Hamlet

Hamlet's interest is in his name being cleared, his reputation being righted, and after that in the news from England, and in the succession to the throne. Not a thought has he for any fault or defect such as Othello reveals in his last words for his. Not a thought, either, for his triumph over it. "Done after all," is what he should say to himself if he were the crippled, aspiring but despairing, spirit the critics have taken him to be. Dramatic art- human nature itself- would demand no less. If the tragedy be, as the critics maintain, internal, here, if nowhere else, that fact must come to light. The audience must see it, if the other characters do not. But Hamlet's only interests now are in things external- his name, the news, his father's crown. "The rest is silence ," the critics pick up his words to answer; and they put a world of meaning into the phrase that could never have been intended, because it could never have been understood. The words simply mean: -I am a dead man, the rest must go untold.

What goes untold Horatio is to tell. (In Shakespeare what ever goes untold, and to him is of moment? His words- of all men's- were neither faint nor few.) Horatio has been commissioned to give the "complete official report." But this is to come, he says, after the play is over, and that implies that it would be only what the audience already know. Meantime he gives a summary of it, the headlines, so to speak, without, however, hinting at any failure or shortcoming in the hero. To him, the Prince's friend, the tragedy is not by any means what we are inclined to take it for--simply the tragedy of Hamlet's soul. "So shall you hear," he cries to the wondering Danes at the end:

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on the inventors' heads.

Nothing in Antiquity can rival this plot for the admirable distribution of Poetick Justice. The Criminals are not only brought to execution, but they are taken in their own Toyls, their own Stratagems recoyl upon 'em, and they are involved themselves in that mischief and ruine, which they had projected for Hamlet . Polonius by playing the Spy meets a Fate, which was neither expected by nor intended for him. Guildenstern and Rosencrans , the Kings Decoys, are counter-plotted, and sent to meet that fate, to which they were trepanning the Prince. The Tyrant himself falls by his own plot, and by the hand of the Son of that Brother, whom he had Murther'd. Laertes suffers by his own Treachery, and dies by a Weapon of his own preparing. Thus every one's crime naturally produces his Punishment, and every one (the Tyrant excepted) commences a Wretch almost as soon as a Villain.

To something of the same effect is the opinion of the author of Some Remarks ( 1736) as he touches on poetic justice in the death of Laertes and the Queen:

The Death of the Queen is particularly according to the strictest rules of Justice; for she loses her life by the villainy of the very Person who had been the Cause of all her Crimes.- P. 48.

It was the tragedy as a whole in which these critics were interested, and Horatio's words lend them ample justification. They knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art; and, as they insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.