ic that we can ever be justified in attributing to him this or that
thesis of any one of his personages, apart from the general ethical
sympathies which must be taken for granted. Much facile propaganda has
been made by the device of crediting him in person with every religious
utterance found in his plays--even in the portions which analytical
criticism proves to have come from other hands. Obviously we must look
to his general handling of the themes with which the current religion
deals, in order to surmise his attitude to that religion. And in the
same way we must compare his general handling of tragic and moral
issues, in order to gather his general attitude to the doctrine of
Montaigne.

At the very outset, we must make a clean sweep of the strange
proposition of Mr. Jacob Feis--that Shakspere deeply disliked the
philosophy of Montaigne, and wrote HAMLET to discredit it. It is hard to
realise how such a hopeless misconception can ever have arisen in the
mind of anyone capable of making the historic research on which Mr. Feis
seeks to found his assertion. If there were no other argument against
it, the bare fact that the tragedy of HAMLET existed before Shakspere,
and that he was, as usual, simply working over a play already on the
boards, should serve to dismiss such a wild hypothesis. And from every
other point of view, the notion is equally preposterous.

No human being in Shakspere's day could have gathered from HAMLET such a
criticism of Montaigne as Mr. Feis reads into it by means of violences
of interpretation which might almost startle Mr. Donnelly. Even if they
blamed Hamlet for delaying his revenge, in the manner of the ordinary
critical moralist, they could not possibly regard that delay as a kind
of vice arising from the absorption of Montaignesque opinions. In the
very year of the appearance of Florio's folio, it was a trifle too soon
to make the assumption that Montaigne was demoralising mankind, even if
we assume Shakspere to have ever been capable of such a judgment. And
that assumption is just as impossible as the other. According to Mr.
Feis, Shakspere detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet's, and
made him die by poison in order to show his abhorrence of them--this,
when we know Hamlet to have died by the poisoned foil in the earlier
play. On that view, Cordelia died by hanging in order to show
Shakspere's conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by
stifling as a fitting punis