But of late, thinking of Shakespeare’s death, I have reread Hamlet. The beloved brother had disappeared, and in his place I found a fat neurasthenic, half evil, half imbecile.
More than ever before the dramatic machinery annoys me. The legendary and murderous intrigue that supports and justifies the action, the barbaric events and manners, among which the semi-barbaric Hamlet moves as an intellectualist dispensing justice, repel me without stirring me. It is such a tragedy as people seek when they go to the theatre to laugh or tremble. Here there is bait a-plenty for those who need blood and miracles to stir their torpid sensibility.
In Hamlet nine of the characters are killed. One is killed before the curtain rises; but he stalks, a vindictive and oratorical spectre, through two acts of the play. A second, Polonius, is killed through an error of the nervous Hamlet. A third, Ophelia, kills herself through the fault of the tender Hamlet. Two others, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are killed in a distant city through the fault of the astute Hamlet. The other four die at the end of the last act: the mother a suicide by mistake, Laertes and Claudius at Hamlet’s hand. Hamlet is the evil genius of himself and of the others. To avenge one corpse he puts eight by its side. And at least six of the eight are innocent.
But this excess might be attributed to the ne-
