gathering and breaking storm. The cause of the murder is a great
personal treachery inspired by an unselfish idea. Though it seems
inevitable, it is a very little thing that makes it possible. Both
Caesar's murder and Brutus' downfall are almost prevented. A hand
stretches out to save both of them. A little domestic treachery inspired
by a selfish idea puts aside the interposing hand in both instances.
Caesar will not listen to his wife because he is sure of himself. Brutus
will not answer his wife for the same reason. They go on to the
magnificent hour which makes the one fine soul in the play a haunted and
unhappy soul till he snatches at Death at Philippi.

The verse is calm, like the noble art that shapes the scenes. It is full
of majesty. Lines occur in which single unusual words are charged with
an incalculable power of meaning.

"Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glazed upon me and went surly by."

"It is the bright day that brings forth the adder."

Shakespeare's intensest and most solemn thought, the Law that directed
the creation of some of his greatest work, is spoken by Brutus--

"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 then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."

_Hamlet, Prince of Denmark._

_Written._ 1601-2.

_Published_, in an imperfect form, 1603; more perfectly, 1604.

_Source of the Plot._ A play upon the subject of Hamlet, now lost,
seems to have been popular in London during the last decades of the
sixteenth century. Some think that it was an early work of
Shakespeare's. No evidence supports this theory. He probably knew
the play, and may have acted in it.

The story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his _Historia Danica_.
Francis de Belleforest printed a version of it in his _Histoires
Tragiques_. An English translation from de Belleforest, called the
_Hystorie of Hamblet_, was published (or perhaps reprinted) in
London in 1608. Shakespeare seems to have known both de Belleforest
and the _Hystorie_.

_The Fable._ Claudius, brother to the King of Denmark, conniving
with Gertrude the Queen, poisons his brother, and seizes the
throne. Soon afterwards he marries Gertrude. At th