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Rh and reflection: it is no mere unruly mania for private slaughter. There is a justice, human and divine, within whose course even crimes may serve as just and necessary acts. Hamlet’s father confesses his own damnation: he must be punished for certain “foul crimes done in my days of nature.” In these foul crimes lies the first justification of Claudius—not in his own eyes, or in those of Hamlet, but from the viewpoint of universal justice. So then a guilty man has slain a guilty man; and to appease the shadow of the guilty man who has been slain, others, guilty and innocent, must die. And an apparent and material justice engenders sad and irrevocable injustices.

If Hamlet were in reality a man of exceptional intelligence, as he seems at times to be, he would not fix upon the idea of vengeance, or at the least he would hesitate to do so. But all the uncertainties of Hamlet have reference not to the legitimacy of vengeance in itself—on this point he decides once and forever—but merely to the choice of the means and the moment for vengeance.

And yet, if he were really capable of thinking more clearly than his fellows, vengeance should have seemed to him a terribly complicated and a brutally useless thing. Vengeance cures nothing; usually, as in this case, it adds worse ills to ills already irreparable. His madness, half feigned, half real, swaying between epilepsy and