Finally, when we turn to Hamlet, we find a consummate example of the crisply-touched opening tableau, making a nervous rather than an intellectual appeal, informing us of nothing, but exciting a vivid, though quite vague, anticipation.  The silent transit of the Ghost, desiring to speak, yet tongue-tied, is certainly one of Shakespeare’s unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic craftsmanship.  One could pretty safely wager that if the Ur-Hamlet, on which Shakespeare worked, were to come to light to-morrow, this particular trait would not be found in it.  But, oddly enough, into the middle of this admirable opening tableau, Shakespeare inserts a formal exposition, introduced in the most conventional way.  Marcellus, for some unexplained reason, is ignorant of what is evidently common knowledge as to the affairs of the realm, and asks to be informed; whereupon Horatio, in a speech of some twenty-five lines, sets forth the past relations between Norway and Denmark, and prepares us for the appearance of Fortinbras in the fourth act.  In modern stage versions all this falls away, and nobody who has not studied the printed text is conscious of its absence.  The commentators, indeed, have proved that Fortinbras is an immensely valuable element in the moral scheme of the play; but from the point of view of pure drama, there is not the slightest necessity for this Norwegian-Danish embroilment or its consequences.[4] The real exposition—­for Hamlet differs from the other tragedies in requiring an exposition—­comes in the great speech of the Ghost in Scene V. The contrast between this speech and Horatio’s lecture in the first scene, exemplifies the difference between a dramatized and an undramatized exposition.  The crisis, as we now learn, began months or years before the rise of the curtain.  It began when Claudius inveigled the affections of Gertrude; and it would have been possible for the poet to have started from this point, and shown us in action all that he in fact conveys to us by way of narration.  His reason for choosing the latter course is abundantly obvious.[5] Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist:  the interest of the play was to centre in his mental processes.  To have awakened our interest in Hamlet the Elder would, therefore, have been a superfluity and an irrelevance.  Moreover (to say nothing of the fact that the Ghost was doubtless a popular figure in the old play, and demanded by the public) it was highly desirable that Hamlet’s knowledge of the usurper’s crime should come to him from a supernatural witness, who could not be cross-questioned or called upon to give material proof.  This was the readiest as well as the most picturesque method of begetting in him that condition of doubt, real or affected, which was necessary to account for his behaviour.  But to have shown us in action the matter of the Ghost’s revelation would have been hopelessly to ruin its effect.  A repetition in narrative of matters already seen