Look there! The dear hallucination of fatherhood! "What would you, gracious figure?" The ghost has come to put this sketch of memory into italics; as if filial appreciation had projected it upon the midnight, in the intensity of recalling his majestic soul. Only a son who was in all respects worthy to be born of Nature's nobleman could pay this debt of being nobly born, and give Imagination's birth to such a sire. See there, he is born! the son is father and mother: inbred posterity conceives its ancestor.
Thus I venture to suppose that, when Hamlet came to his mother, Shakspeare had not deliberated that the ghost would join the party. But his brain kindled with the midnight passion, streamed over down into the pen, and the ink exhaled under the heat of Hamlet's reminiscence into the vaporous outline, which always startles us because it startled Shakspeare,--a sudden whiteness running high along the edge of Hamlet's swelling heart. The scene then shudders with deference to this unexpected presence, which only the son who conceived it can observe. Afterward the verse seems to become merely a coast to help the great wave fall back and subside.
It is possible to have Hamlet played in a style so greatly absorbed as to obliterate our knowledge that the father's custom is to take his cue from the climax of his son's speech and to appear. Then we reproduce the thrill that Shakspeare felt when he sat alone with awe and silence, and they suddenly drew him to their ghost.
I recur now to consider the nature of the oblique and enigmatic style into which Hamlet has fallen. It is not a deliberate effort to sustain the character of a madman, because such a person as Hamlet could find no motive in it: he could not need it to mask his desire to avenge the ghost, for he is Prince, an inmate of the palace, and supernaturally elected to be master of the situation. He says he has "cause and will and strength and means to do't." I conceive, then, that his mind, driven from its ordinary gravity, and the channel of his favorite thoughts diverted, instinctively saves itself by this sustained gesture of irony; and it appears to be madness only to those who do not know that he is well informed of the event, and is struggling to set free from it a purpose. And why should a man of such a well-conditioned brain, a noticer of nice distinctions, have selected for a simulation of madness a style which, nicely estimated, is not mad? He could not calculate that everybody would interpret this difference from his usual deportment into an unsettling of his wits; for the style shows unconsciousness and freedom from premeditation. If he wished to feign distraction, he would have taken care to mar the appositeness of his ironical allusions, which are always in place and always logical. And, if he was half unhinged without knowing it, his speech would have betrayed the same inconsequence. Nowhere is he so abrupt, or delivers matter so remote from an immediate application, that he seems to us to wander, because we too have been admitted to the confidences of the ghost, and share that advantage over the other characters.