Page 67 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

& HAMLE T

think that even the most hardened of 'historical' critics
has ventured to write them off as relics of the old play.
Whatever else Shakespeare may have inherited in Hamlet,
these are his own, and that he took the trouble to write
them is proof to my mind that he attached considerable
importance to the delay-motive and wished his audience
to do so likewise.*
Professor Stoll, in the latest instalment of his perennial
endeavour to exhibit Shakespeare as a dramatist not for
all time but of an age, argues with great elaboration and
learning that Hamlet's self-accusation of delay must not
be taken at its face value but as 'the sort of charge that
Elizabethan and ancient tragedy, concerned with ethical
rather than psychical defects, made no further account
of; that 'even if Shakespeare had desired it ? he could
scarcely, on the contemporary stage, have introduced so
fundamental an innovation as, in the place of a popular
heroic revenger, a procrastinator, lost in thought and
weak of will'; that the reproaches 'motive the delay, not
in the sense of groundingitin character, but of explaining
it and bridging it over; they motive it by reminding the
audience that the main business in hand, though retarded,
1
is not lost to view .' In a word, the soliloquies were not
intended to reveal any flaw in die character of the hero,
2
but to 'save the story ' and spin it out for five acts.
Professor Stoll is inspired by the worthiest of ambitions;
he is in effect defending Hamlet against Mr Eliot's
charge of 'artistic failure'; he is turning the weapons of
the 'historical' critics against themselves, against his own.
self of earlier books; he is fighting in the last ditch to
keep the tattered shreds of what was once the royal
banner of Shakespeare's reputation still flying. Yet that
his thesis is moonshine any unprejudiced reader of the
soliloquy in 4.4. may see for himself. Not that the evi-

1
E. E. Stoll, Art and Artifice in Shakespeare, pp. 94-5.
8
Stoll, op. cit. p. 101.