The Riddles of Hamlet and the Newest Answers

The interest inherent in The Tragedy of Hamlet is perennial. As Shakespeare's most popular work, it continues to-day as in centuries past to captivate men's minds and to awaken their deepest sympathies. Other tragedies may equal it in beauty of imagery, in richness of plot, and in variety of characters, but there is one trait by which it excels all others, and that unique trait marks it distinctly as a tragedy of thought.

It is a mine of profound wisdom. "It is a work of such prophetic design," says Gervinus, "and of such anticipation of the growth of the human mind that it has been understood only, and appreciated after the lapse of three centuries." The hero under difficulties insurmountable moves with magnificent intellect in isolation and towering prominence against hateful and opposing forces, and exposes to our view the psychological action of the mind under strange and conflicting influences. He is himself the tragedy. He is a universal type of man's endless anxiety when, stripped of the delusive hopes of the present life and harassed by the personal sense of his helplessness, he is brought alone face to face with the silent and mysterious world of destiny.

Hamlet is in a manner the most typical work of Shakespeare. In it as in no other are blended his genius and his personality. Written near the close of Elizabeth's reign, it was often revised during the ensuing years while he was suffering acute oppression of mind and heart. Hence it is imbued with his melancholy, and reflects his world-weariness and sense of the foulness, emptiness, and fleetingness of life. "How," asks a critic, "could a man delineate a Hamlet, a

Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many sufering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered!”

If then the tragedy reflect the poet's own experience and be the growth of his own mature judgment concerning the realities of life; if it picture the thoughts and actions of the hero under all the circumstances in which he moves and lives, as well as the religion and moral principles that dominate these same thoughts and actions; it should surely be treated in more than a conventional way, in a way, which instead of giving rise to doubts and difficulties, shall attempt to expose the mysteries that gem-like enrich the most glorious drama of Christian thought in modern times.

Hamlet is not professedly a religious drama. But if we consider that it is replete with religious thoughts and frequent allusions to an invisible power, supreme over human affairs; that its action begins with a preternatural visitor from the spirit world, and closes with the supernatural idea of angels bearing away a human soul to eternal rest; it is clear that Shakespeare has enriched this tragedy more than any other with religious elements of uncommon interest. Carlyle has not hesitated to say that "the poet and his era, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it are attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The Christian Faith which was the theme of Dante's song, had produced this practical life which Shakespeare was to sing. For religion then as it now and always is, was the soul of practice; the primary vital fact in man's life."

If then Hamlet's religion was the soul of practice, the primary vital fact of his life, is it not surprising that its supreme influence should be commonly ignored? Any one who is an adherent of the Faith of the hero and acquainted with the history of English literature of the last three cen

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