SOURCE: Wimsatt, James I. “The Player King on Friendship.” Modern Language Review 65, no. 1 (January 1970): 1-6.

In the following essay, Wimsatt centers on the speech of the Player King in Act III, scene ii of Hamlet, which mentions the mutability of friendship, and contends that Shakespeare portrayed the motifs of fortune and friendship in the play as fickle, unstable, and inscrutable forces.

Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, to the displeasure of neoclassic critics, loaded their plays with material apparently tangential to the main business of the works. It has been the occupation and pastime of later critics to discover the integral roles of this material. In Hamlet, notable for its diversity, nearly every scene and passage has proved susceptible to such discovery. Reynaldo's investigation into Laertes's activities, for example, seems without bearing on the main plot. Yet inspection of Acts II and III shows that Reynaldo's mission is related...