I could be merry now. Hubert, I love

thee;

Well, I'll not say what I intend for thee: Remember. (To the Queen.) Madam, fare you well:

I'll send those powers o'er to your majesty.

Again, in the same play, there is a sort of divine beauty in the scene between Hubert and little Arthur; and this in spite of the fact that little Arthur is a monster, not like a boy in the least, and talks as no boy ever talked. While Shakespeare was writing the historical plays his talent developed rapidly, spontaneously, and in all directions at once. He found himself among hurricanes, and he let them blow; among zephyrs, and he let them breathe or die at their will. This was ever his way.

In the third act of Hamlet a dramatic gust dies out as mysteriously as the strange blast of feeling arises about the little boy in

King John. From the opening of the play, down to the scene between Hamlet and his mother, we are in the atmosphere of the greatest kind of drama. It is a fate-drama, as powerful as the Agamemnon of Æschylus. Our souls are shaken with its reality. This religious interest comes to its climax in Hamlet's sudden vision of the spectre which his mother cannot see. The woman, whose whole heart has been torn to shreds by her son's reproaches, now for a moment forgets everything except her terror in the discovery that Hamlet is really mad. This is a climax out of the supernatural into the natural, such as no one except Shakespeare was ever capable of. The scene is as great as anything in human literature. Then Shakespeare gets tired of the Ghost. He leaves the poor Ghost and his whole story behind, drops it as a dog drops a bone that he has wearied of, and goes gambolling upon the horizon. From this point onward Shakespeare holds the play together with grave-diggers, brilliant soliloquies, young men in frenzy of passion who come to grips over a girl's bier, duels, murders, and a dead march. These latter scenes, however, which are hustled on to the stage, half dressed, to piece out the performance, are as magical as

the earlier parts of the drama. No wonder they made Shakespeare forget the Ghost. Ophelia, with her scraps of lyric phrase which have the power of Sappho at the back of them, moves upon our gaze. We receive dreadful gleams from the mystery behind all life,— fragments of thought, where the passion of forty Dantes is put into accidents of phrase. No wonder the Ghost and the whole plot and scheme of the play were withdrawn from Shakespeare's mind. He winds all up with a thoroughgoing Elizabethan hurlyburly. The main interest, it must be confessed, is never recovered. By the time the curtain falls in Hamlet the characters have become marionettes. They lie about the stage, and one hardly knows which is the king.

All this finale of Hamlet is very inartistic. It certainly would have been easy at least to introduce the Ghost for a last triumphant, sorrowing, magnificent speech over the dead bodies; and this would have tended to pull the play together. But the Ghost is as far from Shakespeare's mind as Helen of Troy, and is almost as completely banished from the action. What is it, then, that keeps the audience in the theatre during the last act of Hamlet? Perhaps it is something

that cannot be stated or even be clearly imagined. Yet through it is conveyed the operation of gigantic Mind, which flashes from Shakespeare as he thinks and dreams and proceeds in his extraordinary journey through the play. It would seem as if all the lighting and staging and arrangements that we have been taught to consider as the essentials of dramatic art are not needed; for Shakespeare produces the most profound effects without any of them. We cannot find his vehicle. We are left standing on the edge of the abyss, not knowing how we came there, or we are lulled in the music of Elysium, not knowing why it sounds.

III

EACH PLAY A WORLD

THERE is a world in each of Shake

speare's plays,-the world, I should say, so felt and so seen as the world never was seen before nor could be felt and seen again, even by Shakespeare. Each play is a little local universe. His stage devices he repeats, but the atmosphere of a play is never repeated. Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice are very unlike one another. The unity that is in each of them results from unimaginable depths of internal harmony in each. The group of persons in any play (I am speaking of the good plays) forms the unity; for the characters are psychologically interlocked with one another. Prospero implies Caliban; Toby Belch implies Malvolio; Shylock, Antonio. The effects of all imaginative art result from subtle implications and adjustments. The public recognises these things as beauty, but cannot analyse them.