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11. His plots to murder Hamlet, his discoverer, in England and in the fencing-scene.

12. Hamlet's farewell words to him:-"Die, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane."

Just compare these proofs with the alleged proofs of the Queen's guilt, as stated at the commencement of my paper, and especially remember that of those eleven proofs against her, no less than five reach us through Hamlet's lips (four out of those five, through no other channel), which five, moreover, contain all that is really of any consequence against her; and are numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8.

If I had to narrrate in prose the argument of the play, so far as it affects the subject of my paper, I should do it in the following

manner:

Before it opens, Claudius and the Queen have been guilty of adultery; and Claudius alone of murder.

The Queen's uneasiness and anxiety are sufficiently accounted for by her remembrance that she had sinned most grievously against her former husband during his lifetime, and was insulting his memory, when dead, by her incestuous marriage with his brother.

Her uneasiness about the changed state of Hamlet proceeds from her belief that it was occasioned in part by her "o'erhasty marriage," coupled with her recollection that he had been the most often present witness of her expressed great love for his deceased father, as he has told us in the words :

Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.

Also, from her reflection that she had bastardized and injured Hamlet, as far as a mother who is subsequently faithless to her husband can do; and, morcover, that Claudius was keeping him from the crown. Also, from her great natural fondness for Hamlet, and the consequent conflict in her mind in attempting to reconcile her grief at his changed state with her desire to continue in her incestuous union with Claudius, and her wish that the latter should retain his crown and kingdom.

Seeing her own sin of fickleness mirrored in the play-scene, and her consequent infidelity suggested, she might naturally conclude that, as she recognised that part of the representation, Claudius, as the cause of his visible alarm, might have recognised his part in the poisoning scene; which suspicion would be strengthened by her remembrance of the very sudden death of her late husband.

Thus, "in great amazement and admiration," as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern describe her directly after the play-scene-" amazed" at the dreadful fear suggested to her by the play-scene; for, if one part were true, why not the other?-amazed at the fear that her husband had been murdered, and that she had linked herself to the

murderer-Hamlet comes and confirms to her this awful suspicion, and leaves in her mind no doubt of its truth.

Upon this, for the first time, she revolts from Claudius and sides with Hamlet.

Upon this

To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,

Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.

Claudius, now, fearing her discovery, and evidently suspecting it, treats her with even less confidence than before; plans to murder her son; and, when the poison mixed for Hamlet is swallowed by her, cares nothing about it, and hopes yet to live himself:

O! yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt;

doubtless not sorry that she, whom he suspects to be now informed of his crime, is removed by death.

And, finally, tastes of his own venom; and—

I have thus endeavoured to show that, if the innocence of the Queen cannot be proved, still the balance of evidence is in her favour.

In conclusion, I desire to remind my readers of the fact, that, although the received text of "Hamlet" is derived mainly from the quarto of 1604, the title-page of which declares that it is "enlarged to almost as much again as it was," yet there exists one copy of an edition dated in 1603. This earlier edition gives a very imperfect idea of the play as it now exists, and differs from the received text, especially, on the subject of my paper. In the interview between Hamlet and his mother, after the acting of the play-scene, Hamlet speaks much more explicitly of the foul play attending his father's death, and of the perpetrator of the crime:

And he is dead.

Murder'd, damnably murder'd,-this was your husband

Ah! have you eyes, and can you look on him
That slew my father, and your dear husband,
To live in the incestuous pleasure of his bed?

And the Queen, in the same scene, declares to her son :-
But, as I have a soul, I swear by heaven

I never knew of this most horrid murder.

To which Hamlet, alluding to his intention to slay Claudius,

replies:

And, mother, but assist me in revenge,
And in his death your infamy shall die.

Whereupon she rejoins:

I will conceal, consent, and do my best,
What stratagem soe'er thou shalt devise.

There is also, in the edition I am now quoting, a scene which does not exist at all in the received text. It takes place between the Queen and Horatio, after Hamlet's escape from the embassy to England; and in it Horatio narrates to the Queen the plot of Claudius to murder Hamlet, and the escape of the latter at the expense of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When the Queen hears of her husband's plot she says, in speaking of Claudius :

Then I perceive there's treason in his looks
That seem'd to sugar o'er his villainy;
But I will soothe and please him for a time,
For murderous minds are always jealous.

She also directs Horatio to bid Hamlet

Be

awhile wary of his presence, lest that he Fail in that he goes about,

alluding to his intention to kill Claudius.

As regards the authenticity of this edition of 1603, Mr. Charles Knight, in his "Studies of Shakspeare," has declared his belief that it "gives us the play as originally written by Shakspeare," who, ho considers, afterwards elaborated this first conception into the glorious tragedy which we now possess. Mr. Collier, with far greater probability, conjectures that it was compiled from a shorthand writer's notes, and that Shakspeare is in no way responsible for its imperfections. At the same time, Mr. Collier says, "It is of high value in enabling us to settle the text of various important passages;" and one particular stage direction, which occurs in no other edition of the play, he believes, with great probability, to carry out the author's intention with respect to the appearance of the Ghost in the scene in question.

If we accept Mr. Knight's belief, I think it sets the matter at rest as to Shakspeare's intention with regard to the Queen's innocence of the crime of murder, and proves that she first became acquainted with such crime in her interview with Hamlet after the play-scenc.

But, if we prefer Mr. Collier's far more probable conjecture, even then the edition of 1603 shows to us the impression produced upon the mind of an attentive spectator by the performance of the play by a body of actors, one of whom was William Shakspeare himself; and who can doubt that he, who in this very play has given to actors for all time such minute directions how to "speak the speech" appointed to each one, and has directed them to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that they o'erstep not the modesty of nature"-who can doubt that he also directed the living actors of his own company to impart to each one of the scenes of his masterpiece, which

1

they were enacting in concert, the exact tone and colour which he desired it to possess?

It may also be remembered that in the interview-scene between Hamlet and his mother, in which occur the passages which differ so materially from the received text, Shakspeare himself was actually present in the part of the Ghost, which he enacted. This renders it probable that the other actors in the same scene would be more than ever careful to observe the directions which they might have received from the author of the play, as to the colour which he desired should be imparted to the scene in question. It is not likely that the short-hand writer, from whose notes I am supposing the edition of 1603 to have been taken, should have completed such notes during the course of one representation of the play. Most probably he saw it acted many times; and the version which he has given us of the interview-scene between Hamlet and his mother may, therefore, fairly be accepted as showing the impression made upon his mind by the manner in which the actor who personated the Queen understood and represented the part habitually, even although the words which the short-hand writer has put into the mouth of the Queen were not actually uttered by the actor of the part, or written by Shakspeare, but merely the embodiment of the impression left upon the mind of the spectator by the performance of an actor who was sustaining the part of the Queen under the of Shakspeare himself.

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