Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/167

 ghost would join the party. But his brain kindled with the midnight passion, streamed over down into the pen, and the ink exhaled under the heat of Hamlet's reminiscence into the vaporous outline, which always startles us because it startled Shakspeare,—a sudden whiteness running high along the edge of Hamlet's swelling heart. The scene then shudders with deference to this unexpected presence, which only the son who conceived it can observe. Afterward the verse seems to become merely a coast to help the great wave fall back and subside.

It is possible to have Hamlet played in a style so greatly absorbed as to obliterate our knowledge that the father's custom is to take his cue from the climax of his son's speech and to appear. Then we reproduce the thrill that Shakspeare felt when he sat alone with awe and silence, and they suddenly drew him to their ghost.

I recur now to consider the nature of the oblique and enigmatic style into which Hamlet has fallen. It is not a deliberate effort to sustain the character of a madman, because such a person as Hamlet could find no motive in it: he could not need it to mask his desire to avenge the ghost, for he is Prince, an inmate of the palace, and supernaturally elected to be master of the situation. He says he has "cause and will and strength and means to do't." I conceive, then, that his mind, driven from its ordinary gravity, and the channel of his favorite thoughts diverted, instinctively saves itself by this sustained gesture of irony; and it appears to be madness only to those who do not know that he is