Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/184

 interview in which all seeming becomes debatable, for rascally things may smile. He shades his brow, and his eyes are two magnets which he detaches from her heart, as he surrenders his last confidence in a stale and unprofitable world.

The irony reaches its most powerful exercise in the second scene of the third act, where Hamlet avails himself of the arrival of play-actors to test the King with his mouse-trap of an interlude. The Athenian mechanics played Pyramus and Thisbe with the simple intention of contributing their duty and homage to the nuptials. We see the humor of its juxtaposition with courtly scenes and weddings. But Hamlet, in his interlude, pretends amusement and mimics a murder to conceal his knowledge of the real one. "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence in the world." His light talk with Ophelia is nothing but the audacity of excitement and expectation. His baffling of Guildenstern with the pipe; his making Polonius see a camel, a weasel, and a whale in a cloud,—covers the dreadful necessity which drives him, in the witching time of night, to that upbraiding of a mother, and that second meeting with a dead father, which will make men's breath bate and their veins creep while English is spoken in this world.

What other mood than Irony could a soul with such a secret for its guest spread for entertainment? Too strongly built and level to be cracked with the earthquake of madness; too awfully overclouded to sparkle with imaginings of wit; too daunted and saddened with