HAMLET AND BRUTUS 305 him. Her reason is buried in the same grave where she sees his entombed. After her death Hamlet can exhibit all the reality of his affection, and declare with truth "forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum" (v. 1). Hamlet's character is, in fact, the most exhaustive study of Brutus' generalised observation in "Julius Cæsar" (ii. 1). "Between the acting of a dreadful thing We There is another speech of Brutus which will throw further light on Hamlet's character. have already supposed that Hamlet wished to impart a kind of solemn judicial character to his father's revenge. This appears rather from the preparation he makes for it, and his exclusive devotion to this one object, than from anything that he says. It is apparently the sense of the disproportion between this all-embracing preparation, and the cowardly secret performance of stabbing the king at his prayers, that prompts Hamlet to make that curdling "Now might I do it pat" (iii. 3). He wishes to do the thing solemnly, judicially, sacrificially, with due intensity of thought and complication The of circumstance. The daggers that he uses he wants to be balanced by the daggers that he utters. judicial sentence is with him as important as the execution. His mother indeed is only to be sentenced, not executed. "Soft, now to my mother. O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever I will speak daggers to her, but use none; To give them seals never, my soul, consent!" (iii. 2). Now it is exactly this solemn judicial feeling which Brutus is careful to impress upon his fellow-conspirators. "Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius .. Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully ; Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcase fit for hounds; And after seem to chide them.”—Julius Cæsar, ii. 1. Claudius was but carrion for hounds; in other respects the feeling of Brutus seems the counterpart of Hamlet's, and the key for comprehending its Othello strives in like manner to maintain the solemn judicial feeling; he says to Desdemona just before killing her— acts. "O perjured woman, thou dost stone my heart, A murder, which I thought a sacrifice." -Othello, v. 2. SHAKESPEARE'S VIEW OF CONSPIRACY 307 Hamlet is a conspirator, urged to revenge by policy and by the sense of personal injury, and only kept back by what he impatiently calls the craven scruples of religion and conscience. Othello is likewise a conspirator, though his act is not treason, but more nearly allied to "petit treason." He has this in common with the conspirator, that to right himself, to do what seems justice and to revenge what seems sin, he takes the law into his own hands, and becomes legislator, juryman, and judge in one. In examining Shakespeare's physiology of conspiracy we must again recall the circumstances of his age and home. He lived among conspirators, as they were then reckoned; among men whose political and religious opinions prevented their feeling that content with things as they were, which was required, under the name of loyalty, by the rulers. In 1584 he must have been in the midst of the panic caused by the apprehension of Somerville and Arden; in 1601 he was intimate with the Essex conspirators, several of whom were his near neighbours at Stratford, who were again implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The conspirators in these cases considered that the measures which they undertook, even though they were measures of revenge, were of a judicial character. A passage which at first sight seems irreconcilable with any great moral depth in Hamlet, is the famous one where he makes his mother compare her former and her present husbands. The deed which had blasted all morality, made religion a rhapsody, and darkened the face of nature, seems to be simply marrying after she had lost a handsome husband. Such is the plain sense of the speech, "Look here upon this picture, and on this"-and it may be asked why such a contrast should scarify a conscience. It is a great social lapse, but not in itself a moral fall if the widow of Hyperion marries a negro. Yet the Queen, without waiting for Hamlet to explain the real criminality of her action, as he afterwards does, is moved to confess herself a sinner for this very crime which is no crime at all. "O Hamlet, speak no more : Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul Lady Macbeth, steeped to the lips in blood, could say no more. She could not wash the stain from her hands. The explanation is, that in art, to Shakespeare, as has been shown in the sonnets, the outward beauty is but a sign of inward virtue. "Ad ognuno è palese," says Crescimbeni, "che la bellezza del corpo sia sicuro argomento, anche naturalmente, della bellezza dell' anima.” 1 The front of Jove, the eye of Mars, the poise of Mercury, "the combination and form" in Hamlet's father, 1 "Where every god did give assurance of a man," were but the exterior pledge of the spiritual gifts 1 Della Bellezza, 93. TRUE BEAUTY INWARD 309 within, the passions subject to reason, and reason to grace. His stepfather was, compared to this mountain, a moor, not because his features were misshapen and his stature dwarfed, but because his inward soul was deformed. He was "a murderer, a villain, and of kings, a cutpurse of the empire The truth that corporeal beauty a slave, a vice and the rule." should bespeak inner worth is axiomatic with the poet. Thus Miranda says of Ferdinand "There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple; If the ill spirit have so fair a house Good things will strive to dwell with it." and Pericles of Marina- -Tempest, i. 2; "Falseness cannot come from thee: for thou look'st For the crowned truth to dwell in." It is Desdemona's purity, apparent in her whole presence, which makes his suspicion of her so terrible to Othello. "Look where she comes! If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself. But this is a doctrine which love accepts spontaneously at first, but must often unlearn; and then it cries out, "Thy sweet virtue answers not thy show" (Shakespeare, Sonnet 93). It is a doctrine |