Page 63 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

lvi HAMLE T

thought to the constitutional practices of Denmark. And
if after the accession of the Scottish King James and
his Danish consort, Queen Anne, Shakespeare's audi-
ence came to include a few 'judicious' courtiers
more knowing than the rest, what then? The election
in Denmark was in practice limited to members of the
royal house; in other words, the choice lay between
Hamlet and his uncle. In the eyes of such spectators,
therefore, Hamlet's disappointment would seem just as
keen and his ambitious designs just as natural as if the
succession had followed the principle of primogeniture.
However it be looked at, an elective throne in Shake-
speare's Denmark is a critical mare's nest.*
One more dramatic problem must here be glanced at,
that of Hamlet's attitude towards Ophelia, an attitude
which seems very perplexing to the ordinary reader and
playgoer, which the psychologists explain as sex-nausea
induced by his mother's behaviour and the historians as
an ill-digested lump of the old play by Kyd, whose
Ophelia, as they infer from Belleforest, was merely a
female decoy employed by Hamlet's uncle to seduce
him. There seems plausibility in both suggestions, but
they fail to satisfy. Certainly Hamlet often treats Ophelia
as if she were a decoy, or even a prostitute, when we see
them together or when he speaks to Polonius about her;
and yet she is as certainly nothing of the kind in Shake-
speare's play. On the other hand, however great his
disgust with life, Hamlet's outrageous language to her
cannot be excused on that ground alone, can indeed only
be excused if he had good grounds for supposing her to
be that which he appears to assume. Something is lost^
some clue to the relationship between them, some acci-
dental misunderstanding which would explain Hamlet's
conduct and render her fate even more pathetic. And
whatis lostis a very simple thing—a single stage-direction,
giving Hamlet an entry (on the inner Elizabethan stage)
nine lines before his entry on the other stage at 2. 2.167,