Pence and praise enough it had evidently brought him in from
the first. No more palpable proof of this can be desired than the
instantaneous attacks on it, the jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of which
a careful ear may catch some far faint echo even yet; the fearful and
furtive yelp from beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule, the
shrill reverberation all around it of plagiarism and parody. Not one
single alteration in the whole play can possibly have been made with a
view to stage effect or to present popularity and profit; or we must
suppose that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was naturally even
greater as a fool. There is a class of mortals to whom this inference is
always grateful--to whom the fond belief that every great man must needs
be a great fool would seem always to afford real comfort and support:
happy, in Prior's phrase, could their inverted rule prove every great
fool to be a great man. Every change in the text of _Hamlet_ has
impaired its fitness for the stage and increased its value for the closet
in exact and perfect proportion. Now, this is not a matter of opinion--of
Mr.
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