ed to the myriad-sided consciousness of the past.
Hence an involution rather than an elucidation of the play. There can be
no doubt that Shakspere, in heightening and deepening the theme, has
obscured it, making the scheming barbarian into a musing pessimist, who
yet waywardly plays the mock-madman as of old, and kills the "rat"
behind the arras; doubts the Ghost while acting on his message;
philosophises with Montaigne and yet delays his revenge in the spirit of
the Christianised savage, who fears to send the praying murderer to
heaven. There is no solution of these anomalies: the very state of
Shakspere's consciousness, working in his subjective way on the old
material, made inevitable a moral anachronism and contradiction,
analogous in its kind to the narrative anachronisms of his historical
plays. But none the less, this tragedy, the first of the great group
which above all his other work make him immortal, remains perpetually
fascinating, by virtue even of that "pale cast of thought" which has
"sicklied it o'er" in the sense of making it too intellectual for
dramatic unity and strict dramatic success. Between these undramatic,
brooding soliloquies which stand so aloof from the action, but dominate
the minds of those who read and meditate the text, and the old
sensational elements of murder, ghost, fencing and killing, which hold
the interest of the crowd--between these constituents, HAMLET remains
the most familiar Shaksperean play.

This very pre-eminence and permanence, no doubt, will make many students
still demur to the notion that a determining factor in the framing of
the play was the poet's perusal of Montaigne's essays. And it would be
easy to overstate that thesis in such a way as to make it untrue.
Indeed, M. Chasles has, to my thinking, so overstated it. Had I come to
his main proposition before realising the infusion of Montaigne's ideas
in HAMLET, I think I should have felt it to be as excessive in the
opposite direction as the proposition of Mr. Feis. Says M.
Chasles:[161]--

"This date of 1603 (publication of Florio's translation) is
instructive; the change in Shakspere's style dates from this
very year. Before 1603, imitation of Petrarch, of Ariosto,
and of Spenser is evident in his work: after 1603, this
coquettish copying of Italy has disappeared; no more
crossing rhymes, no more sonnets and concetti. All is
reformed at once. Shakspere, who had hitherto studied the
ancients only