Page 46 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxxix

influence the imagination. Generally, however, such
associations are all the more potent for our being in-
sensible of them. In his use of imagery, as in his creation
of character, Shakespeare's strength lies in the impression
of unfathomed and unfathomable depths which it is his
art to convey,*

Because his touch is infinite and lends
A yonder to all ends.

But he was past-master also of a very different Hnd
of quibble, though it springs from the same root: the
quibble of wit and repartee. Here the situation is
reversed; for the quibble is the point of the jest, and if
it eludes the auditor the jest falls flat. That a large number
of his quibbles of necessity elude the modern reader and
have usually eluded his editors is the principal reason
why so much of his comic dialogue seems dead wood,
to-day. All the colour and sap of the fun has withered
like that of music-hall jokes fifty years old; we can no
more catch the trick of it than we can be born again into
the Elizabethan age. But editors have been over-modest
in this matter; and my experience with Love's Labour's
Lost, which probably seemed the most brilliant of all
Shakespeare's plays to his contemporaries, and in which
the quibbling is endless, has convinced me that enough
of it can be recovered for us to understand something
of the enthusiasm with which London hailed the advent
of this wittiest of Elizabethan poets. For his reputation,
at any rate at the time he was writing Hamlet, rested upon
'his facetious grace in writing,' as the apologetic Chettle
puts it, while a publisher exclaims, 'So much and such
savoured salt of wit is in his comedies that they seem, for
their height of pleasure, to be born in the sea that brought
1
forth Venus .'
Moreover, if more than half the point of Shakespeare's

1
v. the Epistle to Troths and Cressida, 1609.
Q.H.-3