who it is; he himself first makes it his father, addresses it by this name to obtain more readily the answers to all his questions.

[Page 148.] Hamlet enters into life with the most beautiful ideals. The bitter experiences of life have shattered his ideals. He saw evil, murder, treason, falsehood, where he hoped to find good, self-sacrifice, love, and truth. He came upon meanness, where he sought nobleness; cunning hypocrisy and hidden treachery affronted him, where he looked to meet friendship and open-heartedness. This disillusion has taught him to regard life and mankind as of little worth. But his moral nature would not suffer him to be crushed by his experience. He lost not faith in the moral order of the world. He did not allow the germs which stirred down deep in his breast to be choked. With moral energy he devoted himself to a high mission, to the restoration of the disturbed order of the moral world, to the punishment of the bad, to the vindication and victory of the right. In firm faith in his mission, in the faith that he has to fulfil it in the name of Providence, he finds strength to engage in the conflict with evil, and he seeks above all things to keep himself pure. In the wild storm of passion his strong purpose is to keep firm hold of the helm, and keep his course straight towards the bright goal of his life.

DR H. BAUMGART (1877)*

(Die Hamlet-Tragödie und ihre Kritik. Königsberg i. Pr. 1877.) [The subject of this volume of 165 pages is a critique of the criticisms that have been passed on Hamlet by German Shakespeare scholars, but mainly of Werder, whose idea, as we have already seen, is that the tragic interest of the Play lies not in the character of Hamlet so much as in the nature of his task, which is, not to dispatch the King, but to unmask him, that justice and truth may be brought to light. Should he kill the King without doing this, he would strike like a simpleton, and kill his own cause. Such is the point affirmed by Werder. Thus Dr Baumgart:]

But what is the thought or purpose of an avenger, who by a monstrous act of violence has been wounded in his dearest, most sacred interests? If he be of a quick, fiery temper, disposed to revenge, he does not wait even for full proof of the wrong. He is often carried away to deeds of blood only upon strong suspicion. Is he of a cooler, more deliberate character, he waits, even if the strongest evidence lies before him, until he has an irresistible conviction of the injury. Then he acts with an energy only the more reckless, according to the force of his aroused will, whether others justify him or not, heedless even of his own destruction. When has a man, deeply wronged and thirsting for revenge, ever waited till he could lay his case before the great public? No, he keeps it hidden rather.

Revenge is a strictly personal affair, having nothing in common with punishment, which satisfies the simple sen-e of justice. And where does the Ghost or Hamlet speak of punishment merely, and of the necessity of a previous unmasking? It is

*This and the preceding volume, Dr STRUVE'S, come to hand while these pages are going through the press. The printers are upon me, and I cannot stop to read the volumes through. From the former I have selected the most striking passage that has caught my eye; of the latter I have not had time even to cut the leaves. The few pages, however, that I have read here and there, give promise of an essay of unusual power, and of forebodings to the soundness of WERDER'S theory. Probably under any circumstances but few extracts could have been made from Dr BAUMGART'S volume, so much of it is, professedly, criticism on criticism, which, as is stated in the Preface to Vol. I, has been excluded in the selection of extracts. ED.

revenge alone that the Ghost calls for, and swift revenge that Hamlet promises. There is not a word about handing the King over to punishment, nor of punishment at all, but the first word with which Hamlet again recalls the warning of the Ghost, is a call upon himself, his own passion, that it may drive him at last to the ven geance which he has postponed.

Everything impels him to vengeance, his father's ghost, his own boundless excitement, and yet there is something in him which checks him, in him, not out of him, --something that drives him to despair, to the bitterest self reproaches, but, in spite of all, not to action. Thus, as he only thinks of what has befallen him, his soul rises in a storm, venting itself in the most violent expressions, and then immediately, aware of this empty rage, the more unsparing is his condemnation of himself for being so made as, in spite of all, to be unable to proceed to action. He should hold his tongue and act. He is not equal to the deed, and yet his sensibility, responsive to the slightest touch, breaks out into the wildest expressions, but yet he scolds himself for unpacking his heart with words, and then he resolves. But what does he resolve? To what does his thinking lead him? Does he seek how he shall discover the murder to the world, that at last, without another moment's delay, he may sweep to the act? Nothing of this sort! To secure certainty for himself, he resolves upon the court-play. What his prophetic soul' has told him from the very beginning, what the nightly apparition has stamped in fearful characters on his soul, that he will confirm by proof; which, indeed, is all very well for a cool, deliberate judge, but which would never be done in such a situation by one in any degree disposed to revenge. But then, when he has laid the last doubt, will he, without hesitation, proceed to act? That the conviction wrought by the play is to lead to any measure looking to the public arraignment of the King, there is not a word to intimate.

There is nothing in the whole piece which hints at any plan of Hamlet's, or at any intention to form one. His talk is of nothing but of taking immediate revenge, to which, however, he never makes up his mind until the hour of his death.

The First Quarto having been reprinted in full, there is no collation of it recorded in the Textual Notes, except where an editor has adopted one of its readings.

The agreement of Q2, Q3, Q1, and Q, is indicated by the symbol Qq.

In like manner, the accord of the four Folios is indicated in the Textual Notes by Ff. Manifest misspellings in both Qq and Ff are recorded, as an aid in estimating the value of these editions. I have referred to these early copies at some length in The Date and the Text at the beginning of this Volume, and on p. 36 to a peculiarity of the Second Folio, to which, by the way, STEEVENS, out of what I cannot but think was mere antagonism to MALONE, imputed a value above that of the First Folio.

The Players' Quartos are recorded only in exceptional cases where it is well to have at hand all possible evidence. As a rule, the Quarto of 1676 includes them all; and even it is not noted when it agrees with the four earlier Quartos.

As in the former volumes of this edition, the agreement of Rowe, POPE, THEOBALD, HANMER, WARBURTON, and JOHNSON is indicated by Rowe+. Occasionally, where they all agree with F, I have used, to save space, F1+. Rowe did not print from F in this tragedy, as he did in Macbeth.

4

4

When the GLOBE, the CAMBRIDGE, and CLARENDON editions agree in the same reading, I have used the symbol Glo.+.

The abbreviation (subs.) indicates that trifling variations in spelling, in punctuation, or in stage-directions are not noted, but that one edition follows another substantially.

6

Var.' stands for BOSWELL'S edition of MALONE, or, as it is usually called, the

VARIORUM OF 1821, and for MALONE'S edition of 1790; where its editor, BosWELL, here and there adopted his own text, it is indicated by Bos.; and so trifling is the difference between SINGER'S First Edition and the Variorum of 1821 that 'Var.' might stand for this edition also. Where Singer's readings are noted, they refer, as a rule, to his Second Edition.

The work of collation was well advanced before it was discovered that CALDECOTT'S two editions of 1820 and 1832 differ somewhat from each other both in text and notes; there is no intimation on the title page that the editions are not identical. To revise and change involved more labour and more time than it was thought worth while to bestow on it; 'Cald.' therefore refers generally to Caldecott's Second Edition of 1832.

'Coll. (MS)' refers to Mr COLLIER'S annotated F2.

'Quincy (MS)' refers to Mr QUINCY's annotated F

The abbreviation et cet. after any reading indicates that it is the reading of all editions other than those specified. Be it remembered that, to save space, the readings of some of the above enumerated editions are not recorded in every trifling instance, but only in obscure passages.

An Emendation or Conjecture which is discussed in the Commentary is not repeated in the Textual Notes; nor is conj.' added to any name in the Textual Notes unless it happens to be that of an editor, in which case its omission would be misleading.

In the matter of punctuation the colon is used, as it is in German, as equivalent to 'namely.' Only when thus used does it indicate any appreciable difference from the semicolon.

A dash at the close of a sentence indicates that the speaker changes his address from one person to another.

The Commentary, to be intelligible, must be read in connection with the Textual Notes. For instance, see I, iii, 74.

To save space in the Commentary, all phrases like 'I think,' 'it seems to me,' &c. have been omitted from the notes there cited.

IN the preceding volumes of this edition I have given lists of Books quoted and consulted' in their preparation. Instead thereof, in the present volume will be found in the following pages what is almost the same: a Bibliography of Hamlet, as complete as may be. The number of books, essays, &c., there recorded, which have not been consulted for this edition, is comparatively small.