The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

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SHAKESPEARE Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Gertrude, queen of Denmark, becoming a widow by the sudden death of the king, in less than two months after his death married his brother Claudius. This Claudius did no ways resemble her late husband in the

Many uncertainties cluster around the figure of William Shakespeare. The date of his birth is not positively known, but as he was baptised on April 26, 1564, and as it was usual to christen infants when three days old, it is assumed that he was born on April 23. The same date of the same month in 1616 was his death. A century ago, George Stevens wrote: " All we know with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is —that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married and had children there, went to London, where he commenced acting, and wrote plays and poems, returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." Tradition says that the poet abandoned his native town on account of a poaching incident, and that he subsequently became a schoolmaster. The plays epitomised here are from the pen of Charles and Mary Lamb, and although in this particular form they constitute a departure from the plan generally followed in The World's Greatest Books, yet it was felt to be both a useful and a justifiable one, both on account of the high reputation which Lamb's " Tales from Shakespeare " deservedly enjoy, and also because Shakespeare, perhaps, alone among authors, is already too securely embedded in our thoughts, and too corporate a part of the English language, to stand in need of any lesser aid. In the composition of the " Tales," Charles Lamb (who was born in London on February 10. J775. and died there on December 27, 1834) is held to have been responsible for the tragedies and his sister Mary for the comedies, and apart from the exquisite literary taste which their undertaking displays, and without which it could never have survived, it possesses an added interest for us in the fact that it constituted the first literary success of one who was destined later to gain fresh immortality as among the most perfect and gentle of English essayists. The " Tales" were published in 1807, and were written as a contribution to William Godwin's Juvenile Library.

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qualities of his person or his mind, but was as contemptible in outward appearance as he was base and unworthy in disposition.

But upon no one did this unadvised action of the queen make such impression as upon young Hamlet, who loved and venerated the memory of his dead father almost to idolatry, and being of a nice sense of honour, and a most exquisite practiser of propriety himself, did sorely take to heart this unworthy conduct of his mother Gertrude.

It was not that the prospect of exclusion from the throne, his lawful inheritance, weighed so much upon his spirits; but what so galled him, and took away all his cheerful spirits, was, that his mother had shown herself so forgetful to his father's memory; and such a father! who had been to her so loving and so gentle a husband! She had married again, married his uncle, her dear husband's brother, in itself a highly improper and unlawful marriage, from the nearness of relationship, but made much more so by the indecent haste with which it was concluded.

In vain was all that his mother Gertrude or the king could do to contrive to divert him; he still appeared in

Except " Antony and Cleopatra," which exceeds it by sixty lines, " Hamlet, or the Prince of Denmark," is the longest of all Shakespeare's plays. It was produced in 1602, and two years later there appeared a printed version of " The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," by William Shakespeare, newly imprinted and enlarged. For the actual story, the dramatist was probably indebted to a dramatic version by another writer, which obtained great vogue on the stage in 1589. As regards the play itself, it is rather a masterly philosophical effort, a study of a moral prisoning, than a piece of dramatic literature purely and simply. Yet its dramatic qualities cannot be ignored: proof of which is its undiminished popularity wherever the English language is spoken, and also on the European continent. The action moves slowly, at times it does not move at all; still the very personality—complex and subtle as it is—of Hamlet himself compels attention and carries everything before it. " ' Hamlet,'" said the great French critic Taine, " is Shakespeare, and in the whole of his gallery of portraits Shakespeare has painted himself in the most striking of all."