Page 72 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION kr

times perverse, essay, The influence of the audience on
1
Shakespeare's drama , faces the facts of Hamlet's be-
haviour as no other writer has done, and though he puts
a construction upon them somewhat different from mine,
both are covered by the shrewd criticism in The Testa-
ment of Beauty:
Hamlet himself would never hav been aught to us, or we
to Hamlet, wer't not for the artful balance whereby
Shakespeare so gingerly put his sanity in doubt
2
without the while confounding his Reason .
So I come to my last point. If Shakespeare knew
someone in real life possessed of such greatness and
struggling with such weakness, someone whom he per-
haps admired this side idolatry or in whom he was
deeply interested, someone too whose fame and worth
Stood challenger on mount of all the age
For his perfection,
would he not have put Mm into a play? By this I do not
of course mean that Hamlet was such a man, but merely
that Shakespeare's knowledge of such a man may have
provided the leaven of feeling which set working the
creative ferment that produced Hamlet. Hamlet, I say
again, is a character in a play, not a historical figure, how-
ever much Ms genesis may owe to the relations between
two men once living at the end of the sixteenth century.
He is as genuine a child of Shakespeare's imagination as
Mark. Antony or Macbeth; he has no existence outside
the frame of his drama; and it would be as futile to try
and explain him by discussing the 'psychology' of his
supposed original, as it is to try and explain the play in
the light of what we surmise about the lost Hamlet of
Kyd. But if, as many have believed and as I have else-
3
where maintained , the emotional stimulus for his
1
Collected Essays, etc. of Robert Bridges (Oxford), i. 25-
27. 2 1.11. 577-80.
8
The Essential Shakespeare, pp. 95-107.