In _Hamlet_, as it seems to me, we set foot as it were on the bridge
between the middle and the final period of Shakespeare. That priceless
waif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacity of a hungry
publisher is of course more accurately definable as the first play of
_Hamlet_ than as the first edition of the play. And this first _Hamlet_,
on the whole, belongs altogether to the middle period. The deeper
complexities of the subject are merely indicated. Simple and trenchant
outlines of character are yet to be supplanted by features of subtler
suggestion and infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost more of a
satirist than a philosopher: Asper and Macilente, Felice and Malevole,
the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by
Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with an
inevitable streak of caricature in them, of the first Hamlet; they would
have been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the second. The
Queen, whose finished figure is now something of a riddle, stands out
simply enough in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as
accomplice of Hamlet.
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