passage, the barren spectators want to laugh at the clown
instead of attending to some necessary question of the play.
Hamlet's hatred of exaggeration is marked in both passages.
And so (as already pointed out, p. 133) in the play-scene,
when his own lines are going to be delivered, he impatiently
calls out to the actor to leave his damnable faces and begin;
and at the grave of Ophelia he is furious with what he thinks
the exaggeration of Laertes, burlesques his language, and
breaks off with the words,

Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou.

Now if Hamlet's praise of the Aeneas and Dido play and speech is
ironical, his later advice to the player must surely be ironical too:
and who will maintain that? And if in the one passage Hamlet is serious
but Shakespeare ironical, then in the other passage all those famous
remarks about drama and acting, which have been cherished as
Shakespeare's by all the world, express the opposite of Shakespeare's
opinion: and who will maintain that? And if Hamlet and Shakespeare are
both serious--and nothing else is credible--then, to Hamlet and
Shakespeare, the speeches of Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia's grave are
rant, but the speech of Aeneas to Dido is not rant. Is it not evident
that he meant it for an exalted narrative speech of 'passion,' in a
style which, though he may not have adopted it, he still approved and
despised the million for not approving,--a speech to be delivered with
temperance or modesty, but not too tamely neither? Is he not aiming here
to do precisely what Marlowe aimed to do when he proposed to lead the
audience

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

to 'stately' themes which beget 'high astounding terms'? And is it
strange that, like Marlowe in _Tamburlaine_, he adopted a style marred
in places by that which _we_ think bombast, but which the author meant
to be more 'handsome than fine'?

2. If this is so, we can easily understand how it comes about that the
speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free
from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from
that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic. To the first class
certainly belongs the passage beginning, 'But as we often see.' To the
second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was

Baked and imp