Page:William Strunk Jr. - The Importance of The Ghost in Hamlet.djvu/6

468 other students, of whom one of the latest is Professor C. M. Lewis (The Genesis of Hamlet, 1907), have frankly admitted the inconsistencies of the text, accounting for them as resulting from the presence in the play of inharmonious material retained from the original source and from Shakespeare's first version. No attempt to formulate a comprehensive explanation of Hamlet's conduct, from that of Goethe in 1795 to the latest with which I am acquainted, that of Dr. Ernest Jones (The American Journal of Psychology, Jan., 1910), has been generally accepted as satisfactorily accounting for everything in the play. Consciously or unconsciously, all the critics disregard some of the data. Professor Lewis, for example, deems it justifiable to disregard, in estimating Hamlet's character, such details as the sending of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death, as Hamlet's remark about "perfect conscience," as his soliloquy on meeting the troops of Fortinbras. "The composite Hamlet is not an entity at all, and therefore not a subject for psychological analysis" (p. 133). Whether or not the reader is prepared to go quite so far as this, he will, I think, be ready to concede that the main desideratum in interpreting Hamlet is not to provide an answer for every difficult question that may be asked in connection with the play, but to discover, if that be possible, how Shakespeare intended his hero's