Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/27

 announcing that Hamlet is again in Denmark; before he was two days at sea, he became the pirates' prisoner. On the day of the arrival of letters Ophelia is drowned. Her flowers indicate that the time is early June. Ophelia's burial and Hamlet's death take place on the next day. Yet the time has been sufficient for Fortinbras to win his Polish victory and be again at Elsinore, and for ambassadors to return from England announcing the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. We might obligingly imagine that the pirate ship conveying Hamlet to Denmark was delayed by baffling winds; but his letters are written after he has landed, and they describe his companions as holding their course for England. The truth is, as stated by Professor Hall Griffin (whose record of the notes of time has aided me here), "Shakespeare is at fault"; he "did not trouble himself to reconcile . . . inconsistencies which practical experience as an actor would tell him do not trouble the spectator."

The division of the last three Acts of the play is made without the authority of any early edition. Act V. certainly opens aright. But the division between II. and III. is a matter of doubt, and the received division between III. and IV. is unfortunate. Mr. E. Rose proposed that III. should open with Hamlet's advice to the players (III. ii. of the received arrangement), and that IV. should open with the march of Fortinbras (our present IV. iv:). As regards IV., this is the division of Mr. Hudson in his Harvard Shakespeare; and but for the inconvenience of disturbing an accepted arrangement, to which references are made in lexicons and concordances, I should in this edition follow Mr. Hudson.