Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/29

 task. They often speak as if the poet started with some central idea of which Hamlet was to be the exponent. "Shakespeare," wrote Goethe, "sought to depict a great deed laid upon a soul unequal to the performance of it." "In Hamlet," wrote Coleridge, "Shakespeare seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses and our meditation on the working of our minds—an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds." I prefer to think of Shakespeare as setting to work with the intention of rehandling the subject of an old play, so as to give it fresh interest on the stage; as following the subject given to him, and as following the instinctive leadings of his genius. The traditional Hamlet was distinguished by intellectual subtlety, by riddling speech, by a power of ingeniously baffling his pursuers, and, at the same time, by a love of truth. But the subtlety of Saxo's Amleth—and we may be sure the same is true of Kyd's Hamlet—was what Burke happily describes, in a different connection, as a "clumsy subtlety." If he would be taken to be mad, he affects unclean and brutal habits, or crows like a cock, or rides a horse with his head towards the tail. Shakespeare was attracted by the intellectual subtlety of Hamlet, and was inevitably led by his genius to refine this subtlety, and to diversify its manifestations. He was caught in the web of his own imaginings, and became so absorbed in his work that he forgot to keep it within the limits suitable for theatrical representation; the tragedy has, perhaps, never been presented in its entirety on the English stage in consequence of its