Page 407 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

300 C O R R E C T I O N S A N D 2.2.

soliloquy. For various interpretations of Ham.'s line of
thought, v. Trench, pp. 111-2 5, Adams, pp. 244-45,
W. W. Greg (M.L.R. xxxi. 151), and my What happens
in Hamlet, p. 142. Adams and Greg independently
suggest that Hamlet's first idea is to use The Murder of
Gonzago 'as a sort of challenge to the ling' and that it
is only later (i.e. at the end of the soliloquy) that he
thinks of making it 'a test of the king's conscience' and
of introducing the poisoning through the ear to that end
('something like the murder of my father'). And
Trench's theory is not dissimilar. To me the difference
between these two intentions seems so slight as to be
dramatically imperceptible.
562-63. What's Hecuba.. .weep for her? Prof.
J. A. K. Thomson draws my attention, in a private
letter, to an anecdote about Alexander of Pherae, a
tyrant of the 'Cambyses' sort, in Plutarch's Life of
Pelopides (North's Plutarch, ii. 3 23,Tudor Translations),
which runs:
And an other time being in a Theater, where the tragedy
of Troades of Euripides was played, he went out of the
Theater, and sent word to the players notwithstandinge,
that they shoulde go on with their playe, as if he had bene
still amonge them: saying, that he came not away for any
misliking he had of them or of the play, but bicause he was
ashamed his people shoulde see him weepe, to see"the miseries
of Hecuba and Andromacha played, and that they never
saw him pity the death of any one man, of so many of his
citizens as he had caused to be slaine. The gilty conscience
therefore of this cruell and heathen tyran, did make him
tremble at the only name and reputacion of Epaminondas.
The story bridges Ham.'s soliloquy, as it were, since it
deals with a remorseless tyrant, like Pyrrhus, who was
also a 'guilty creature sitting at a play.. .by the very
cunning of the scene.. .struck.. .to the soul,' and
makes him weep for Hecuba. Sh., as Prof. Thomson
says, 'must have read this story. Plutarch tells it for its