tures. Again, it may be held without any improbability that, from
carelessness or because he was engaged on this play for several years,
Shakespeare left inconsistencies in his exhibition of the character
which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning. Or,
possibly, we may be baffled because he has illustrated in it certain
strange facts of human nature, which he had noticed but of which we are
ignorant. But then all this would apply in some measure to other
characters in Shakespeare, and it is not this that is meant by the
statement that Hamlet is unintelligible. What is meant is that
Shakespeare _intended_ him to be so, because he himself was feeling
strongly, and wished his audience to feel strongly, what a mystery life
is, and how impossible it is for us to understand it. Now here, surely,
we have mere confusion of mind. The mysteriousness of life is one thing,
the psychological unintelligibility of a dramatic character is quite
another; and the second does not show the first, it shows only the
incapacity or folly of the dramatist. If it did show the first, it would
be very easy to surpass Shakespeare in producing a sense of mystery: we
should simply have to portray an absolutely nonsensical character. Of
course _Hamlet_ appeals powerfully to our sense of the mystery of life,
but so does _every_ good tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is
an enigma to us, but because, having a fair understanding of him, we
feel how strange it is that strength and weakness should be so mingled
in one soul, and that this soul should be doomed to such misery and
apparent failure.

(1) To come, then, to our typical views, we may lay it down, first, that
no theory will hold water which finds the cause of Hamlet's delay
merely, or mainly, or even to any considerable extent, in external
difficulties. Nothing is easier than to spin a plausible theory of this
kind. What, it may be asked,[33] was Hamlet to do when the Ghost had
left him with its commission of vengeance? The King was surrounded not
merely by courtiers but by a Swiss body-guard: how was Hamlet to get at
him? Was he then to accuse him publicly of the murder? If he did, what
would happen? How would he prove the charge? All that he had to offer in
proof was--a ghost-story! Others, to be sure, had seen the Ghost, but no
one else had heard its revelations. Obviously, then, even if the court
had been honest, instead of subservient and corrupt, it would have