"A slave, that is not twentieth part the tithe
Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings!
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole
And put it in his pocket."
Look there! The dear hallucination of fatherhood! "What would you, gracious figure?" The ghost has come to put this sketch of memory into italics; as if filial appreciation had projected it upon the midnight, in the intensity of recalling his majestic soul. Only a son who was in all respects worthy to be born of Nature's nobleman could pay this debt of being nobly born, and give Imagination's birth to such a sire. See there, he is born! the son is father and mother: inbred posterity conceives its ancestor.
Thus I venture to suppose that, when Hamlet came to his mother, Shakspeare had not deliberated that the ghost would join the party. But his brain kindled with the midnight passion, streamed over down into the pen, and the ink exhaled under the heat of Hamlet's reminiscence into the vaporous outline, which always startles us because it startled Shakspeare,—a sudden whiteness running high along the edge of Hamlet's swelling heart. The scene then shudders with deference to this unexpected presence, which only the son who conceived it can observe. Afterward the verse seems to become merely a coast to help the great wave fall back and subside.
It is possible to have Hamlet played in a style so greatly absorbed as to obliterate our knowledge that the father's custom is to take his cue from the climax of his son's speech and to appear. Then we reproduce the thrill that Shakspeare felt when he sat alone with awe and silence, and they suddenly drew him to their ghost.
I recur now to consider the nature of the oblique and enigmatic style into which Hamlet has fallen. It is not a deliberate effort to sustain the character of a madman, because such a person as Hamlet could find no motive in it: he could not need it to mask his desire to avenge the ghost, for he is Prince, an inmate of the palace, and supernaturally elected to be master of the situation. He says he has "cause and will and strength and means to do't." I conceive, then, that his mind, driven from its ordinary gravity, and the channel of his favorite thoughts diverted, instinctively saves itself by this sustained gesture of irony; and it appears to be madness only to those who do not know that he is well informed of the event, and is struggling to set free from it a purpose. And why should a man of such a well-conditioned brain, a noticer of nice distinctions, have selected for a simulation of madness a style which, nicely estimated, is not mad? He could not calculate that everybody would interpret this difference from his usual deportment into an unsettling of his wits; for the style shows unconsciousness and freedom from premeditation. If he wished to feign distraction, he would have taken care to mar the appositeness of his ironical allusions, which are always in place and always logical. And, if he was half unhinged without knowing it, his speech would have betrayed the same inconsequence. Nowhere is he so abrupt, or delivers matter so remote from an immediate application, that he seems to us to wander, because we too have been admitted to the confidences of the ghost, and share that advantage over the other characters.
Since this essay was written, I have found, in the highly suggestive "Shakspeare-Studien" of Otto Ludwig, the following remarks, which are closely related to my own treatment of the subject, and provide some additional reflections:—
"Hamlet's subjective tendency is so predominant that we are surprised when he alleges no motive for assuming madness; nor is it elsewhere accounted for. It would have served his purpose much better if he had feigned a comfortable and contented, rather than an unsettled, mind. And, on the whole, one cannot at any point detect a reason why he chooses any active dissimulation. For he merely needed to remain undiscovered.
"We never hear him once reflecting upon his intention, though he runs to reflection on all topics. Just after the apparition, he merely remarks to his friends that, if he should appear to them to do strange things, they need not remark upon it so as to betray his object." Ludwig here alludes to the lines,—
"As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on."
Hamlet tells them not to seem too wise about it. The theory of premeditated madness rests upon this passage, and upon one other, which will be noticed. But suppose that Shakspeare did at first entertain a purpose, borrowed from the old chronicle, of disguising Hamlet in some unusual vein, the psychological necessities of his character decided what that vein must be, as they also decided against the old chronicle in the matter of introducing a ghost. And Hamlet's mental quality is really shown by the vein into which it imperatively runs. He was overmastered and completely occupied by this mood of indignation at all the villainous cants of a smiling world. The temper grew so compactly beneath Shakspeare's pen that he could not interpolate into it any amateur simulations. The poet would not, if he could, have so diluted the terribly gathering sincerity which left that epithet of "antic" beached high up and disqualified for floating on its tide.