[Footnote 29:  It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the fact, which seems hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in places re-written, some little time after its first composition.]

[Footnote 30:  This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I think, especially the case in King Lear and Timon.]

[Footnote 31:  The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of course, much nearer to Hamlet, especially in versification, than to Antony and Cleopatra, in which Shakespeare’s final style first shows itself practically complete.  It has been impossible, in the brief treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual plays.]

[Footnote 32:  The Mirror, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness, Variorum Hamlet, ii. 148.  In the above remarks I have relied mainly on Furness’s collection of extracts from early critics.]

[Footnote 33:  I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still less, to do justice to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder (Vorlesungen ueber Hamlet, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet’s difficulties as merely external.]

[Footnote 34:  I give one instance.  When he spares the King, he speaks of killing him when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is awake in bed, when he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases the least obstacle (III. iii. 89 ff.).]

[Footnote 35:  It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the conscience view, the line ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ and to observe the total misinterpretation of the soliloquy To be or not to be, from which the line comes.  In this soliloquy Hamlet is not thinking of the duty laid upon him at all.  He is debating the question of suicide.  No one oppressed by the ills of life, he says, would continue to bear them if it were not for speculation about his possible fortune in another life.  And then, generalising, he says (what applies to himself, no doubt, though he shows no consciousness of the fact) that such speculation or reflection makes men hesitate and shrink like cowards from great actions and enterprises.  ‘Conscience’ does not mean moral sense or scrupulosity, but this reflection on the consequences of action.  It is the same thing as the ’craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event’ of the speech in IV. iv.  As to this use of ‘conscience,’ see Schmidt, s.v. and the parallels there given.  The Oxford Dictionary also gives many examples of similar uses of ‘conscience,’ though it unfortunately lends its authority to the misinterpretation criticised.]

[Footnote 36:  The King does not die of the poison on the foil, like Laertes and Hamlet.  They were wounded before he was, but they die after him.]

[Footnote 37:  I may add here a word on one small matter.  It is constantly asserted that Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius.  Now, if he did, it would make no difference to my point in the paragraph above; but there is no warrant in the text for the assertion.  It is based on some words of the Queen (IV. i. 24), in answer to the King’s question, ‘Where is he gone?’: