baffling of Fate work and simmer and grow strong, till they combine with
Fate in the preparation of an end that shall not be baffled. Even so,
"the end men looked for cometh not." The end comes to both actions at
once in the squalor of a chance-medley. Fate has her will at last. Life,
who was so long baffled, only hesitated. She destroys the man who
wrenched her from her course, and the man who would neither wrench her
back nor let her stay, and the women who loved these men, and the men
who loved them. Revenge and chance together restore life to her course,
by a destruction of the lives too beastly, and of the lives too hasty,
and of the lives too foolish, and of the life too wise, to be all
together on earth at the same time.

It is difficult to praise the poetry of _Hamlet_. Nearly all the play is
as familiar by often quotation as the New Testament. The great, wise,
and wonderful beauty of the play is a part of the English mind for ever.
It is difficult to live for a day anywhere in England (except in a
theatre) without hearing or reading a part of _Hamlet_. Lines that are
little quoted are the lines to quote here--

"this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest."

"O proud death!
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes, at a shot,
So bloodily hast struck?"

The last speech, great as the speech at the end of Timon, and noble,
like that, with a music beyond the art of voices, is constructed on a
similar metrical basis.

"Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldier's music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot."

_Troilus and Cressida._

_Written._ (?)

_Produced._ After publication.

_Published._ 1609.

_Source of the Plot._ Geoffrey Chaucer's poem of _Troilus and
Creseide_. John Lydgate's _Troy Boke_. William Caxton's translation
of the French book of the _Recuyels of Troy_. George Chapman's
translation of Homer's _Iliad_.

Among many other possible sources may be mentioned a now lost play
of _Troilus and Cressida_ (produced in 1599) by the poets Thomas
Dekker and Henry Che