Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/10

4 castle walls at night, and Hamlet, informed of this, keeps watch and encounters it. The narrative of the ghost of the elder Hamlet, stripped of all its rhetoric, reveals that, while sleeping in his garden, he was murdered by his brother, who poured poison in his ears (the detail is important), that the queen was guilty of illicit relations with Claudius before the murder, and that thus cut off in the blossoms of his sin, without the rites of the Church, the Ghost is forced to dwell in the horrors of Purgatory until the faults of earth have been purged away. While laying upon Hamlet the dreadful duty of vengeance, the Ghost expressly charges that the Queen is to be left to the reproaches of her own conscience.

The effect of these revelations upon Hamlet's delicate and highly nervous organism is overwhelming. He answers Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo, who, alarmed for his safety, seek him out, with "wild and whirling words"—partly through his own intense mental excitement, and partly through an instinctive desire to keep the look—is the small difficulty that, Hamlet's father deceased, Hamlet should ipso facto have inherited the throne." Greg, loc. cit., p. 396, suggests that Claudius reigns by right of some "matriarchal custom, or by that of the strong man on the spot." The true answer seems to be that pointed out long ago by Steevens—that the throne of Denmark was elective, although with a presumption in favor of the heir by descent, and that the King succeeded in securing enough votes for election. Hamlet's remark (Act V, Sc. II, 1. 65) that the king had "popp'd in" between the election and his own hopes is the best of testimony to this. It is worth noting that according to Saxo Grammaticus—the ultimate source of the Hamlet-story save vague references—the selection of the Danish kings took place according to this fashion. The theory put forward by C. M. Lewis (The Genesis of Hamlet, N.Y., 1907, p. 40) that the situation is best explained by Belleforest does not appear convincing. Belleforest informs us that the characters corresponding to Claudius and the elder Hamlet were governors of a province of Denmark; that Hamlet married the king's daughter, that Claudius slew him and wedded the princess his wife, and that on the death of the king her father Claudius thus became king of Denmark. So, says Lewis, "the elder Hamlet was never king of Denmark, and Claudius reigned only by right of his wife."—But Lewis admits that "in later parts of the novel it seems that Belleforest himself has forgotten the facts, for he speaks as if the elder Hamlet had been king, and Claudius had made himself his heir by the murder" (p. 41). There is scarcely a doubt that this was Shakspere's—and inferentially Kyd's—understanding of the matter. In Shakspere's play, the elder Hamlet is repeatedly called "king," the wager with the elder Fortinbras does not look like the act of a prince consort, and there is no intimation that the Queen is of more distinguished birth than her husbands. There is, of course, no evidence that Shakspere was acquainted with Belleforest.