nvincing, or rather they promptly put
themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy
recalls anything else in Shakspere;[132] but he goes on to find
analogies between other passages in HAMLET and some of Bruno's
philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's theorem that all things are made
up of indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr.
Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet's soliloquy:

"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"

It is difficult to be serious over such a contention; and it is quite
impossible for anybody out of Germany or the Bacon-Shakspere party to
be as serious over it as Dr. Tschischwitz, who finds that Hamlet's
figure of the melting of flesh into dew is an illustration of Bruno's
"atomic system," and goes on to find a further Brunonian significance in
Hamlet's jeering answers to the king's demand for the body of Polonius.
Of these passages he finds the source or suggestion in one which he
translates from Bruno's CENA DE LE CENERI:--

"For to this matter, of which our planet is formed, death
and dissolution do not come; and the annihilation of all
nature is not possible; but it attains from time to time, by
a fixed law, to renew itself and to change all its parts,
rearranging and recombining them; all this necessarily
taking place in a determinate series, under which everything
assumes the place of another."[133]

In the judgment of Dr. Tschischwitz, this theorem, which anticipates so
remarkably the modern scientific conception of the universe,
"elucidates" Hamlet's talk about worms and bodies, and his further
sketch of the progress of Alexander's dust to the plugging of a
beer-barrel. It seems unnecessary to argue that all this is the idlest
supererogation. The passages cited from HAMLET, all of them found in the
First Quarto, might have been drafted by a much lesser man than
Shakspere, and that without ever having heard of Bruno or the theory of
the indestructibility of matter. There is nothing in the case
approaching to a reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while on
the contrary the "leave not a wrack behind," in the TEMPEST, is an
expression which sets aside, as if it were unknown, the conception of an
endless transmutation of matter, in a context where the thought would
naturally suggest itself to one who had met with it. Where Hamlet is
merely sardonic in the plane of popular or at least exoteric humour, Dr