Page 59 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

Hi H A M L E T

and when the apparition is before his eyes, the opening
words of his speech—
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked, or charitable—
voice the orthodox Protestant standpoint. While he is
actually talking with the Ghost he is convinced: it is the
spirit of his beloved father. But directly the vision
disappears the doubts return:
O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else ?
And shall I couple hell? O fie!
He shuts down the thought of hell; but the thought is
there, to prey upon him'with added force in moods of
depression later.
The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T*assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me—
he declares at the end of Act 2; and in the deep de-
'
spondency of the To be or not to be' soliloquy in the
scene following he has clearly so far given up belief in
the 'honesty' of the Ghost that he speaks of the world
beyond the grave as
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns.
Thus a passage, which has long been a stone of stumbling
to critics ignorant of Elizabethan spiritualism, which
Professor Stoll has stigmatised as a piece of careless
writing on Shakespeare's part, 'an unguarded word such
1
as we find not in Ibsen ', and Mr J. M. Robertson has
1
E. E. Stoll, Hamlet: an historical and comparative Study,
1919, p. 35. Professor Stoll alone among the 'historical'
critics seems to realise that Elizabethan spiritualism is