's brain that the great action of
the drama {181} takes place; the other characters are mere accessories
and foils. Here we are brought face to face with the fear and mystery
of the future life and the deepest problems of this. It is hardly true
to say that Hamlet himself is a philosopher. He gives some very wise
advice to the players; but in the main he is grappling problems without
solving them, peering into the dark, but bringing from it no definite
addition to our knowledge. He represents rather the eternal
questioning of the human heart when face to face with the great
mysteries of existence; and perhaps this accounts largely for the wide
and lasting popularity of the play. Side by side with this
deep-souled, earnest man, moving in the shadow of the unseen, with his
terrible duties and haunting fears, Shakespeare has placed in
intentional mockery the old dotard Polonius, the incarnation of shallow
worldly wisdom.

No other play of Shakespeare's has called forth such a mass of comment
as this or so many varied interpretations. Neither has any other
roused a deeper interest in its readers. The spell which it casts over
old and young alike is due partly to the character of the young prince
himself, partly to the suggestive mystery with which it invests all
problems of life and sorrow.

+Date+.--'A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett' was entered in the
Stationers' Register July, 1602. Consequently, Shakespeare's
Preliminary version, as represented by the First Quarto, though not
printed until 1603, must have been written in or before the spring
months of 1602; the second version 1603-1604.

+Sources+.--The plot came originally from the _Historia Danica_, a
history of Denmark in Latin, written in the twelfth century {182} by
Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar. About 1570 the story was retold in
French in Belleforest's _Histoires Tragiques_. Besides his debt to
Belleforest, it seems almost certain that Shakespeare drew from an
earlier English tragedy of Hamlet by another man. This earlier play is
lost; but Nash, a contemporary writer, alludes to it as early as 1589,
and Henslowe's Diary records its performance in 1494. Somewhat before
1590, an early dramatist, Thomas Kyd, had written a play called _The
Spanish Tragedy_, which, though far inferior to Shakespeare's _Hamlet_,
resembled it in many ways. This likeness has caused scholars to
suspect that Kyd wrote the early Hamlet; and their suspicions are