¹ As I shall have to refer often to Dr. Greg and to Professor Wilson, I am taking the liberty of generally omitting their titles.

² Bibliography of Greg's and Wilson's publications is given below. My article, “The Play-Scene in Hamlet,” appeared in the JEGP, xvii (1919), 1–22.

³ Joseph Quincy Adams, edition of the play (Boston and New York, 1929), 261 ff.; Levin L. Schiicking, Der Sinn des Hamlet (Leipzig, 1935), translated by Graham Rawson as “The Meaning of Hamlet” (London, 1937); Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, Third Series, Hamlet (London, 1937). Granville-Barker records his “total disagreement” with Wilson's interpretation of the Play-Scene (p. 97). I did not read his book until after the present paper was written, and I find that in two or three places he has anticipated my objections.

⁴ MLR, xxxi (1936), 145.

⁵ Sometimes with strange results. In the stage version used by John Gielgud, Ophelia says, as soon as the Prologue enters, “What means this, my lord?,” and Hamlet answers, “Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief,” all of which applies in the uncut text to the dumb-show, and is inapplicable as following the entrance of the Prologue. See Rosamond Gilder, John Gielgud's Hamlet, a record of performance (New York, 1937), p. 164. Miss Gilder's work in giving an exact description of the acting and settings of this performance is much to be commended; it would be extremely useful to have such records of all the more important productions of the play.

⁶ The best place to get Dr. Greg's theory is his paper, “Hamlet's Hallucination,” MLR, xii (1917), 393–421. See also “Re-enter Ghost: A Reply to Mr. J. D. Wilson,” ibid., xiv (1919), 353–369, and “What Happens in Hamlet?” ibid., xxxi (1936), 145–154, and “A Critical Mousetrap,” pp. 179–180 of A Book of Homage lo Shakespeare (Oxford, 1916).

⁷ xii, 419.

⁸ xii, 397.

⁹ xii, 401.

¹⁰ xii, 398.

¹¹ xii, 401.

¹² xii, 395.

¹³ xii, 413.

¹⁴ xii, 416.

¹⁵ xii, 406.

¹⁶ xii, 420, note.

¹⁷ References without title to Wilson's work in what follows are taken from What Happens in Hamlet, second edition (Cambridge, England, 1937). Those from his edition of the play (Cambridge, England, 1934) are preceded by “Ed.” He had earlier published “The Parallel Plots in Hamlet,” MLR, xiii (1918), 129–156; “The Play-Scene in Hamlet Restored,” Athenæum (1918) July, 303–307; Aug., 344–349; Sept., 384–388; Nov., 462–467. Analyses of the contents of these articles will be found in the useful Hamlet Bibliography and Reference Guide, by Anton A. Raven (Chicago, 1936). Quotations from Shakespeare's text in the present article are from the Neilson edition, The Cambridge Poets (Boston and New York, 1906).

¹⁸ P. 139.

¹⁹ Furness, Variorum, i, 242. See also W. F. Trench, Shakespeare's Hamlet, a New Commentary (London, 1913), p. 159, note 2.

²⁰ P. 184.

²¹ P. 159.

²² Cf. p. 163.

²³ P. 195.

²⁴ See below, pp. 734–735.

²⁵ Cf. Wilson's eleven points (not fourteen), p. 139.

²⁶ As, for example, in the following passage. When Laertes returns, the King tells him that “he which hath your noble father slain pursued my life,” and Laertes assents:

It well appears. But tell me

Why you proceeded not against these feats,

So crimeful and so capital in nature,

As by your safety, wisdom, all things else,

You mainly were stirr'd up.

Professor Wilson asks what these feats were, which clearly involved the person of Claudius, and finds that Hamlet himself hinted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he might take to assassination. Rosencrantz observes that Hamlet does not lack advancement, since he has the voice of the King himself for the succession, and Hamlet replies: “Ay, but ‘While the grass grows’,—the proverb is something musty.” “In short,” says Wilson, “the heir to the throne does not propose to wait his turn, but to anticipate the course of nature by action. It is Hamlet, then, and not Claudius, who first broaches the subject of assassination, and of ambition as the motive therefor” (p. 168).

This is certainly a “warping” of the meaning of the text. It is, of course, highly improbable that Hamlet would give away a plan so dangerous as this to the friends whom he does not trust, and least of all at this point—his next move is to call for the recorder, and expose their designs on him. And the proverb “Whylst grass doth growe, oft sterves the seely steede” (to cite one of its forms) does not mean that the horse is going to kick his master to death. Malone explained it correctly: “Hamlet means to intimate that whilst he is waiting for the succession to the throne of Denmark, he may himself be taken off by death.” (Quoted by Furness, New Variorum, i, 267.) For other illustrations of highhanded treatment of the text, observe Wilson's remarks about the “usurpation” of Claudius (p. 717 below, note 32), the significance of the prologue and of the “miching mallecho” speech (pp. 729, 732 below).

²⁷ Ed. lix.

²⁸ Shakespeare's Hamlet: a New Commentary (London, 1913), p. xii. Cf. p. 2. “The tragedy of Hamlet is a work perfect in conception and execution.”

²⁹ V. Østerberg, Studier over Hamlet-texterne, i (Copenhagen, etc., 1920).

³⁰ Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (Cambridge, England, 1933), p. 100.

³¹ Ed., xlvi-1, passim.

³² In connection with his argument to prove Claudius a “usurper.” It is not my purpose to discuss matters not affecting the Play-Scene, but this is perhaps relevant. I confess I do not understand the situation as he presents it to us. “The dejected air of the crown prince, the contrast between his black doublet and the bright costumes of the rest, his strange and (as it would seem) sulky conduct towards his uncle, above all the hypocritical and ingratiating address of the uncle to him, bore only one possible interpretation—usurpation; and that Hamlet never mentions the subject in his first soliloquy but reveals a far more horrible wrong must have seemed to the original audience one of the most effective dramatic strokes of the play” (Ed., liv). So the fact that Hamlet says nothing about usurpation after the court scene, but dwells on his mother's frailty and his father's death, indicates that usurpation was what was really weighing on his mind in that scene!

Again, we are reminded that the monarchy of Elizabeth and James was elective, but on the next page that “an elective throne in Shakespeare's Denmark is a critical mare's nest” (lv–lvi). Wilson is sure that Claudius was a usurper.

The situation appears to be as follows. Shakespeare meant us to understand that the throne of Denmark was hereditary, but that the order of succession by descent might be set aside if the good of the country demanded it. Determination of this lay in the hands of the nobility; in that sense the throne was elective. On the death of his brother, Claudius persuaded the Danish nobles, headed by Polonius, to declare him king. He was a usurper only in the sense that Henry IV or Henry VII were usurpers. When they were established on the throne, and had the most powerful elements in the country behind them, they were legitimatized. This general arrangement was true of the early Germanic kingdoms, in England as elsewhere, but Shakespeare's auditors had in all probability no interest in the historical situation in early Denmark. Steevens and Blackstone were wrong in emphasizing this as explaining the dramatist's procedure, though they were on the right track in explaining the general arrangement of the succession in the play. The line “Popp'd in between the election and my hopes” is conclusive. “Election” can only mean “choice.” When a crowd of Danes, “in a riotous head” burst in upon Claudius, they cry, “Choose we! Laertes shall be king!” Notice that Hamlet does not say that Claudius came between him and his rights, only his hopes. The new king won his crown by despicable means, but he was careful to have it legally set upon his head. As Professor J. Q. Adams puts it, “Indeed, so successful is [Claudius] in the employment of these his two chief weapons, flattery and bribery, that he has secured from the politicians of the Court his election to the throne in spite of Hamlet's being the idol of the people of Denmark” (loc.cit., p. 183).

³³ He has somewhat modified his views, but if I understand him he still clings to his main points.

³⁴ Quoted from W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), p. 15. This whole question is discussed from various points of view and in detail in that book. The quotation from R. W. Chambers is from “The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure,” Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (London, 1937), p. 29.

³⁵ By Mr. E. L. Ferguson, who believes that the King could not, from the dumb-show, “be certain that Hamlet knew all his secret.” See “The Play-Scene in ‘Hamlet’,” MLR, xiv (1919), 370. So too Miss Alice Walker, “‘Miching Malicho’ and the Play Scene in Hamlet,” MLR, xxxi (1936), 514.

³⁶ Mr. F. T. Bowers, in “The Audience and the Poisoners of Elizabethan Tragedy, JEGP, xxvi (1937), 501, notes only one parallel, and that not a ”leperous distilment“ but a powder, in Marlowe's Edward II, in which Lightbom says (Act v, Scene iv):

I learned in Naples how to poison flowers;

To strangle with a lawn thrust down the throat;

To pierce the windpipe with a needle's point;

Or whilst one is asleep, to take a quill

And blow a little powder in his ears.

³⁷ This was clearly seen by Mr. E. L. Ferguson, loc. cit., who remarks, “The weakness of the views that I have criticized is that, failing to see in the dumb-show anything but a premature disclosure of the mouse-trap, they miss the intensity of the struggle in which the protagonists come to grips.” (p. 379).

³⁸ A. C. Bradley made no such mistake. “King Claudius rarely gets from the audience the attention he deserves ... As a king he is courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He nowhere shows cowardice ... He was not... stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit.” Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1905), pp. 168–170.

³⁹ Pp. 195, 150.

⁴⁰ P. 151. Percy Simpson, “Actors and Acting,” Shakespeare's England (Oxford, 1916), ii, 253: “Hamlet's object in ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ is to probe the King's conscience; so he imposes a double test, first this quick rehearsal of the bare events ... then the prolonged strain of the fully acted scene.” Edward Dowden, Arden Shakespeare (1899), p. 116, note: [The King's] suspicions would doubtless be aroused, and he would watch the play with keener interest, but he might suppose that the dumb-show presented, in English fashion, action which was not to be developed through dialogue. Hamlet would thus have a double opportunity of catching the conscience of the King.“ W. W. Lawrence, JEGP, xviii (1919), 11: ”We cannot see into Hamlet's mind ... But it is perfectly possible that he considered that the dumb-show would ... aid his plot, since this would give two shots at Claudius, the one sudden, the other a more slowly developed emotional attack.“

⁴¹ P. 159.

⁴² P. 159, note.

⁴³ xiv, 362, note.

⁴⁴ P. 153. He obviously means “second tooth”; I fear he would not make a good dentist.

⁴⁵ Loc. cit., p. 265.

⁴⁶ “Professor Bradley's Hamlet,” Drama and Lije (New York, 1908), p. 155. I quote from Raven's bibliography.

⁴⁷ Wilson has well emphasized this, and shown the devices by which Shakespeare endeavors to diminish the effect of the coincidence. Cf. 143 f.

⁴⁸ A. J. A. Waldock, Hamlet, a Study in Critical Method (Cambridge, England, 1931), p. 79.

⁴⁹ MLR, xiv, 367, note.

⁵⁰ The quotation from Goethe is freely translated from the edition of the Conversations with Eckermann by H. H. Houben (Leipzig, 1909), p. 496; that from Somerset Maugham is taken from The Summing-Up (New York, 1938), p. 160.

⁵¹ From the introduction to William Gillette's “The Illusion of the First Time in Acting,” Publications of the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, Second Series (New York, 1915), p. 15.

⁵² Ed., xxiii.

⁵³ The Meaning of Hamlet (1937), p. 130. See note p. 710 above.

⁵⁴ See the excellent comments by Granville-Barker, pp. 98 ff.

⁵⁵ P. 158.

⁵⁶ See W. J. Lawrence, “The Dumb Show in Hamlet,” Life and Letters, v (Nov., 1930), 333–340; also in Those Nut-Cracking Elizabethans (London, 1935), p. 59 ff., and M. H. Dodds, “The Dumb Show in Hamlet,” Notes and Queries, clix (Nov. 29, 1930), 386.

⁵⁷ Dr. Greg well remarked that there is no getting rid of the dumb-show. “Not only is the textual tradition unassailable, but the show is actually the subject of comment by Ophelia and Hamlet, a fact that proves it to be no mere oversight, no intrusion accidentally foisted into the text, but an integral, and presumably rational, part of the scene in which it occurs.” MLN, xii, 398.

⁵⁸ “Dumb Show in Elizabethan Drama,” RES, xi (1935), 403.

⁵⁹ H. D. Gray, “The Dumb-Show in Hamlet,” MP, xvii (1919–20), 51 ff.; see especially p. 54. For Mr. Ferguson's article, see above, p. 721, note.

Dr. Greg says, “According to Mr. Lawrence, Shakespeare's reason for introducing the dumb-show was to inform the King that his secret was discovered and so make possible the contest of wills which he regards as the essence of the scene. This, so far as the playscene is concerned, is an even more revolutionary interpretation than my own” (MLR, xiv, 367, note 4). The difference is that Dr. Greg's theory that the King was innocent of the crime as set forth before the court destroys completely the plot of Hamlet as usually understood; my view involves no radical change whatever, but provides further dramatic interest. I will leave readers to judge which is the more “revolutionary.”

⁶⁰ MLR, xiv, 355.

⁶¹ I take the liberty of making Shakespeare quote Dr. Greg.

⁶² MLR, xiv, 368.

⁶³ See Greg, MLR, xii, 404. He thinks the “miching mallecho” remark is “intentionally cryptic: if anything it suggests that the show was a surprise. Now if the dumb-show was unexpected on Hamlet's part, it must have been singularly unwelcome.” I cannot see sufficient evidence in this speech that Hamlet was taken by surprise. Why should it not refer, as it has always been taken, to the “mischief” in the plot of the play? And Hamlet certainly knew all about that.

⁶⁴ See for the theories mentioned in this paragraph Wilson, Chapter v, passim.

⁶⁵ Cf. Granville-Barker, loc. cit., p. 97, note.

⁶⁶ Wilson, p. xi. Professor Nicoll's comments are taken from The Year's Work in English Studies, xvi (1935), 188.

⁶⁷ xiv–xviii.