hment for adultery. The idea is outside of
serious discussion. Barely to assume that Shakspere held Hamlet for a
pitiable weakling is a sufficiently shallow interpretation of the play;
but to assume that he made him die by way of condign punishment for his
opinions is merely ridiculous. Once for all, there is absolutely nothing
in Hamlet's creed or conduct which Shakspere was in a position to regard
as open to his denunciation. The one intelligible idea which Mr. Feis
can suggest as connecting Hamlet's conduct with Montaigne's philosophy
is that Montaigne was a quietest, preaching and practising withdrawal
from public broils. But Shakspere's own practice was on all fours with
this. He sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public affairs; and
as soon as he had gained a competence he retired, at the age of
forty-seven, to Stratford-on-Avon. Mr. Feis's argument brings us to the
very crudest form of the good old Christian verdict that if Hamlet had
been a good and resolute man he would have killed his uncle out of hand,
whether at prayers or anywhere else, and would then have married
Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162]
And to that edifying assumption, Mr. Feis adds the fantasy that
Shakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne as a deterrent from the
retributive slaughter of guilty uncles by wronged nephews.

In the hands of Herr Stedefeld, who in 1871 anticipated Mr. Feis's view
of HAMLET as a sermon against Montaigne, the thesis is not a whit more
plausible. Herr Stedefeld entitles his book[163]: "Hamlet: a
Drama-with-a-purpose (TENDENZDRAMA) opposing the sceptical and
cosmopolitan view of things taken by Michael de Montaigne"; and his
general position is that Shakspere wrote the play as "the apotheosis of
a practical Christianity," by way of showing how any one like Hamlet,
lacking in Christian piety, and devoid of faith, love, and hope, must
needs come to a bad end, even in a good cause. We are not entitled to
charge Herr Stedefeld's thesis to the account of religious bias, seeing
that Mr. Feis in his turn writes from the standpoint of a kind of
Protestant freethinker, who sees in Shakspere a champion of free inquiry
against the Catholic conformist policy of Montaigne; while strictly
orthodox Christians have found in Hamlet's various allusions to deity,
and in his "as for me, I will go pray," a proof alike of his and of
Shakspere's steadfast piety. Against all such superficialitie