ords to
the test. Instantly he seizes the chance: when a thing has to be done,
and can be done, Hamlet is _never_ wanting--shows himself the very
promptest of men.

In the last passage of this act I do not take it that he is expressing
an idea then first occurring to him: that the whole thing may be a snare
of the devil is a doubt with which during weeks he has been familiar.

The delay through which, in utter failure to comprehend his character,
he has been so miserably misjudged, falls really between the first and
second acts, although it seems in the regard of most readers to underlie
and protract the whole play. Its duration is measured by the journey of
the ambassadors to and from the neighbouring kingdom of Norway.

It is notably odd, by the way, that those who accuse Hamlet of inaction,
are mostly the same who believe his madness a reality! In truth,
however, his affected madness is one of the strongest signs of his
activity, and his delay one of the strongest proofs of his sanity.

This second act, the third act, and a part always given to the fourth,
but which really belongs to the third, occupy in all only one day.

[Footnote 1: Here follows in _1st Q._

confest a murder
Committed long before.
This spirit that I haue seene may be the Diuell,
And out of my weakenesse and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such men,
Doth seeke to damne me, I will haue sounder proofes,
The play's the thing, &c.]

[Footnote 2:

'Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;' &c.

_Macbeth_, iii. 4.]

[Footnote 3: In the _1st Q._ Hamlet, speaking to Horatio (l 37), says,

And if he doe not bleach, and change at that,--

_Bleach_ is radically the same word as _blench_:--to bleach, to blanch,
to blench--_to grow white_.]

[Footnote 4: Emphasis on _May_, as resuming previous doubtful thought
and suspicion.]

[Footnote 5: --caused from the first by his mother's behaviour, not
constitutional.]

[Footnote 6: --'such conditions of the spirits'.]

[Footnote 7: Here is one element in the very existence of the preceding
act: doubt as to the facts of the case has been throughout operating to
restrain him; and here first he reveals, perhaps first recognizes its
influence. Subject to change of feeling with the wavering of conviction,
he now for a moment regards his uncertainty as involving unnatural
distrust of a being in whose presence he cannot help