ims this Hamlet a man of
the future. No half-way treaties with the obvious in life, no crooking
the pregnant hinges of his opinions to the powers that be. An anarch,
pure and complex, he despises all methods. What soliloquies, replete
with the biting, cynical wisdom of a disillusionised soul!

"Ah," he sighs, "there are no longer young girls, they are all nurses.
Ophelia loves me because, as Hobbes claims: 'Nothing is more
agreeable in our ownership of goods than the thought that they are
superior to the goods of others.' Now I am socially and morally
superior to the 'goods' of her little friends. She wishes to make me,
Hamlet, comfortable. Ah, if I could only have met Helen of Narbonne!"
A Hamlet who quotes the author of The Leviathan is a Hamlet with a
vengeance.

To him enter the players William and Kate. He reads them his play.
Kate's stage name is Ophelia. "Comment!" cries Hamlet, "encore une
Ophelia dans ma potion!" William doesn't like the play because his
part is not "sympathetic." After they retire Hamlet indulges in a
passionate outburst reproaching the times with its hypocrisy and des
hypocrites et routinieres jeunes filles. If women but knew they would
prostrate themselves before him as did the weeping ones upon the body
of the dead Adonis! The key of this discourse is high-pitched and
cutting. Laforgue, a philosopher, a pessimist, makes his art the
canvas for his ironic temperament. The Prince's interview with Ophelia
is full of soundless mirth. And how he lavishes upon his own deranged
head offensive abuse: "Piteous provincial! Cabotin! Pedicure!" This
last is his topmost term of contempt.

His parleying with the grave-diggers is another stroke of wit. One of
them tells him that Polonius is carried off by apoplexy--a bust has
been erected to his memory bearing the inscription, "Words! Words!
Words!" He also learns that Yorick was his half-brother, the son of a
gipsy woman. Ophelia dies--he hears this with mixed feelings--and he
is informed that the young Prince Hamlet is quite mad. The
grave-digger is a philosopher, he thinks that Fortinbras is at hand,
that the best investment for his money will be in Norwegian bonds. The
funeral cortege approaches. Hamlet hides.

His soliloquy upon the skull of Yorick has been partly done into
English by Mr. Symons.

"Alas, poor Yorick! As one seems to hear in this little shell, the
multitudinous roar of the ocean, so I hear the whole quenchless
symphony of the un