Since this essay was written, I have found, in the highly suggestive "Shakspeare-Studien" of Otto Ludwig, the following remarks, which are closely related to my own treatment of the subject, and provide some additional reflections:--
"Hamlet's subjective tendency is so predominant that we are surprised when he alleges no motive for assuming madness; nor is it elsewhere accounted for. It would have served his purpose much better if he had feigned a comfortable and contented, rather than an unsettled, mind. And, on the whole, one cannot at any point detect a reason why he chooses any active dissimulation. For he merely needed to remain undiscovered.
"We never hear him once reflecting upon his intention, though he runs to reflection on all topics. Just after the apparition, he merely remarks to his friends that, if he should appear to them to do strange things, they need not remark upon it so as to betray his object." Ludwig here alludes to the lines,--
"As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on."
Hamlet tells them not to seem too wise about it. The theory of premeditated madness rests upon this passage, and upon one other, which will be noticed. But suppose that Shakspeare did at first entertain a purpose, borrowed from the old chronicle, of disguising Hamlet in some unusual vein, the psychological necessities of his character decided what that vein must be, as they also decided against the old chronicle in the matter of introducing a ghost. And Hamlet's mental quality is really shown by the vein into which it imperatively runs. He was overmastered and completely occupied by this mood of indignation at all the villainous cants of a smiling world. The temper grew so compactly beneath Shakspeare's pen that he could not interpolate into it any amateur simulations. The poet would not, if he could, have so diluted the terribly gathering sincerity which left that epithet of "antic" beached high up and disqualified for floating on its tide.
On Elsinore's platform, Hamlet felt that the sudden complication would put him into strange behavior; he did not know exactly what, but he perceived it coming on. Such a man estimates himself more shrewdly than the crowd imagines. He was aware of a mind that over-refined and idealized, and of a disposition to avoid too close realities. Any hint of nature or society sufficed to sequester him in a monologue. But now he felt some modification passing through him; it is scarcely yet articulate, but it is inevitable to a man of his quality. Hamlet may call his mood by whatever phrases suit the different emergencies; but, in the main, it is the breaking-up of his mind's customary exercise into ironical scorn at discovering the rottenness of Denmark.