Acts flatly contradict one another; and it is impossible to make out
whether Hamlet was at Court or at the University when his father was
murdered. But it should be noticed that often what seems a defect of
this latter kind is not really a defect. For instance, the difficulty
about Hamlet's age (even if it cannot be resolved by the text alone) did
not exist for Shakespeare's audience. The moment Burbage entered it must
have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty. And in like
manner many questions of dramatic interpretation which trouble us could
never have arisen when the plays were first produced, for the actor
would be instructed by the author how to render any critical and
possibly ambiguous passage. (I have heard it remarked, and the remark I
believe is just, that Shakespeare seems to have relied on such
instructions less than most of his contemporaries; one fact out of
several which might be adduced to prove that he did not regard his plays
as mere stage-dramas of the moment.)

(_e_) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often
provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passages
in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or 'pestered with
metaphors'; but they were surely right in the general statement that his
language often shows these faults. And this is a subject which later
criticism has never fairly faced and examined.

(_f_) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious
characters talk alike,[24] and that he constantly speaks through the
mouths of his _dramatis personae_ without regard to their individual
natures, would be to exaggerate absurdly; but it is true that in his
earlier plays these faults are traceable in some degree, and even in
_Hamlet_ there are striking passages where dramatic appropriateness is
sacrificed to some other object. When Laertes speaks the lines
beginning,

For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
In thews and bulk,

who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes?
Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the
instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists
to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see
that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in
part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience
thoughts which will help them to understand, not the player-king nor yet
K