best evidence possible—­his own; and that not by mere word of mouth but by actual stroke of hand.  Ben Jonson might shout aloud over his own work on a public stage, “By God ’tis good,” and so for all its real goodness and his real greatness make sure that both the workman and his work should be less unnaturally than unreasonably laughed at; Shakespeare knew a better way of showing confidence in himself, but he showed not a whit less confidence.  Scene by scene, line for line, stroke upon stroke and touch after touch, he went over all the old laboured ground again; and not to ensure success in his own day and fill his pockets with contemporary pence, but merely and wholly with a purpose to make it worthy of himself and his future students.  Pence and praise enough it had evidently brought him in from the first.  No more palpable proof of this can be desired than the instantaneous attacks on it, the jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of which a careful ear may catch some far faint echo even yet; the fearful and furtive yelp from beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule, the shrill reverberation all around it of plagiarism and parody.  Not one single alteration in the whole play can possibly have been made with a view to stage effect or to present popularity and profit; or we must suppose that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was naturally even greater as a fool.  There is a class of mortals to whom this inference is always grateful—­to whom the fond belief that every great man must needs be a great fool would seem always to afford real comfort and support:  happy, in Prior’s phrase, could their inverted rule prove every great fool to be a great man.  Every change in the text of Hamlet has impaired its fitness for the stage and increased its value for the closet in exact and perfect proportion.  Now, this is not a matter of opinion—­of Mr. Pope’s opinion or Mr. Carlyle’s; it is a matter of fact and evidence.  Even in Shakespeare’s time the actors threw out his additions; they throw out these very same additions in our own.  The one especial speech, if any one such especial speech there be, in which the personal genius of Shakespeare soars up to the very highest of its height and strikes down to the very deepest of its depth, is passed over by modern actors; it was cut away by Hemings and Condell.  We may almost assume it as certain that no boards have ever echoed—­at least, more than once or twice—­to the supreme soliloquy of Hamlet.  Those words which combine the noblest pleading ever proffered for the rights of human reason with the loftiest vindication ever uttered of those rights, no mortal ear within our knowledge has ever heard spoken on the stage.  A convocation even of all priests could not have been more unhesitatingly unanimous in its rejection than seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all actors.  It could hardly have been found worthier of theological than it has been found of theatrical condemnation.  Yet, beyond all question, magnificent as is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb into a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on philosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and resolution.