There is not more difference between the sweet
quiet flow of those plain verses which open the original play within the
play and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substitutes, full-charged with
heavy classic artillery of Phoebus and Neptune and Tellus and Hymen, than
there is between the straightforward agents of their own destiny whom we
meet in the first _Hamlet_ and the obliquely moving patients who veer
sideways to their doom in the second.
This minor transformation of style in the inner play, made solely with
the evident view of marking the distinction between its duly artificial
forms of speech and the duly natural forms of speech passing between the
spectators, is but one among innumerable indications which only a
purblind perversity of prepossession can overlook of the especial store
set by Shakespeare himself on this favourite work, and the exceptional
pains taken by him to preserve it for aftertime in such fullness of
finished form as might make it worthiest of profound and perpetual study
by the light of far other lamps than illuminate the stage. Of all vulgar
errors the most wanton, the most wilful, and the most resolutely
tenacious of life, is that belief bequeathed from the days of Pope, in
which it was pardonable, to the days of Mr.
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