Page 54 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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

stage and for an Elizabethan audience, they label them
•relics of an old play' and talk of the stubbornness of
Shakespeare's material or the crudity of Elizabethan
drama.
But before Shakespeare be dismissed from the rank
of dramatist and degraded to that of a mere poetical
decorator of other people's plays, a word or two may
perhaps be found in his defence. There are dozens of
problems, large and small, in Hamlet which have never
been satisfactorily explained, and of which quite a fair
proportion have never even been noticed. Some are
probably due to 'historical' causes, that is to say they are
discrepancies arising out of revision. I doubt, however,
whether any of these are to be set down to the intracta-
bility of the inherited plot, and I am certain that they
vanish one and all in the illusion of the theatre. The most
famous of them, for example, the puzzle of Hamlet's
age, which seems to be about eighteen at the opening of
the play and is inferentially fixed at thirty by the words
of the sexton in the last act, looks like a consequence
of revision, but has obviously nothing to do with any
difficulty in the original play and passes entirely un-
noticed by spectators in the theatre, seeing that their
Hamlet is an actor made up to represent a certain age,
1
which they accept without question . Shakespeare's
critics have seldom recognised that he enjoyed, and of
right exercised, a liberty denied to the novelist and
eschewed by the modern dramatist whose production in
an age dominated by the printing-press is consciously or
unconsciously conditioned by the terms of publication.
Verisimilitude and not consistency or historical accuracy
is the business of drama, and its Elizabethan artists,
working in a theatre without drop-curtain or act-pauses,
knew that the audience could not ponder or check the
1
Cf. Bradley, op. cit. p. 73, 'the moment Burbage en-
tered it must have been dear whether the hero was twenty
or thirty,'