nd this is the secret of the whole
transformation which the old play of HAMLET has received at his hands.
Where he was formerly the magical sympathetic plate, receiving and
rectifying and giving forth in inspired speech every impression, however
distorted by previous instruments, that is brought within the scope of
its action, he is now in addition the inward judge of it all, so much so
that the secondary activity tends to overshadow the primary. The old
HAMLET, it is clear, was a tragedy of blood, of physical horror. The
least that Shakspere, at this age, could have done with it, would be to
overlay and transform the physical with moral perception; and this has
already been in part done in the First Quarto form. The mad Hamlet and
the mad Ophelia, who had been at least as much comic as tragic figures
in the older play, are already purified of that taint of their barbaric
birth, save in so far as Hamlet still gibes at Polonius and jests with
Ophelia in the primitive fashion of the pretended madman seeking his
revenge. But the sense of the futility of the whole heathen plan, of the
vanity of the revenge to which the Christian ghost hounds his son, of
the moral void left by the initial crime and its concomitants, not to be
filled by any hecatomb of slain wrongdoers--the sense of all this, which
is the essence of the tragedy, though so few critics seem to see it,
clearly emerges only in the finished play. The dramatist is become the
chorus to his plot, and the impression it all makes on his newly active
spirit comes out in soliloquy after soliloquy, which hamper as much as
they explain the action. In the old prose story, the astute barbarian
takes a curiously circuitous course to his revenge, but at last attains
it. In the intermediate tragedy of blood, the circuitous action had been
preserved, and withal the revenge was attained only in the general
catastrophe, by that daimonic "fortune" on which Montaigne so often
enlarges. For Shakspere, then, with his mind newly at work in reverie
and judgment, where before it had been but perceptive and reproductive,
the theme was one of human impotence, failure of will, weariness of
spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable
evil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic
spirit which has put itself in his place, as it had done with a hundred
suggested types before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension, a
self-consciousness add