1 ‘The World of Hamlet’, Yale Review, XLI (Summer 1952), 513.

2 Act II, scene I, Polonius and Reynaldo, a chronic embarrassment to commentators, shows Laertes being called to account for his activities in Paris. Even minor characters in Hamlet are suspicious of each other's actions and intentions.

3 I hope this approach avoids two pitfalls: (1) the tendency to conjecture about a coned psychology that dramatic characters, in their perfect outwardness, do not seem to me to possess; (2) the tendency to invent a past to explain the behavior of dramatic characters. This past exists only when the playwright deliberately chooses to describe it.

4 A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1954). My debt to Burke's thinking is great, not only to his rigorous terminology, but to his generally acute analysis of the structure of action. The concept of circumference is discussed on pp. 77 fF.

5 The Fortinbras support is co-extensive with the main plot, beginning on Hamlet's birthday and ending almost at the moment of his death. See I.i.84-86, v.i. 155-164. This dimension of Shakespeare's plot is worked out with unusual care.

6 Citations are from The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. Neilson, William Allan and Hill, Charles Jarvis (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).Google Scholar

7 S. F.Johnson, ‘The Regeneration of Hamlet', SQ, III (July 1952), 187-207, for a good discussion of the passion-reason conflict in Hamlet. I think ‘role’ is a third and coal member of this motivational group.

8 Chapman has explored a related possibility in The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois. His revenging hero, Clermont d'Ambois, is reluctant to act because of Stoic principles. The existence of this play demonstrates that Shakespeare's treatment of the revenge theme is not as idiosyncratic as some have claimed.

9 William Empson, ‘Hamlet When New’, pt. I, Sewanee Review, LXI (Jan.-Mar. 1953) 15-42.

10 See Harry Levin, ‘An Explication of the Player's Speech', Kettyon ReviewII (Spring 1950), 273-296, for an extraordinarily thorough analysis of this speech and its function in the action. He sees the following soliloquy as a ‘mirror image of the [player's] speech’ p. 288, but notes that the player moves from action to passion whereas Hamlet moves from passion to action. The action toward which he moves is not the action demanded of him, however, for he is about to trap the King's conscience, not his body.

11 It is at this point that Ernest Jones's Hamlet and Oedipus (London, 1949) is illuminating. Hamlet's emotional paralysis does not strike the audience as perverse when it is viewed within the Oedipal triangle the play contains. As Empson says, ‘The feeling that this hero is allowed to act in a peculiar way which is yet so nehow familiar, because one has been tempted to do it oneself, is surely part of the essence of the story. ’ ‘Hamlet When New ’, pt. II, Sewanee Review, LXI (Apr.-June 1953), 202.

12 Kenneth Burke says that all epithets imply a program of action toward the object named.

13 See note 10 above. What Levin, op. cit., takes as action looks to me more like a backing away from action as Hamlet moves from the appropriate angry emotions of the revenge role to still another ‘rational ’ delay.

14 Like the structure of so many of Shakespeare's plays, the analogical structure of Hamlet is almost unbelievably complicated. Hamlet is like Fortinbras, Laertes, Ophelia;, Levin adds further parallels to Aeneas and Pyrrhus in the Player's speech of act II, scene 2.

15 Johnson's explication of this speech refutes decisively those who would deny its Christian emphasis. See ‘The Regeneration of Hamlet', pp. 203-205.

16 There are contrary views. Cf. Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., ‘Hamlet,A Christian Tragedy', SP, LIX (Apr. 1962), 119-140. While I take it as proved that the official position of the Church sanctioned revenge under certain circumstances and that Hamlet exemplifies some of those circumstances, it still remains true that if we take the life of Christ as a paradigm of the ideal Christian life, then revenge is not a Christian act. When the Church justifies revenge theologically, it seems to me to do so because it is faced with its own Hamlet-like need to recognize that the conditions of the fallen world sometimes require professing Christians to act in un-Christlike ways.

17 Empson, ‘Hamlet When New', pt. I, says that Shakespeare deliberately leaves the delay motivation obscure as a means of countering the clichés of the delayed-revenge, plot and that he fills the gap with Hamlet's self-examination. I see the delay as motivated neither externally, in mechanical obstacles, nor internally, in a single convincing Psychological explanation (Oedipal or other), but in the continuously shifting relationship tween these two possibilities. Hamlet concentrates his questions on the uneasy balance between a problematic nature of man and a problematic nature of the world.

18 Johnson, ‘Regeneration', reads this mood with a slightly different emphasis. He stresses Hamlet's sense of Heaven's ordinance and says that he has learned ‘a willing compliance ‘ailce with the workings of heaven ’. While this is true, we must also keep in mind Hamlet's sense of uncase, his chastened awareness that ‘I have shot mine arrow o'er the house, / and hurt my brother ’, and his recognition after his return of his responsibility for the madness and death of Ophelia.

19 I cannot agree with Fergusson, Francis, The Idea of a Theater (Princeton, 1949)Google Scholar, who discerns a ‘ritual scapegoat’ motif in Hamlet. The play seems to me to take on meaning precisely in the way it ‘displaces ’ that motif in favor of a peculiarly dark vision of the posibilities for heroic, sacrificial, and redemptive action. The assumption that the coming of Fortinbras signifies a new, purged order in Denmark requires us to ignore the play's eplicit and repeated emphasis that Hamlet the elder, a good king, was the declared enemy of the Fortinbras régime and that the threat of this foreign conquest is a danger even claudius tries to avert.