despatched to England.  But, on the voyage there, he discovered the King’s commission, ordering the King of England to put him immediately to death; and, with this in his pocket, he made his way back to Denmark.  For now, he saw, the proof of the King’s attempt to murder him would procure belief also for the story of the murder of his father.  His enemy, however, was too quick for him, and his public arraignment of that enemy was prevented by his own death.

A theory like this sounds very plausible—­so long as you do not remember the text.  But no unsophisticated mind, fresh from the reading of Hamlet, will accept it; and, as soon as we begin to probe it, fatal objections arise in such numbers that I choose but a few, and indeed I think the first of them is enough.

(a) From beginning to end of the play, Hamlet never makes the slightest reference to any external difficulty.  How is it possible to explain this fact in conformity with the theory?  For what conceivable reason should Shakespeare conceal from us so carefully the key to the problem?

(b) Not only does Hamlet fail to allude to such difficulties, but he always assumes that he can obey the Ghost,[34] and he once asserts this in so many words (’Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do’t,’ IV. iv. 45).

(c) Again, why does Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising the people against the King?  Why but to show how much more easily Hamlet, whom the people loved, could have done the same thing, if that was the plan he preferred?

(d) Again, Hamlet did not plan the play-scene in the hope that the King would betray his guilt to the court.  He planned it, according to his own account, in order to convince himself by the King’s agitation that the Ghost had spoken the truth.  This is perfectly clear from II. ii. 625 ff. and from III. ii. 80 ff.  Some readers are misled by the words in the latter passage: 

                     if his occulted guilt
     Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
     It is a damned ghost that we have seen.

The meaning obviously is, as the context shows, ’if his hidden guilt do not betray itself on occasion of one speech,’ viz., the ’dozen or sixteen lines’ with which Hamlet has furnished the player, and of which only six are delivered, because the King does not merely show his guilt in his face (which was all Hamlet had hoped, III. ii. 90) but rushes from the room.

It may be as well to add that, although Hamlet’s own account of his reason for arranging the play-scene may be questioned, it is impossible to suppose that, if his real design had been to provoke an open confession of guilt, he could have been unconscious of this design.

(e) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of the plan of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of using his ‘sword’ or his ‘arm.’  And this is so just as much after he has returned to Denmark with the commission in his pocket as it was before this event.  When he has told Horatio the story of the voyage, he does not say, ‘Now I can convict him’:  he says, ’Now am I not justified in using this arm?’