Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/115

100 Fortinbras thinks, would more become a battle-field than a

palace, points the moral so obvious throughout the piece, that the end of action is not within the hands of the human

agents.

The blow which finally quits the King was fully

deserved for his last act.

His end has an accidental sudden

ness about it, which disappoints the expectation of judicial revenge. Like Laertes, he is a woodcock caught in his own springe. Retribution is left to the terrible future, whose mysteries have been partially unveiled ; and the mind, pre pared by the revelations of the Ghost, accepts the death of the King but as the beginning of his quittance.

The death of Hamlet has been objected to, as cruel and needless ; but would it not rather have been cruel to have left

him alive in this harsh world, drawing his breath in pain. Heart-broken, and in that half-mad state which is vastly more painful than developed insanity, what could he do here, after the one act for which he was bound to live had been accom

plished.

Had he survived, he must have sank into inert

motiveless melancholy, or have struggled on in the still more

painful state of contention between conscience and suicidal desire. To prevent a wounded name being left behind him, he can command his friend to “absent him from felicity awhile ;” but for himself the best is the dark mantle of

oblivion, the rest with hope which his friend so gracefully expresses:

“Now cracks a noble heart: Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels guard thee to thy rest " There is no attempted poetical justice in this bloody finale to the drama. The way of the world rather is followed in the indiscriminate mischief Sweet Ophelia and noble Hamlet meet the same fate which attends the incestuous Queen, the villanous King, the passionate Laertes, and the well

meaning Polonius. The vortex of crime draws down the innocent and the guilty; the balance of desert being left for