The Poet even causes the King himself, when attempting repentance, to confess the futility of hope of pardon, unless he restore the crown and abandon his criminal union:

"Forgive me my foul murder

That cannot be; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my Queen.
May one be pardoned and retained the offence?"

If then from the play itself, it is evident that the marriage of Claudius is incestuous and unlawful, and in fact no marriage, it can confer on him no claim nor right to the throne; and, in consequence, if he be de facto king, he is not so de jure, and must, therefore, be considered an imposter and actual usurper.

CHAPTER VIII

The Real or Assumed Madness

of Hamlet

The mooted question of the Prince's sanity has divided the readers of Shakespeare into two opposing schools; the one defending a feigned, and the other an unfeigned madness. The problem arises from the Poet's unrivalled genius in the creation of characters. So vivid were his conceptions of his ideal creations that, actually living and acting in them, he gives them an objective existence in which they seem living realities, or persons walking among us, endowed with our human emotions and passions, and subject to the vicisitudes of our common mortality. The confounding of this ideal with the real has given rise to two divergent schools. The critics of the one, unmindful of the fact that Hamlet is wholly an ideal existence, are accustomed to look upon him as real and actual as the men they daily meet in social intercourse, and accordingly judge him as they would a man in ordinary life. The other school, ignoring the different impersonations of Hamlet upon the public stage, considers him only as an ideal existence, and places the solution of the problem in the discovery of the dramatist's intention in the creation of the character.

The Poet with consummate art has so portrayed the abnormal actions of a demented mind, and so truly pictured all the traits of genuine madness, even in its minutest symptoms, that a real madman could not enact the character more perfectly. Conscious of his skill in this portrayal so true to life, he has in consequence depicted the court of Claudius divided in opinion on Hamlet's feigned or unfeigned madness, just as the Shakespearean world is divided

to-day. To say that the Queen, and Polonius, and others thought him mad, is no proof of his real madness; but only that by his perfect impersonation he succeeded in creating this belief; and that such was his purpose is clear from the play. If the court firmly believed in the dementia of the Prince, Claudius, who was of a deeper and more penetrating mind and an adept in crafty cunning, stood firm in his doubt from the first. The consciousness of his guilt made him alert and, like a criminal ever fearing detection, he suspected the concealment of some evil design under Hamlet's mimic madness. If to-day we find eminent physicians standing with Polonius and the Queen in the belief of Hamlet's real madness, we see on the opposite side others with the astute king and an overwhelming majority of Shakespeare's readers. That many physicians should deem the Prince's madness a reality is nothing surprising. Well known are the celebrated legal cases in which medical specialists of the highest rank were divided in judgment on the sanity or insanity of the man on trial.

Let a man mimic madness as perfectly as Hamlet, and be summoned to court on trial of his sanity. If it be shown by judicial evidence, that before beginning to enact the role of madman, he had never throughout his life exhibited the least symptom of dementia, but, on the contrary, was known as a man of a sound and strong mind; if it be shown that before assuming the antics of a madman, he had actually summoned his trusted friends, informed them of his purpose, cautioned them against betrayal, and even sworn them to secrecy; if it be proved that on every occasion, when moving among his intimate friends, he is consistently sane, and feigns madness only in presence of those who, he fears, will thwart his secret design; and if it be shown on reputable testimony that he entered upon his course of dementia to guard an incommunicable secret, and to shield himself in the pursuit of a specified end, difficult

and dangerous of attainment; such a man on such evidence. would in open court be declared beyond all doubt sane and sound of mind by the unanimous verdict of any specially impanelled jury.

The mad role that Hamlet plays to perfection, is certainly a proof of Shakespeare's genius, but by no means a surety of the insanity of the Prince, unless we be prepared to maintain that no one save a madman can simulate dementia. If, as Lowell has well remarked, Shakespeare himself without being mad, could so observe and remember all the abnormal symptoms of insanity as to reproduce them, why should it be beyond the power of an ideal Hamlet, born into dramatic life, to reproduce them in himself any more than the many tragedians, who, since Shakespeare's day, have so successfully mimicked the madness of the Prince upon the public stage?

The perfect portrayal of Hamlet's mad role has been ascribed to the unaided genius of Shakespeare. The character, it is thought, is nothing more than the outward expression of the Poet's subjective and purely mental creation. Such a notion, while highly magnifying the powers of the artist, is, however, contrary to psychological facts. Our ideas are mental images of things perceived by the senses. They depend upon their objective realities no less than does an image upon the thing which it images. The dictum of Aristotle: "There are no ideas in our intellect which we have not derived from sense perception," has become an axiom of rational philosophy. If then all natural knowledge originates in sense perception, Shakespeare's perfect knowledge of the symptoms of insanity was not the product of his imagination alone, but was due to his observation of these symptoms existing in real human beings. His portrayal is admittedly true to nature, and it is true to nature, because a reflex or reproduction of what he himself had witnessed in demented unfortunates. This fact has

been placed beyond reasonable doubt by a legal document which was recently discovered in the Roll's Office, London.1 From it we learn that Shakespeare lived on Muggleton Street, directly opposite a medical college near which was an insane asylum. Here, by studying the antics of the inmates, he had every opportunity to draw from nature, when engaged in the creation of his mad characters. It is therefore more reasonable to infer that his accurate knowledge of traits which are common to the demented was not solely the product of his imagination, but rather the result of his studied observations of individual cases.

Since Hamlet then on the testimony of medical experts exhibits accurately all the symptoms of dementia, the question of his real or pretended madness can be solved only by ascertaining the intention of the Poet. We may safely assume that a dramatist so renowned in his art has not left us in darkness concerning a factor most important in this drama. In our doubt we may turn for light to other dramas wherein he portrays demented characters with equal skill. Nowhere can we find more striking elements of contrast and resemblance than in Lear and Ophelia. The grandeur of Lear in his sublime outbursts of a mighty passion, differs surprisingly from the pathetic inanities of the gentle Ophelia; yet Shakespeare leaves no doubt of the genuine madness of the one and the other. In Lear, supreme ingratitude, blighting the affections of a fond and overconfiding parent, has wrecked his noble mind; in Ophelia, the loss of a father by the hand of a lover, whose "noble and most sovereign reason" she has seemingly blasted by rejecting his importunate suit, has over-powered her feelings, and left her "divided from herself and her fair judgment, without the which we're pictures, or mere beasts."

1 The document is a record of a lawsuit of a Huguenot familiy with whom Shakespeare boarded, and in whose interest he appeared several times as a sworn witness in court.