that Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic that this change comes too late.  And, in the third place, there is a trait about which doubt is impossible,—­a sense in Hamlet that he is in the hands of Providence.  This had, indeed, already shown itself at the death of Polonius,[64] and perhaps at Hamlet’s farewell to the King,[65] but the idea seems now to be constantly present in his mind.  ’There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,’ he declares to Horatio in speaking of the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission.  How was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?

     Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,

Hamlet answers; he had his father’s signet in his purse.  And though he has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield to it:  ’we defy augury:  there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow ... the readiness is all.’

Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked effect on our feeling about Hamlet’s character and still more about the events of the action.  But I find it impossible to believe, with some critics, that they indicate any material change in his general condition, or the formation of any effective resolution to fulfil the appointed duty.  On the contrary, they seem to express that kind of religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence, because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to be the will of Providence.  In place of this determination, the Hamlet of the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or indifferent self-abandonment, as if he secretly despaired of forcing himself to action, and were ready to leave his duty to some other power than his own. This is really the main change which appears in him after his return to Denmark, and which had begun to show itself before he went,—­this, and not a determination to act, nor even an anxiety to do so.

For when he returns he stands in a most perilous position.  On one side of him is the King, whose safety depends on his death, and who has done his best to murder him; on the other, Laertes, whose father and sister he has sent to their graves, and of whose behaviour and probable attitude he must surely be informed by Horatio.  What is required of him, therefore, if he is not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost wariness and the swiftest resolution.  Yet it is not too much to say that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows no consciousness of this position.  He muses in the graveyard on the nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust returns, whether it be a court-jester’s