Page 61 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

liv H A M L E T

the conversations between Hamlet and the two spies,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; they clarify the whole
puzzling situation after the Play-scene; and they add
surprising force and meaning to one of the most dramatic
moments in the Play-scene itself.
I shall be told that had Shakespeare intended all this
he would have made it plainer. The argument really cuts
the other way. That Shakespeare did intend it is proved
by Hamlet's two references to his loss of the crown: the
one I have just referred to at 3. 4. 99, and the words

Popped in between th'election and my hopes,
spoken to Horatio in the last scene. And the fact that
these references occur so late in the play proves that
Shakespeare did not need to make it plainer, that he
knew his audience would assume the situation from the
start. The events and speeches of the first half of the
second scene of the play could leave no doubt in the
minds of spectators at the Globe, as they clearly left no
doubt in those of most eighteenth-century readers. The
dejected air of the crown prince, the contrast between
his black doublet and the bright costumes of the rest, his
strange and (as it would seem) sulky conduct towards
his uncle, above all the hypocritical and ingratiating
address of the uncle to him, bore only one possible
interpretation—usurpation; and that Hamlet never men-
tions the subject in his first soliloquy but reveals a far
more horrible wrong must have seemed to the original
audience one of the most effective dramatic strokes of
the play.
But I shall be told further that Denmark was an
elective monarchy, as Hamlet's own words testify, and
that, though disappointed perhaps, he had no legal case
against Claudius. This objection offers a pretty illustra-
tion of the dangers of the 'historical' method, that is of
explaining situations in Shakespeare by reference to his
hypothetical sources. I say 'hypothetical' because there