In the entr’acte Monsieur de W. and I talked over the play, and, unfortunately, I said, “Did Hamlet ever exist?” A bomb exploding under our noses could not have been more disastrous!  He burst out in indignant tones, and we almost came to literary blows in our violent discussion.  M. de W. insists upon it that Shakespeare knew all about Hamlet and where he lived, the medieval clothes he wore, and that he was the sepulchral Prince with whom we are so familiar; that Ophelia was a very misused and unhappy young lady, who drowned herself in a water-lily pond; and that Hamlet’s papa used to come nights and scare the life out of the courtiers.

“Wait a little,” I said.  “I flatter myself that I know the story of Hamlet thoroughly.  I spent all last summer studying the old Danish chronicle, which was written in Latin in 1200 by a monk called Saxo Grammaticus, then translated into old-fashioned Danish, which I translated, to amuse myself, into English.  If what Saxo says is true Hamlet lived about two or three hundred years before Christ.”

“Impossible!” almost screamed my friend.

I went on, regardless of M. de W.’s dangerous attitude:  “Denmark at that time was divided into several kingdoms, and Hamlet’s father was king in a part of Jutland, which, let us say, was as small as Rhode Island—­”

“What nonsense!” interrupted M. de W., indignantly.

“He probably went about in fur-covered legs and a sheepskin over his shoulders, as was then the fashion.  He was called Amleth; Shakespeare simply transposed the h.  He was a naughty little boy, vicious and revengeful.  He despised his mother and hated his uncle, who was his stepfather.”

[Illustration:  TWO YOUNG QUEENS From a photograph, taken in 1878, of the two daughters of the King of Denmark.  They were then the Princess of Wales and the Grand Duchess Dagmar.  They are now the widows of two European sovereigns, Dowager Queen Alexandra of England and the Dowager Empress of Russia.  They spend their summers together in a small cottage near Copenhagen.  Alexandra is on the right of the picture.]

“Why?” asked, in a milder tone, M. de W.

“Because his mother and the uncle, wishing to marry and mount the throne, killed Hamlet’s father.  Hamlet passed his youth haunted by thoughts of revenge and how he could punish the two sinners.”

“It was clever of Shakespeare to let the father do the haunting and leave to Hamlet the role of a guileless and sentimental youth; the authorities do not agree as to whether Hamlet was really a fool or only pretended to be one.”

“Fool he certainly was not,” I replied.  “He was clever enough to play the part of one, and he played it so well that no one, even at that time, could make out what he really was.”

“Then,” declared M. de W., “Shakespeare got that part of it right—­perhaps you will concede that much.  How about Hamlet’s grave?  Surely there is no humbug about that?  I have seen it myself.  Has it been there since two hundred years B.C.?”