Table of ContentsPrevious PageNext Page

Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.
PAGE 144
HAMLET

I incline to think that Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic that this change comes too late. And, in the third place, there is a trait about which doubt is impossible -- a sense in Hamlet that he is in the hands of Providence. This had, indeed, already shown itself at the death of Polonius,1 and perhaps at Hamlet's farewell to the King,2 but the idea seems now to be constantly present in his mind. 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends,' he declares to Horatio in speaking of the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission. How was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?

Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,

Hamlet answers; he had his father's signet in his purse. And though he has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield to it: 'we defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . the readiness is all.'

     Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked effect on our feeling about Hamlet's character and still more about the events of the action. But I find it impossible to believe, with some critics, that they indicate any material change in his general

   1III. iv. 172:
                        For this same lord,
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so
To punish me with this and this with me
That I must be their scourge and minister:
i.e. the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense elsewhere also in Shakespeare.

   2IV. iii. 48:
Ham. For England!
King.             Ay, Hamlet.
Ham.                       Good.
King. So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.
Ham. I see a cherub that sees them.

Table of ContentsPrevious PageNext Page