a young child when his father's brother succeeded to rule in Norway, according to the old usage (illustrated also in "Macbeth") that set aside direct succession if the king's son was not of age to be a leader of the people. But Hamlet was a man in years, though not in action, when he left his uncle free to take the throne. Throughout the play Fortinbras serves as a foil to Hamlet. Fortinbras is a man of action, who thinks little; Hamlet is a man of the highest intellectual culture, in whom thought is very busy ; in whom "The native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, At the opening of the play there is stir of warlike preparation in Denmark, and strict watch against the sudden energies of Fortinbras, who is expected to make a bold dash for the lands his father lost. Into the midst of the watch comes one from the other world, to give Hamlet something that he must not only think upon, but do. As Shakespeare reads life, everyone who has come to manhood has to do his work. In youth we prepare for our work; but after we have entered on life's active duties all study is but the care to keep our arms from rusting, arms that we have daily to use. Hamlet, when the play opens, has only been drawn from his enjoyment of the studious university life by his father's sudden death, followed within a month by his uncle's marriage with his mother. When the play opens he is still at Elsinore, his father 'but two months dead; nay, not so much, not two," and his mother had married "Within a month, Let me not think on 't. Frailty, thy name is woman.' He His mother's marriage pains him yet more than his father's death. When he hears of his father's spirit in arms, his thought flashes at once to suspicion of his uncle. The spirit confirms his suspicion. has no doubt that it is his duty to avenge the murder of his father. But, in the first conviction, he plans already simulation of madness that shall give give him opportunities of secret observation, "As I perhaps hereafter shall think meet, To put an antic disposition on." The device is that of a mind already “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Had Fortinbras been so summoned to action, the king would have been dead in an hour. When, later in the play, by the killing of Polonius, Laertes, who serves also as a contrast to Hamlet, is in Hamlet's position, with a father killed, he is back from Paris in a whirlwind, beating at the palace gates. But at the close of the First Act, Hamlet's exclamation, after he has learnt his duty is, "The time is out of joint: O, curséd spite, No man healthily active would in Hamlet's position either have felt it necessary to break from the woman whom he deeply loved, or to use the tricks of a feigned madness to cover self-indulgence in a long, last farewell look. Time passes, and much is thought and felt, but nothing done. When the players come, to whom, as delighting him with shadows of action, he had been a good patron at the university, and when one of the players loses himself in the grief of Hecuba, Hamlet reproaches himself with self-comparison. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, That I have?" "About, my brains!" is the result; and still only the brain works. The spirit may have been the devil in a pleasing shape. Hamlet will put its truth to test by the device of the play in which the king shall see the image of his crime. "If his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech, It is a damnéd ghost that we have seen." It does unkennel itself. Hamlet absolutely knows his uncle's guilt; but it is by a method that reveals his knowledge to his uncle, whom an evil conscience had made eager to discover whether some such knowledge did not lie at the root of Hamlet's change to madness, whether real or assumed. An easy op And now, why does not Hamlet kill the king? portunity offers. But his mind is again too busy; he refrains out of no spirit of mercy, but because he cannot kill the king enough. The king is praying. Killed now, he might find heaven. Hamlet will wait till he can kill more perfectly, body and soul. Two months have slipped by since Hamlet undertook his duty. This is marked by a passage in the play scene. "How cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within two hours." Ophelia. 'Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord." At the beginning of the play, it was "Nay, not two months, not two." 66 The king, who has learnt from Hamlet the danger to himself, loses no time, though Hamlet still delays. Hamlet allows himself to be shipped off to England, with secret orders for his execution there. While he is still thus passive, he sees the forces of young Fortinbras, whose preparation against Denmark has been diverted to the Polack, pass over a plain before him, and again has clear intellectual sense of his own fault. He can tell himself what the play tells to us all, that— "He that made us with such large discourse, That capability and God-like reason To fust in us unused." All deeds of Hamlet are by act without premeditation. By sudden impulse he stabs Polonius behind the arras, without time even to give full birth to the thought that he may be killing the king. No thinking of his could possibly have foreseen or brought the pirate ship that came into engagement with the ship carrying him to England; and it was not even with design so to return to Denmark that he leapt to the other deck as the ships grappled for action. But when he had returned he was again passive. He accepted passively the challenge to the fencing match, and when he at last did kill his own and his father's murderer, it was by action on the impulse of the moment. It was done rashly, as Hamlet said to Horatio of an act of his on board the ship; and Hamlet's comment on this rashness has in it the soul of the play "Let us know, Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us, Rough hew them how we will." There are many Hamlets in the world with intellectual power for large usefulness, who wait, day by day and year by year, in the hope to do more perfectly what they live to do; die, therefore, and leave their lives unused; while men of lower power, prompt for action, are content and ready to do what they can, well knowing that at the best they can only rough hew, but in humble trust that leaves to God the issues of the little service they may bring. It is a last touch to the significance of this whole play that at its close the man whose fault is the reverse of Hamlet's-the man of ready action, though it be with little thought, the stir of whose energies was felt in the opening scene-re-enters from his victory over the Polack, and the curtain falls on Fortinbras, King. TRANSLATORS CHAPTER XV. YOUNGER WRITERS AT THE END OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN 1586 TO 1603. Translators. SIR JOHN HARINGTON was the son of a John Harington who throve in the service of King Henry VIII., and pleased the king by marrying, in 1546, one of his illegitimate daughters, to whom the king had given the lands of two forfeited monasteries. She died soon afterwards, childless; and John Harington the elder, who went into the service of the Princess Elizabeth, published in 1550 a translation of "The booke of freendeship by M. T. Cicero." He also praised in private verse the princess's six gentlewomen, and took one of them--Isabella, daughter of Sir John Markham-for second wife in 1554. Within the first year of their marriage they were imprisoned, with Princess Elizabeth, in the Tower. In 1561 their son John was born, and had Elizabeth, then queen, for godmother. Sir John John Harington the younger had in his youth the queen for friend. He was educated at Eton and at Christ's College, Cambridge, then studied law at Lincoln's Inn, had reputation at Court for wit, and at home for spending more than his allowance warranted. At the age of about twenty-three he married. While amusing the Court with free epigrams and playful verses, that were passed from hand to hand, he translated |