For—­to return in conclusion to the action of the play—­in all that happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power.  We do not define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.  And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King.  For these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy, seem to be bent on avoiding each other.  But they cannot.  Through devious paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it puts the sword into Hamlet’s hand.  He himself must die, for he needed this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he must fulfil it.  And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which seem to lead elsewhere.  Concentration on the character of the hero is apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no other tragedy of Shakespeare’s, not even in Macbeth, is this aspect so impressive.[83]

I mention Macbeth for a further reason.  In Macbeth and Hamlet not only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense, religious.  I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in Othello or King Lear.  The horror in Macbeth’s soul is more than once represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally ‘lost’; the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as Hamlet nears its close the ‘religious’ tone of the tragedy is deepened in two ways.  In the first place, ‘accident’ is introduced into the plot in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship.  This incident has been therefore severely criticised as a lame expedient,[84] but it appears probable that the ‘accident’ is meant to impress the imagination as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly does so.  And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet’s part, of his being in the hands of Providence.  The repeated expressions of this feeling are not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effect is to strengthen in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished, because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will.