represent Man. Hamlet includes esoter- 
 ically — within himself — all that Marcellus, Horatio, 
 and Hamlet esoterically represent — 'sense,' 'intel- 
 lect,' and 'conscience.' Shakespeare presents a 
 psychological problem in the closing dramatic action 
 of the first Act. To illustrate : 
 
 When Marcellus and Horatio take hold of Hamlet 
 to hinder him from following the Ghost, Hamlet 
 releases himself and communes with the apparition. 
 The struggling Prince goes beyond the ' senses ' 
 and 'reason;' communes with the Supernatural; 
 and presently is again with Marcellus and Horatio, 
 upon the plane of sense and reason. These friends 
 vainly implore him to tell them his high experience. 
 He is still the hindered Man ; refuses ; and the Act 
 closes with Hamlet's words : " Nay, come ; lefs go 
 together." 
 
 Marcellus, Horatio, and Hamlet leave the plat- 
 form and go into the Castle together. Hamlet has 
 
164 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 his senses and reason now, at the close of the first 
 Act : Will he keep them all the way through the 
 play? 
 
 ORGANISM AND ENVIRONMENT. 
 
 Man is hindered by his organism and environ- 
 ment. He can not apprehend the Supernatural by 
 the senses — the Marcellus element of his nature. 
 Neither by the reason — his Horatio element ; be- 
 cause the reason only apprehends relations, and 
 the senses only apprehend objects ; but man has a 
 capacity for the reception of the Supernatural. He 
 is the Supernatural in embryo — an ' image of God.' 
 Man is a son of God; the Father's Spirit can 
 reveal Himself and His Law to the Son of His 
 Image. 
 
 It is the Hamlet in Man that can commune with 
 the Supernatural. The usurping Claudius must be 
 dethroned, in the orderly way of Justice and 
 Righteousness. 
 
 HAMLET. 
 
 This name is anagrammatized from 'Amleth,' a 
 mythical character, by placing the h first. Amleth 
 is from the Icelandic — from Amla^ to toil^ and 
 Lothi^ devoted to; a mythic impersonation of the 
 endless toil and travail of the sea. 
 
 Shakespeare — ' one who shakes a speare ' — trans- 
 figured and elevated this suggestion into the con- 
 ception of Hamlet. He makes Life itself the sea, 
 and Marl's voyage in his body -ship, the toiling 
 
Tlie Secret of Ha7nlet. 165 
 
 traveler to that ' undiscovered country from whose 
 bourn no traveler returns.' 
 
 Placing the definition of ' H,' 'Am,' and ' Let,' 
 together in their order, the esoteric meaning of 
 Hamlet is revealed, as Humanity Hindered; the 
 Man-hindered ; and this accounts for his hesitation, 
 inactivity, and procrastination. It is the hesitation 
 of character, not disease ; nature, not caprice. His 
 voyage must be in accordance with his compass and 
 chart, his conscience and sense of Righteousness. 
 
 Hamlet means, in another sense, a village with- 
 out a church ; a village without a governing mu- 
 nicipality. Esoterically, a collection of faculties 
 not reduced to order ; a little world ; a chaos which 
 may become a cosmos. Hamlet is a ' kingdom 
 within,' an inner kingdom at war with itself; dif- 
 ferent passions and persons desiring to rule. He 
 is only 
 
 PRINCE OF DENMARK, 
 
 not King ; he ought to rule, but he does not. The 
 inner throne has no permanent ruler ; sometimes 
 reason rules, then passion ; now conscience ; then 
 circumstances ; now the potential spiritual man ; 
 now the developed natural man. Man is ' out of 
 joint,' his faculties disarranged, his ' inner king- 
 dom ' ' dismantled.' He is out of harmony with 
 himself ; his will and passions contend against his 
 conscience and reason. There is something wrong 
 — ' something rotten in the state of Denmark ' — 
 something has disarranged the faculties. An inner 
 usurping Claudius is in the way. Hamlet realizes 
 
1 66 The Secret of Haynlet, 
 
 the condition of internal anarchy and disorder in 
 the State of his ' Denmark ' body-prison of ' too, 
 too solid flesh.' 
 
 " The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, 
 That ever I was born to set it right." 
 
 But this is 
 
 MAN^S MISSION IN LIFE, 
 
 to set himself right ; to realize an inner atonement 
 — and if he would consent to follow the still small 
 voice within — the Father's Spirit — the Holy Ghost 
 — he would be led into harmony with himself and 
 his environment. 
 
 But Man hesitates t*nd his power of action decays. 
 And when after struggling, and the purpose of 
 action is resolved upon, he realizes the truth that — 
 
 '* Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
 And the first motion all the interim is 
 Like a phantasm, or a hideous dream; 
 The genius and the mortal instruments 
 Are there in council ; and the state of man. 
 Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
 The nature of an insurrection." 
 For 
 
 ** Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape 
 From the lower world within him, moods of tiger or of ape? 
 Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning age of ages 
 Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?" 
 
 Hamlet is warned not to defile himself in execut- 
 ing his father's business. He is to remember that 
 
 " Him, only him the shield of Jove defends 
 Whose means are pure and spotless as his ends." 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 167 
 
 The people of Denmark have rights that he must 
 respect. He must not contrive aught against his 
 mother ; neither shock the moral sense of the nation. 
 He must not do violence to the voices of his own 
 inner kingdom; he must fulfill righteousness; he 
 must not destroy the Law. 
 
 CLAUDIUS, 
 
 must be dealt with according to law. His guilt 
 must be established by proof that all Denmark will 
 accept, and the condemnation and death of the 
 usurping King must meet the approval of the Danes. 
 The Prince knows that Claudius is a murderer, 
 usurper ; but he can not prove the murderer guilty 
 in the eyes of the Danish nation— composed as it is 
 of men who only live on the plane of ' sense ' and 
 * reason.' He can not summon the Ghost, the Su- 
 pernatural can not speak with the Marcellus' and 
 Horatio's of the outer or inner Kingdoms of Man. 
 He must wait. Claudius must live until his charac- 
 ter and past crimes shall reveal themselves to all. 
 Man's appetites and passions are not put into his 
 nature merely to be killed. Man is to utter himself 
 — his higher self. A part of his nature is made to 
 think deeply, feel nobly, made to be charitable and 
 chivalric, made to worship, to pity, and to love. 
 The positive expression and work of the higher self 
 is the one worthy purpose of life. This is dethron- 
 ing the inner Claudius according to the inner law, 
 ' whose seat is the bosom of God,' whose ' voice the 
 harmonyof the world.' Law: ' all things in heaven 
 
l68 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling 
 her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her 
 power.' The seat of Law is also in the bosom of 
 Man and her voice the harmony of the Microcosm 
 — the inner subjective kingdom of Man. 
 
 Coleridge remarks of Hamlet's cowardice that it 
 proceeded merely from that aversion to action which 
 prevails among such as have a world in thejnselves. 
 And Owen says : 
 
 " He falls a prey first to his own genius for pro- 
 found many-sided meditation, his subtilizing and 
 refining instincts, his invincible preference for the 
 ideal and abstract as compared with the actual and 
 concrete ; and, secondly, to the varied consider- 
 ations, the manifold difficulties and perplexities 
 which he so readily detects in every object of 
 thought and of action. Hamlet's universe — his own 
 subjective microcosm was therefore just as full of 
 uncertainties, antagonisms, unsolved and insoluble 
 problems as the universe of Prometheus, of Job, and 
 of Faust. To him every human motive and im- 
 pulse, the scope and result of every separate act, all 
 the accompaniments and relations of human conduct 
 seem to present the appearance, not of simplicity, 
 but of complexity. 
 
 ** So study evermore is overshot; 
 While it doth study to have what it would, 
 It doth forget to do the thing it would." 
 
The Secret of Hamlet, 169 
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 
 was a great incentive to the expression of Shake- 
 speare's skeptical disquisitions contained in Hamlet, 
 and scattered throughout his other dramas. Biron 
 in ' Love's Labours Lost,' especially reminds one 
 of the skepticism and cynicism of the great essayist. 
 *' I heard with pleasure," says Emerson, " that one 
 of the newly discovered autographs of William 
 Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of 
 Montaigne. It is the only book which we certainly 
 know to have been in the Poet's library." 
 
 Skepticism has been defined as the antithesis in 
 every possible manner of phenomena and noumena ; 
 and Shakespeare's favorite conception of Humanity 
 might be defined as a centre-point of contradic- 
 tions — a seething mass of conflicting opinions, 
 instincts, feelings, and attributes. "Thus there is 
 a perpetual conflict between the will and the 
 reason, between reason and imagination, between 
 the will and the act, or between theory and prac- 
 tice, between rude will and grace, between tempta- 
 tion and conscience, between desire and fruition." 
 
 Shakespeare discerns room for doubt in the laws 
 and principles of human action. So Friar Lau- 
 rence tells us : 
 
 ** For naught so vile that on the earth doth live, 
 But to the earth some special good doth give ; 
 Nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use, 
 Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: 
 Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied ; 
 And vice sometimes by action dignified," 
 
170 The Secret of Hamlet, 
 
 In this world, vice and virtue can not be defi- 
 nitely separated : 
 
 '* In the corrupted currents of this world, 
 Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice; 
 And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself 
 Buys out the law." 
 
 In the Heavenly world it is different : 
 
 ** But 'tis not so above. 
 There is no shuffling — there the action lies 
 In his true nature." 
 
 Hamlet is the skeptic of practice, one whose 
 power of action is paralyzed by over-much reflec- 
 tion. His character is partially shown in other 
 creations of the Poet. He is the excessive develop- 
 ment of a faculty found in most men who are 
 thinkers. " The union of keen thought with slow 
 cautions or imperfect volition — a psychological ana- 
 logue to the weakening of some physical power 
 which comes from the redundant vigor of vitality 
 of another." 
 
 "A sharp wit matched with too blunt a will." 
 
 This is entirely Hamletic : 
 
 ♦*A tardiness in nature 
 Which often leaves the history unspoke 
 That intends to do." 
 
 King Claudius says : 
 
 "And like a man to double business bound, 
 I stand in pause where I shall first begin. 
 And both neglect." 
 
 But, just as great minds are especially given to 
 speculation, so also is it true that acts invite and 
 justify speculation in proportion to their greatness : 
 
The Secret of Hainlet. 171 
 
 " Checks and disasters 
 Grow in the veins of actions highest reared, 
 As knots by the conflux of meeting sap 
 Infect the sound pine and divert his grain, 
 Tortive and errant from his course of growth." 
 
 Brutus most resembles Hamlet, and in his apology 
 for his seeming suspicion of mankind, and neglect 
 of his friends, says : 
 
 *' Nor construe any further my neglect 
 Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war, 
 Forgets the shows of love to other men." 
 
 Men like Hamlet prefer deliberation to decision, 
 contrivance and policy to action, and indefinite 
 search to discovery. The endless strivings of Faust 
 is the intellectual analogue to the indefinite hesita- 
 tion in action of Hamlet, both being alike deter- 
 mined by excess of imaginative power. Intellectual 
 doubt often has no other significance than procras- 
 tinated conviction, or postponement of action. 
 Prometheus looked forward to a deliverer from the 
 tyranny of Zeus, and Job was confident of a vindi- 
 cator of his righteousness from the false accusations 
 of his friends. Cautious thinkers postpone the final 
 statement of their creed, hoping for more light. 
 
 Hamlet is not only great in thought, but great in 
 feeling. He possesses great emotional susceptibil- 
 ity, and realizes the power of passion : 
 
 " Passion is but the slave to memory, 
 Of violent birth but poor validity. 
 What to ourselves in passion we propose, 
 The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. 
 The violence of either grief or joy 
 Their own enactures with themselves destroy." 
 
1^2 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 He is represented by his enemy as being remiss : 
 
 '• Most generous and free from all contriving." 
 
 And in complete harmony with this view, Shake- 
 speare represents him not as successfully contriving 
 his uncle's death, but as himself falling an acci- 
 dental victim to his uncle's plot. 
 
 POLONIUS, 
 
 the superficial, talkative, conceited dogmatist, is 
 the real antagonist of Hamlet. Hamlet points to 
 his head as a ' distracted globe.' Polonius declares 
 that, given the circumstances, he could find 
 
 *' Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed, 
 Within the centre." 
 
 Johnson says Polonius is ' knowing in retrospect, 
 and ignorant in foresight.' He has great knowl- 
 edge of the world, a diplomatic experience, and a 
 success in ' hunting the trail of policy.' He is a 
 politician whose faculties are declining, and whose 
 strongest point is his memory. " Such a man," 
 says Johnson, *' is positive and confident, because 
 he knows that his mind was once strong, but knows 
 not that it has become weak." He is now only an 
 echo of his former self. 
 
 LAERTES, 
 
 is quite a contrast to Hamlet. He is not noble, 
 yet there are elements of nobleness in him: his 
 respect for his father, love for his sister, and obedi- 
 ence to the King, speak well for him as a son, 
 
The Secret of Hafnlet, 173 
 
 brother, and subject of Denmark. He is a man of 
 the world, and has few moral scruples ; delights in 
 the gaities of the French capital — lives and dies 
 quite different from the Prince of Denmark. 
 " Laertes dies repenting of the base wrong he has 
 done to Hamlet, and begging his forgiveness ; 
 Hamlet dies pitying Laertes, and forgiving him." 
 
 GERTRUDE, 
 
 signifies a ' spear-maiden,' and doubtlessly took its 
 present form from the name Geruth in the old 
 Danish history. Her character explains why 
 Shakespeare should eliminate the expressive ' h ' 
 from the name Geruth, and change it to Gertrude. 
 In the play she is represented as carried along in 
 the train of consequences which her own guilt had 
 started. 
 
 SIN 
 
 is the central theme of Hamlet : its growing conse- 
 quences, sure return upon the heads of those who 
 walk in evil ways, and the judgment reached when 
 the ' wheel comes full circle.' It is a dramatic 
 representation 
 
 *• Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; 
 Of accidental judgments, casual slaughter; 
 Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; 
 And, in this upshot, purposes mistook 
 Fall'n on the inventors' heads." 
 
 Gertrude reveals the hearts of the evil doers : 
 
1 74 The Secret of Hamlet. 
 
 " To my sick soul, as sin^s true nature is, 
 Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss : 
 So full of artless jealousy is guilt, 
 It spills itself in fearing to be spilt." 
 
 The play of Hamlet is evidently a Psychological 
 Drama of the inner soul-life of humanity. The 
 inner stage — the inner Elsinore — is Hamlet's heart. 
 Francisco represents the inner feeling of fear, as 
 yet undefined, vague yet real fear, and he is the 
 chorus of Hamlet's heart, the herald of his inner 
 feelings and perplexities, before the Prince is 
 
 introduced. 
 
 ♦* 'Tis bitter cold, 
 And I am sick at heart," 
 
 is an audible confession of Hamlet's heart through 
 his chorus, Francisco. 
 
 Marcellus and Bernardo represent the senses — 
 mere officers — reporters to the king of the inner 
 kingdom. 
 
 HORATIO 
 represents the ' reason,' an intimate friend of Ham- 
 let who, as explained in the sequel, represents the 
 * divinity within ' — conscience, or the capacity for 
 the reception of the revelation from the supernatual. 
 Shakespeare has revealed his psychological ability 
 in discerning and expressing the true relation be- 
 tween acts of the will and the results of subsequent 
 reaction, in the moulding of character. His living 
 physical symbols express accurately internal states 
 of the soul. This is the secret of the popularity of 
 the play. It ' speaks by card ' to universal human 
 experience. 
 
The Secret of Hamlet. 175 
 
 THE KEY TO HAMLET 
 
 is in all probability intentionally given in the eso- 
 teric meaning of the name, Hamlet, and shown in 
 the definition of the word in its anagrammatiza- 
 tion from ' Amleth.' It is easier to think this, 
 than to believe that the names, Hamlet, Horatio, 
 and Ophelia only accidentally reveal their respec- 
 tive characters and history in the secret meaning of 
 their respective names. Especially as the ethical 
 significance and spiritual sense of the drama per- 
 fectly accords with this view, as interpreted by a 
 * consensus of the Competent.' For the present, 
 ^ the rest is silence.' 
 
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