purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to
shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the
concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.

_Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we had spared..._

Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

--He will have it that _Hamlet_ is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said
for Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our
flesh creep.

_List! List! O List!_

My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

_If thou didst ever..._

--What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris
lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from _limbo patrum_, returning
to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?

John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.

Lifted.

--It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with
a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.

Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.

--Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the
pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon
has other thoughts.

Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

--The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the
ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who
has studied _Hamlet_ all the years of his life which were not vanity in
order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,
the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,
calling him by a name:

_Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,_

bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has
died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.

Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in
the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by