sages, and leave a closer comparison to those who desire to make it; resting assured that they will be led to the same conclusion which I myself have reached. For although they must observe, as others have observed before them, that many of the passages found in the later but not in the earlier version are distinguished by that blending of psychological insight with imagination and fancy which is the highest manifestation of Shakespeare's genius, they should also remember that the quarto of 1603 was hastily printed to meet an urgent popular demand, and that the philosophical part of the play would be at once the most difficult to obtain by surreptitious means, and the least valued by the persons to supply whose cravings that edition was published. It may safely be presumed that those persons were chiefly interested in the plot, the incidents, and the characters; and the passages of the play which would give them these were just those which could be most easily reproduced from notes or from memory. To minds undisciplined in thought, abstract truth is difficult of apprehension and of recollection, even when poetry drapes its austere outlines with beautiful associations; whereas a mere child can remember a story, and even the most interesting speeches of the people who figure in it. And in addition to this very important consideration, there is the yet more important fact that some of the most profoundly thoughtful passages in the play, passages most indicative of maturity of intellect and wide observation of life, are found essentially complete, although grossly and almost ludicrously corrupted, in the first imperfect version of the tragedy. Two of the most celebrated and most reflective passages of the play shall furnish us examples in point of the last remark, and also characteristic specimens of the kind of corruption to which the text of the play was subjected in the preparation of the quarto of 1603. The first of Hamlet's two celebrated soliloquies (Act I. Sc. 2) appears in the quarto of 1603 in this form: "Ham. O that this too much grieu'd and sallied flesh Would melt to nothing, or that the vniuersall Globe of heauen would turne al to a Chaos! O God within two moneths; no not two: maried, Mine vncle: O let me not thinke of it, My fathers brother: but no more like Within two months, ere yet the salt of most In her galled eyes: she married, O God, a beast, Ere yet the shooes were olde," The which she followed my dead fathers corse, But breake my hearte, for I must holde my tongue." A comparison of these lines with those of the perfect soliloquy makes it apparent that these are but an imperfect representation of those. The latter are no expansion of the former. The thoughts are the same in both, with the exception of seven lines which were plainly omitted from the first version, not added to it in writing the second. The maimed and halting second and third lines in the version of 1603, which it is absurd to suppose that Shakespeare could have written at any period of his life, are the best that the person who furnished it could do to supply the place of the corresponding lines and the seven which follow them in the perfect soliloquy. The rest is all tangled and disordered, though but slightly defective, and shows in its very confusion of parts that it represents the perfect speech. Notice the misplacement of lines, such as the one containing the comparison to Hercules, and that about the shoes, and the unrighteous tears; and see that "Why she would hang on him" is not only misplaced, but that him' is without an antecedent, owing to the omission of the allusion to Hamlet's father and his love for the Queen. Yet see in this very derangement and in these defects the proof that the earlier version is merely mutilated, not a sketch; the later, merely perfect, not elaborated. The evidence of the same relation of the two texts is perhaps yet stronger in the case of the second and more important soliloquy, which is printed thus in the first quarto: "Ham. To be or not to be, I there's the point, To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all; No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes, From whence no passenger euer retur❜nd, But for this, the ioyfull hope of this, Whol'd bear the scornes and flattery of the world, The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne, And thousand more calamities besides, To grunt and sweate vnder this weary life, Which pusles the braine, and doth confound the sence, I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of vs all, This reads almost like intentional burlesque, so completely, yet absurdly, are all the thoughts of the genuine soliloquy represented in it. Like the shadow of a fair and stately building on the surface of a troubled river, it distorts outline, destroys symmetry, confuses parts, contracts some passages, expands others, robs color of its charm and light of its brilliancy, and presents but a dim, grotesque, and shapeless image of the beautiful original; while yet, with that original before us, we can see that it is a reflection of the whole structure, and not merely of its foundation, its framework, or its important parts. How ludicrously the well-known sentences, To sleep, perchance to dream," and that, several lines below, about the dread of something after death," are lumped together, and crushed into shapelessness in the lines, "No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes And borne before an everlasting Judge, That this soliloquy, as it stands in the quarto of 1603, is merely a mutilated version of that which is found in the quarto of 1604 is as clear to my apprehension as that the latter was written by William Shakespeare. Another proof that the quarto of 1603 is but an accidentally imperfect representation of the completed play is found in the fragment which it gives of the Scene (Act IV. Sc. 4) in which Fortinbras enters at the head of the Norwegian forces. This consists only of the speech of Fortinbras, which appears in the following shape: Tell him that Fortenbrasse, nephew to old Norway, According to the Articles agreed on : You know our Randevous, goe march away." This has the same distorted likeness to the genuine speech that the soliloquies just cited have to their prototypes in the true text. But- to look farther with this speech the Scene ends : we have, "exeunt all," and immediately, "enter King and Queene." Now, will any one believe that Shakespeare brought Fortinbras at the head of an army upon the stage merely to speak these half dozen lines of commonplace? Plainly the only object was to give Hamlet the opportunity for that great introspective soliloquy in which, with a psychological insight profounder than that which is exhibited in any other passage of the tragedy, the poet makes the Prince confess in whisper to himself the subtle modes and hidden causes of his vacillation. Considering the motive of the play, the introduction of Fortinbras and his army without the subsequent dialogue and soliloquy is a moral impossibility which overrides all other arguments. Yet this one is not unsupported. For the speech of Fortinbras in the first version itself furnishes evidence that it was written out for the press by a person who had heard the dialogue which it introduces. The latter part of the line --- "Tell him that Fortinbras, nephew to old Norway" has no counterpart in the genuine speech; but we detect in it an unmistakable reminiscence of the following passage of the subsequent dialogue which is found in the edition of 1604: "Ham. Who commands them, sir? Cap. The Nephew to old Norway, Fortenbrasse." It is to be noticed, too, that the absence of this dialogue and soliloquy from the quarto of 1603 is no proof whatever that they were not written when the copy for that edition was prepared; and this for the all-sufficient reason that they are also wanting in the folio itself, which was printed twenty years afterwards. It seems almost certain that these passages were omitted in the representation, and struck out of the stage copy from which the folio was printed, owing to the great length of the play, and a lack of popular interest consequent upon their speculative character. And it is also safe to conclude that the same considerations led the procurer of the copy for the surreptitious edition to withhold even a garbled version of them, if, indeed, they were not already omitted in the performance at the time when he did his work. case. And this brings us to another branch of the evidence in the There are many important passages of the completed play of which there is no vestige in the quarto of 1603; which would seem to favor the conclusion that that edition represents but an early sketch of Shakespeare's work, especially as some of them are reflective in character, and all indicate maturity of power. Of these I will mention the lines about the ominous appearances in Rome "ere the mightiest Julius fell," Act I. Sc. 1; all that part of Hamlet's censure of Danish drunkenness beginning, "This heavy-headed revel," Act I. Sc. 4; the reflection upon that monster custom," Act III. Sc. 4; the soliloquy just above alluded to, Act IV. Sc. 4; the euphuistic passage between Osric and Hamlet beginning, Sir, here is newly come to court, Laertes," Act V. Sc. 2; and the Prince's brief colloquy with a Lord in the same Scene. But the absence of these passages from the first quarto is deprived of all bearing upon the question of the state of the play which that edition professed to represent by the fact that they are likewise lacking in the folio. On the other hand, there are passages in the folio which are not found in the second quarto, enlarged though it was "to almost as much againe" as the play had been before, "according to the true and perfect copy;" and of these passages there are traces at least in the quarto of 1603. Such is 64 |