Page 48 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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

Gutldenstern. A thing, my lord!
Hamlet. Of nothing, bring me to him.
Editors rightly quote Ps. cxliv. 4 (Prayer Book version),
'Man is like a tiling of nought,' but they forget to com-
plete the verse—'his time passeth away like a shadow,'
and so fail to catch Hamlet's point, which is that the
King's days are numbered, as he has hinted in the
scarcely less cryptic 'The body is with the king, but the
king is not with the body' a moment before.
Elaborate and subtle conundrums of this kind raise
a general question of some difficulty at first sight If
modern editors poring over their texts with the aid of
dictionaries and glossaries have been foiled, how were
even the swiftest Elizabethan intelligences expected to
tackle them in the rapid give-and-take of spoken
dialogue? A good deal, of course, depends upon
whether the spectator or reader comes to the play in the
proper frame of mind. Anyone who has watched a
music-hall audience taking point after point in the gag
of the funny man will know how quickly even the
generality, when 'tickle o'th'sere,' will rise to the most
far-fetched jest. Editors, on the other hand, have usually
been of a temperament slow in such uptake, and have
lacked the education a music-hall might provide. Again,
Shakespeare no doubt relied to some extent upon the
memory of his audience, and generally cast his quibbling
riddles into a form which, in those days when verbal
memory had not yet been swamped and corrupted
by over-much reading, was easy to retain and ponder
when the play was done. But he had something else
besides memory to reckon with, a something the influence
of which upon Elizabethan drama has been strangely
neglected.
' My tables, meet it is I set it down/ exclaims Hamlet;
and every Elizabethan gallant or inns-of-court man
carried his table-book about him, for use on all sorts of
occasions; to copy down 'saws of books' as he read,