[Footnote 1:  I. v. 92.]

[Footnote 2:  II. ii. 627.]

[Footnote 3:  III. ii. 87.]

59.  This question was, in Shakspere’s time, quite a legitimate element of uncertainty in the complicated problem that presented itself for solution to Hamlet’s ever-analyzing mind; and this being so, an apparent inconsistency in detail which has usually been charged upon Shakspere with regard to this play, can be satisfactorily explained.  Some critics are never weary of exclaiming that Shakspere’s genius was so vast and uncontrollable that it must not be tested, or expected to be found conformable to the rules of art that limit ordinary mortals; that there are many discrepancies and errors in his plays that are to be condoned upon that account; in fact, that he was a very careless and slovenly workman.  A favourite instance of this is taken from “Hamlet,” where Shakspere actually makes the chief character of the play talk of death as “the bourne from whence no traveller returns” not long after he has been engaged in a prolonged conversation with such a returned traveller.

Now, no artist, however distinguished or however transcendent his genius, is to be pardoned for insincere workmanship, and the greater the man, the less his excuse.  Errors arising from want of information (and Shakspere commits these often) may be pardoned if the means for correcting them be unattainable; but errors arising from mere carelessness are not to be pardoned.  Further, in many of these cases of supposed contradiction there is an element of carelessness indeed; but it lies at the door of the critic, not of the author; and this appears to be true in the present instance.  The dilemma, as it presented itself to the contemporary mind, must be carefully kept in view.  Either the spirits of the departed could revisit this world, or they could not.  If they could not, then the apparitions mistaken for them must be devils assuming their forms.  Now, the tendency of Hamlet’s mind, immediately before the great soliloquy on suicide, is decidedly in favour of the latter alternative.  The last words that he has uttered, which are also the last quoted here,[1] are those in which he declares most forcibly that he believes the devil-theory possible, and consequently that the dead do not return to this world; and his utterances in his soliloquy are only an accentuate and outcome of this feeling of uncertainty.  The very root of his desire for death is that he cannot discard with any feeling of certitude the Protestant doctrine that no traveller does after death return from the invisible world, and that the so-called ghosts are a diabolic deception.

[Footnote 1:  sec. 58, p. 59.]