her troubled looks and flushing face even the faintest flash by which he may see her guilty conscience unwillingly revealed. Reading upon her face the handwriting of her troubled thoughts, he gives them expression with telling force, when with eyes piercing her very soul, he mutters in burning words audible to her, "wormwood! wormwood!"

After this sudden and brief interruption, the Player-king proceeds to assure his consort that, while now admitting the truth of her words and her present firm resolve to live in perpetual widowhood, nevertheless, relying on his knowledge of the fickleness of the human heart and the natural instability of human resolutions, he still cannot help but think that, under changed circumstances, she too will change her mind; for our fates often running contrary to our wills, leave us our resolves, but frustrate their fulfilment. Hence, he concludes by affirming that, though she now swear never to wed a second husband, this resolve shall die when her "first lord is dead."

The Player-queen, in response, swears to the eternal loyalty of her love and the infrangibility of her resolve. In proof whereof, she neither hesitates to invoke many curses and imprecations on herself, nor to pray Heaven to let eternal strife pursue her, both here and in the world to come, if, once a widow, she ever be a wife again. These words as Hamlet perceives, strongly affect his mother, and in steady gaze he watches her disturbed feelings, which he further irritates by the terrible irony of his accusing words, "if she should break it now!"

Ignoring Claudius throughout the dialogue, Hamlet had centered his attention wholly upon Gertrude. Though the ghost had revealed the fact that she had been faithless to his father; that, while counterfeiting the sincerest affection, she had yielded to the illicit love of his seducing uncle, he was still unaware of the extent of her guilt: whether she had ac

tively or passively countenanced the murder, or whether in full innocence of the foul crime, she had contracted an incestuous marriage with the murderer. Having learned from her troubled looks and restlessness, that she recognized herself in the Player-queen, he now suddenly turns upon her and startles her by the suddenness and vehemence of his sarcastic question, "Madam, how like you this play?" His question was a shaft barbed with bitter irony, which quickened the memory of her infidelity to his loving father. Gertrude in surprise, falters for the moment at the fierce utterance, only to reply, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." These telltale words of covered guilt prove that she has recognized in the Player-queen her own faithless love; and Hamlet, mindful of her disdain to mourn the memory of his honored father and of her shameful hasty marriage, shoots another shaft steeped in ridicule and raillery, in the words "O, but she'll keep her word."

Claudius, too, in guilty conscience takes alarm. During the introductory pantomime, he had been distracted partly by the loquacious Polonius, and partly by Hamlet's attention to Ophelia. Hence, he did not notice the silent actors in their dumb and brief portrayal of the plot. He had since, however, heard enough of the dialogue of the Player-king and queen to sniff offense; Gertrude's evident disturbance at the pointed reference to the Player-queen's hasty marriage with her criminal paramour inspired a fear lest there be a further design to unkennel the secret of his soul. This is manifest from his eager questions and demand to know the plot before the play proceeds. Hamlet in a light and airy mood assures him, that, as all is done with merriment and jest, there can be no possible offense. Nevertheless, from anxiety of mind, he fears lest Claudius, who seems alarmed by suspicions, may interrupt the play before the enactment of the poisoning scene, and so thwart his

well laid plot. Hence his ingenuity is supremely taxed. He must at once disarm the King of his suspicions and his fears, and detain him nolens volens to the end. He is equal to the task, and when Claudius, manifestly worried and still unassured, gruffly demands the name of the play, the Prince in playful satire replies in enigmatic words, "The Mousetrap.”

With a deep penetration of the wily character of his uncle, Hamlet relies on one bold, but successful stroke. He braves the King, and shames him, and in defiance challenges him to interrupt the play at the risk of a public confession of his guilt. The interlude, he says is but the image of a murder done long long ago in a foreign land, and though the knavish crime be heinous, why should his royal highness, whose soul is stainless as his own, fear its re-enactment. Such a play, if it make the guilty wince, will leave the innocent unaffected. His defiant ruse triumphs; and Claudius unwillingly remains to see the play continued.

ENTRAPPED

As the play proceeds, the approaching crisis rouses Hamlet to the greatest nervous tension. With glowing mind and throbbing heart, he fiercely struggles to repress wild emotions, which, if manifested at this critical moment, might terminate the play before Lucianus enters to speak his sixteen lines. His eyes rigidly fixed upon the uneasy King, his attention, all absorbed by his overmastering purpose, is not distracted for an instant even by the words of Ophelia. If he speak to her at all, it is to ease the tumult of his thoughts and, under the mask of an assumed indifference and calm, to bridge over the moments of intense suspense while awaiting the expected climax when he may release his pent-up thoughts and feelings.

His first reply to Ophelia, in words cynical and half ambiguous, is an allusion to their former love, and must have

proved an unwelcome, if not a bitter jest. His unseemly language is prompted, not only by his wish to impress upon her and others the reality of his madness, but also by the bitter feeling which arises from his knowledge of her shallow and imperfect love. From her weakness of character, he has come to consider her scarcely more than a puppet, or "image" controlled by a string in the hand of an old dotard. In his last reply, he tells her she must take her husband for better for worse, words which refer to the Catholic Ritual of sacramental marriage. This sacrament, which bars every notion of pos sible divorce, is entered into by the contracting parties, when each in turn makes before God the following solemn and relig ious vow: "I promise to take thee for my lawful wife (husband) to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part." These words were in part changed in the new ritual of the State Church of Shakespeare's day.

At the entrance of Lucianus, the poisoner, Hamlet's ner vous tension reaches the extreme. The sight of the actor, wasting time in tragic attitudes and horrid mien, overtaxes his patience. He commands him to proceed to action, at the same time giving him the cue to the momentous lines, which, for the clear circumstantial portrayal of the crime of Claudius, he himself had inserted in the interlude. While Lucianus pours the poison in the ears of the sleeping king, Hamlet with the intent of heightening its effect, suddenly leaps forward, and, with gaze fixed on Claudius, points at him, while exclaiming in tremulous excitement and impassioned words: "he poisons him in the garden for his crown! You shall see anon how the murderer wins the love of the queen!"

Claudius in a daze, as if struck by some unseen hand, rises hastily in wild bewilderment, and with manifest affright cuts short the lines of Lucianus. At his action, Hamlet thunders in

fierce sarcastic tones, "What, frighted with false fire!" The Queen from anxious concern inquires, "How fares my lord?" The courtiers supposing Claudius the victim of some sudden malady, crowd about him, and Polonius hastily shambles forward, and, with excited words and gestures, commands the players to cease the performance.

At the sight of his crime revealed in every circumstance and of the feverish excitement of Hamlet, whose words with wild gesticulation forced upon his attention each secret detail, Claudius feels the mask torn from his face, and stands revealed a criminal, a horrid fratricide, and usurper of the throne. Surprised and appalled at his exposure, like Macbeth at the sight of Banquo's ghost, he struggles with a fearful riot in his soul. In quick succession, shame, fear, horror, anger, and despair with rushing tumult rack his heart, confuse his mind, rob him of speech and un-man his trembling swaying form. Around him all seems dark as the blackness of his soul, and groping helplessly about, his repeated cry for light is reechoed by the courtiers, who, while shouting amid disorder for lights, lights, hurry away the conscience-stricken man to his private apartments. As the Queen remained unaffected by the poisoning scene, it may be reasonably supposed that she was ignorant of her husband's murder.

COME, SOME MUSIC!

As the King is led away in a sense of overpowering confusion, Hamlet looks after him and sings aloud snatches of an old song: "Why, let the stricken deer go weep.' He feels the impulse of murder in his heart, and breaks out in loud, ironical laughter, which, ringing in cruel echoes through the hall, falls with accusing terror on the ears of the retreating criminal.

Again alone with Horatio, Hamlet, of pensive nature or