of the time, authority was making preparations for perpetrating one of the greatest acts of injustice which have left their stain on English history. How near the real circumstances the poet might have ventured to approach we are unable to decide; perhaps he spoke out as plainly as regard for his own head would permit, for certainly the English people of 1604 must have been strangely blunt in their understandings if they did not perceive that Raleigh was Claudio, and that by the sanguinary Lord Deputy no other than Robert Cecil could be meant. From the days of Pontius Pilate downwards, in every channel through which supreme power had forced its way, justice had had so little to do with the relations between the governors and the governed that Shakespeare thought no fiction too extravagant to indicate the actual state of things. Every honest heart in England was throbbing with apprehension for the fate of Claudio; the hunch-back Angelo, as he passed to and fro between Windsor and Whitehall, inspired in all who beheld him a mixed feeling of aversion and terror, and when Elizabeth Throgmorton and Mary Sidney had played unsuccessfully the part of Isabella, the Metropolis looked daily for the erection of that scaffold in Palace Yard which a few years later was polluted with the victim's innocent blood. I have said that several problems are attempted to be solved in this play; but more than once the poet's philosophy breaks down, proves unequal to the task it has undertaken, and leaves the subject involved, if possible, in thicker darkness than before. Shakespeare was least of all men qualified to disparage the value of life, with whose endless sources of joy and happiness his mind had familiarised itself. Doubtless it is easier to draw startling pictures of calamity and suffering, to suggest ideas of sublimity by arraying the destructive forces of nature against man, than to evolve out of circumstances a brilliant conception of human happiness. But when many topics lie before him, Shakespeare is seldom inclined to select the easiest; he has not done so in this instance, but undertakes by an aggregate of rhetoric, argument, and sophistry to convince a man in youth and health, loving and being beloved, with most of fortune's highest gifts at his command, that it is really better to turn his back on all these things and become, as he expresses it, a kneaded clod, than to revel in the enjoyment of Nature's bounty, rendered doubly brilliant by hope and invested with stability by virtue. The speaker in this case is immediately felt not to be in earnest, but only to be spinning sophisms to display his ingenuity. In Hamlet it is otherwise. His discontent is genuine, his morbid constitution, both of mind and body, inclines him to look upon the wrong side of things, to regard this brave o'erhanging firmament fretted with golden fires as a mere pestilent congregation of vapours, to be delighted neither with man nor woman, to envy in theory the Hindoo yoghi who burnt himself alive before the Hellenic conqueror while he is withheld from following his example by fear of the evils he may have to cope with when he shall have shuffled off this mortal coil. Here there is no shamming, no heaping of words together for effect, no shallow playing with figures of speech; it is constitutional gloom allied closely with weakness and effeminacy that speaks, while to strike one fatal blow is less within the compass of possibility than to heap Pelion upon Ossa. Man's apprehensions, however, of punishments after death are rather proportioned to his constitutional timidity than to the transgressions of which he may have been guilty. Hamlet's course of life had, so far as we know, been marked by few deviations from the path of rectitude; Claudio's by still fewer; so that had Eacus been the judge, he would at worst have been sentenced to accompany Thersites and other moderate offenders in Hades. Yet the agonies conjured up in his imagination by the prospect of immediate death have no recorded parallel : Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; The weariest and most loathed worldly life To what we fear of death. In Hamlet the doctrine of Purgatory is substituted for that of Hell, to which however Shakespeare often alludes satirically as 'the everlasting bonfire.' If what is supposed to take place in our globe be thought to take place likewise in every other, we behold when we look forth into the firmament by night nothing but an infinite multitude of shining hells, where the souls peculiar to each star or planet are shut up in some cavern near its centre to be burned and otherwise tortured to all eternity. To believe this is to have formed a hideous theory of the creation of God, which as far as our intellects will carry us is invariably discovered to be instinct with goodness and happiness. The exceptions we seem to perceive, while sufficient to perplex our understandings, may all be completely reconcilable with the vast plan of the universe which we must suppose to exist in the mind of God. Our most philosophical and practical conceptions, viewed in contrast with the beauty and sublimity of the universe, are only so many pretty fancies gliding like bog-fires over the infinite abyss of existence. Sickly fancies like these, no less prevalent in ancient than in modern times, awoke the scorn of Lucretius, who exclaims What has this bugbear death to frighten man, If souls can die as well as bodies can? But his contemporaries were as little soothed by his fierce declamation as was Claudio's mind by the sophistical rant of the ducal friar, which occasionally becomes comic through its extravagance. Through the whole mental element of Shakespeare's age the doctrine had penetrated, that guilt contracted by one person may be justly expiated by the sufferings of another, which rendered the task of the confessor in dealing with the fear of death all but impracticable. To plead innocence or even virtue proves of no avail ; someone else has perpetrated crime, and fate determines that we are therefore to be subjected to punishment. In this tenet originated the mental tortures of Claudio, countenanced by the theology of the seventeenth century and linked inextricably with the belief in fate. However great or clear may have been his intellect, Shakespeare found all his logic at fault when the course of his reasoning brought him face to face with this dark problem. No metaphysical spectre conjured forth from the depths of speculation has ever haunted the human mind like this. Everything in nature appears to be appointed, regulated, fixed, by laws coeval and co-extensive with nature; but man's mind claims exemption from allegiance to the power that governs everything else. The divine influence stops and ceases to act when it approaches this hallowed circle, in which a power distinct from that of God reigns paramount, rejecting all idea of control, but recognising, in consequence of its absolute freedom, the existence of its responsibility. In considering this question we can only defend ourselves against the force of destiny by insisting on a liberty as complete as I have just described. Nothing must determine our will but the will itself; no influence, good or evil, must reach the soul from without; it must be free to act, to think, to reason, to judge, and must likewise be able to comprehend the nature and quality of all actions before it acts, to estimate all motives, to search into the hidden springs of all beings by which it is surrounded, that it may neither be betrayed into evil by perversity nor into error by ignorance. Is this state of things within us reconcilable with our intellectual experience? Can any man claim for himself so absolute a dominion over his own internal forces? Throughout Shakespeare's works, or nearly throughout, we detect traces of a faith in the subjugation of the human mind by that unknown something which the Greeks denominated Moira or Pepromene, and believed to be superior even to Zeus himself. N |