THE subject of Hamlet was sufficiently well known before Shakespeare treated of it. It is told in the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote about 1180-1208. It appeared translated into French in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques in 1570. There is an English prose version, The Hystorie of Hamblet, which dates from 1608 and is thus certainly later in date than the play, though possibly there were earlier versions which have been lost.

There can be no doubt that a play on the subject existed as early as 1589, for Nash makes a plain reference to it in his preface to Greene's Menaphon (1587 or 1589), and Lodge in his Wit's Miserie alludes to a ghost which cried like an oyster-wife, "Hamlet, revenge": a play of Hamlet was also performed by the Lord Chamberlain's company in 1594. There is a general consensus of opinion that this early Hamlet cannot have been by Shakespeare, since Meres does not refer to it in his famous list given in the Palladis Tamia of 1598.

The general consensus of opinion is that this early drama was probably by Kyd.

Since Kyd's play has disappeared, it is totally impossible to ascertain whether he did or did not use historical material as an element in that drama though, so far as concerns any material existing previous to 1589, he may quite well have done so, and I would call the reader's attention very carefully to the fact, for it may be significant, that the only historical parallels I find to known elements in the earlier Hamlet are all, as a matter of fact, anterior to this date. My method will be to compare the play with the Amleth story on the one side and the historical details on the other, and to show that the action of the play far more closely agrees with that of history than with that of the saga, and also that the main problems of the play are not the problems of the saga but are certainly those of the history.

In Shakespeare's drama the queen is called Gertrude; her first husband is Hamlet, like his son, and the murderous usurper is Claudius. In the saga, the queen is Geruth, her first husband is Horvendil, and his brother, who slays him, is Feng.

What the saga says concerning the murder is the following:

"Such great good fortune stung Feng with jealousy so that he resolved treacherously to waylay his brother—thus showing that goodness is not safe even from those of a man's own household. And behold, when a chance came to murder him, his bloody hand sated even the deadly passion of his soul. Then he took the wife of the brother he had butchered capping unnatural murder with incest."

Feng admits his brother's murder to the people; but he invents a justification for his deed by saying that his brother had planned the murder of the queen—Gertrude. There was thus nothing secret about the murder which took place publicly, and which was acknowledged before the whole court. The prose Hystorie of Hamblet gives exactly the same version as Saxo Grammaticus; it tells how the adulterer murdered his brother at a banquet, and then slandered the dead man by saying that he would have slain his wife; "so, instead of pursuing him as a parricide and an incestuous person, all the courtiers admired and flattered him in his good fortune."

We may now turn to Shakespeare and note how close are the known parallels to the history of James I—the identical person in whom both Shakespeare and his audience had, at that moment, reason to take such a profound interest.

To begin with, the device of having the murder told by a ghost has no parallel whatever in the saga source (there would be no motive for it); but it had a parallel in the Darnley murder for the Scottish ballad-makers had already hit on exactly that device. Thus, in Edinburgh, 1567, there was published a ballad entitled The Testament and Tragedie of the umquhile King Henrie Stuart, of gude memorie.

In it, the unhappy ghost of the murdered king returns and laments:

Sum tyme scho [i.e. Mary.] thocht I was sa amiabill,
Sa perfect, plesand, and sa delectabill
. . . she luid me by all wycht;
Sum tyme, to show affectioun favourabill,
Gratifeit me with giftis honorabill;
* * *
Sum tyme mi mynde she praisit me sa hycht
Leifand all uther; hir bedfellow brycht
Chesit me to be and maid me your king."

Then, further, the murder in the saga takes place, as we have seen, in an open and obvious way, and is fully acknowledged.

In Shakespeare the ghost explains that his murder is secret and stealthy [Act I, v.]:

                         "Now, Hamlet, hear:
'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused: . . .
. . . Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leporous distilment; . . .
And a most instant tetter bark'd about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,
All my smooth body."

Now, the father of James I was finally murdered by means of, or at least concurrently with, a gunpowder explosion; but it was very generally believed that, a previous attempt had been made to poison him.

Burton says [History of Scotland, Vol. IV.]:

"Darnley was seized with a sudden and acute illness which broke out cutaneously. Poison was at first naturally suspected. The disease was speedily pronounced to be small-pox; but it has been conjectured that it may have been one of those forms of contamination which had then begun to make their silent and mysterious visitation in this country, while the immediate cause by which they were communicated was yet unknown. From what occurred afterwards it became a current belief that he had been poisoned."

The plot for his destruction with gunpowder was next attempted; but it does not appear that he perished as a result of the explosion. Burton continues:

"It seems that the intended victim with his page . . . attempted to escape and even got over a wall into a garden when they were seized and strangled. They were found without any marks from the explosion but with marks of other violence."

Now here we surely have remarkable correspondences with the Shakespearian murder: we have the body of the victim covered with a "loathsome tetter" which is ascribed to the malign influence of poison; we have the secret character of the murder itself, and we have the body of the victim found in an "orchard."

Let us once again compare Shakespeare with a source which was certainly available both for himself and for his audience, Buchanan's Detection.[Scotch Version, 1572.]

"Ere he was passed a mile from Stirling all the parts of his body were taken with such a sore ache, as it might easily appear that the same proceeded not of the force of any sickness but by plain treachery. The tokens of which treachery, certain black pimples, so soon as he was come to Glasgow, broke out all over his whole body with so great ache and such pain throughout his limbs, that he lingered out his life with very small hope of escape; and yet all this while the queen would not suffer so much as a physician to come near him."

Buchanan dwells on the same theme in his Oration, [Possibly by another hand.] also a source available alike to Shakespeare and Shakespeare's audience, and probably known very well to all of them:

"It is certainly known that he was poisoned. . . . For though the Shamelessness of Men would not stick to deny a thing so manifest; yet the kind of Disease, strange, unknown to the People, unacquainted with Physicians, especially such as had not been in Italy and Spain, black Pimples breaking out all over his body, grievous aches in all his limbs and intolerable stink disclosed it—there is no Adulteress but the same is also a Poisoner. Read her own Letter. He is not much deformed and yet he hath received much. Whereof hath he received much? The thing itself, the Disease, the Pimples, the Savor do tell you. Even that much he received that brought Deformity, Forsooth, very Poison. Whatsoever it was that he received the same, the same was the Cause of his Deformity.

". . . She will have the manner of ministring the Medicine to be secret. If it be to heal him what needs that secrecy? . . . To whom is this Charge committed to seek out a new Medicine and curing for the King? Forsooth to the King's Enemy, to the Queen's adulterer, the vilest of all two-footed beasts, whose house was in France defamed for poisoning and whose Servants were there for the same cause, some tortured, some imprisoned, and all suspected. . . .

"So forsooth are Medicines accustomed to be provided by Enemies, in a secret Place, without Witnesses. That therefore which an Adulterer and Adulteress, and the partner of the Wife's Body, curiously prepareth and secretly administreth; what Medicine this is, let every Man with himself weigh and consider."

We see here the immense stress which Buchanan lays on the secrecy of the murder, on the solitude of the unhappy victim at the time the poisoning took place, on the foulness produced in his body, the deformity, the pustules, etc., all of which agree closely with the murder of Hamlet's father, and, what is especially significant, not one of these details is to be found in either of the prose versions. In the so-called literary source, the murder is not secret, the victim is not alone, poison is not used, deformity is not caused. It is worthy of note that the very term the ghost uses in describing his condition, "leprous," had been applied by contemporary writers to Darnley.

A satirist called him "the leper," leprosy being confounded with "la grosse verole." [Andrew Lang, Mystery of Mary Stuart.]

We may also observe that Buchanan insists that the method of poisoning was well known in France and Italy, and Hamlet himself compares his father's death to the Italian murder of Gonzago.

Buchanan says: "There is no adulteress but the same is also a poisoner," and Hamlet has: "None wed the second but who killed the first." [Act III, ii.]

We may compare also Buchanan's own satire appended to his Latin version:

"Et quem non potuit morientem auferre veneno
Hunc fera, sulphureo pulvere tollit humo,
* * *
Nobilis ille tuas vires Darnleuis heros
pertulit, heu tristes pertulit ille faces.
* * *
Siccine Bothwellum poteras sine lege tenere?
Siccine Bothwelli poterant te flectere verba."

This, again, has a close resemblance to the ghost's lament:

"Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit.
O wicked wit and gifts that have the power
So to seduce."

Buchanan terms Bothwell "an adulterer," and "the vilest of all two-legged beasts," who has power to bend the queen with his words, and Shakespeare uses almost the same phrases.

Another curious detail of the murder may be observed here. The ghost declares that he was murdered by poison—henbane—poured in his ear while he slept. Now, Mary's accusers, [See Leslie, Bishop of Ross (Hatfield Papers).] to heap calumny upon her, had accused her of conniving also at the murder of her first husband—Francis II of France. That unhappy prince died from an abscess in the ear, but it was a common rumour that it was caused by poison inserted in the ear.

Now, does it not look as if Shakespeare were combining in one most powerful and dramatic scene these three attempts all associated with Mary Queen of Scots: the poison in the ear from the reputed murder of Francis II, the loathsomeness and vileness of the unhappy victim from the first attempt on Darnley, and the body of the victim found in the garden with the actual murder of Darnley? Why not? All these three attempts had already been associated together, one strengthening another, by the queen's accusers, [See Leslie, Bishop of Ross.] and a dramatic poet very naturally desires to make his play as intense and moving as he can. The association, like the Darnley ghost, is already there. Why not use it?

There is, however, one important modification. At the time when Mary Queen of Scots was executed, she was regarded by the people of England with embittered hate, and it is more than probable that every word of Buchanan's terrific indictment was regarded as true. James had, however, a certain respect for the memory of his mother, and it is probable that anyone who desired to please him might be inclined to take a lenient view of Mary's connection with the crime. It has been possible even for modern historians to deny altogether or in part her connection with it, and her apologists of course (like Belleforest) did so in Shakespeare's own time.

Now, this is very much what happens in Hamlet. In the saga there is no doubt whatever as to the queen's guilt; she has not only committed adultery, she has connived at the murder, and acquiesced in the false statement invented to justify the deed. In Shakespeare, on the contrary, we have the subtlety and complexity of the history—nothing whatever is said to make it plain that the queen has knowingly acquiesced in her husband's murder. She may have done; but though the ghost accuses her of adultery he does not say that she connived at the other crime. His attitude towards her is always tender and indulgent, and Darnley, we may remember, to the last day of his recorded life sought the love of Mary, and pathetically believed in the possibility of a reconciliation with her. That is half the pathos of Darnley's fate, and it is certainly half the pathos of Shakespeare's ghost that he continues to love his erring wife in spite of all.

As a reference to Buchanan will at once show, he lays enormous stress on the undiminished affection of the unhappy victim which survived even the attempt to poison him. "Why," asks Buchanan, [Oration.] "did she thrust away from her the young Gentleman . . . he being beautiful, near of her kin, of the Blood Royal and (that which is greatest), most entirely loving her."

Again, both the ghost and Hamlet call attention to the fickleness of the queen. The ghost claims that he won her swiftly: he says his love

                        "was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made to her in marriage."

This, again, looks as if it were suggested by the rapid marriage of Mary and Darnley after a brief acquaintance.

Again, even before he has seen the ghost, Hamlet dwells on the fact that his mother used to show such an intense affection for his father; but forgot him so soon and declined upon one whose gifts were so far inferior.

                         "Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, with a month—
. . . married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules . . .
                          O most wicked speed, to post,
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets." [Act I, ii.]

Now, this is precisely one of Buchanan's chief indictments against Mary, that she so vehemently loved her first husband, but so rapidly forgot him and married the second who was so immeasurably his inferior in person and charm.

These are some of the most apposite passages:

"What if I ask again why she so extremely loved the young Man? why she so hastily married him and so unmeasurable honoured him? Such are the natures of some women.

"That husband therefore whom she lately wedded . . . without whom she could not endure, whom she scarcely durst suffer out of her sight, him she thrust forth."

" . . . that adulterous partner, neither in birth nor in beauty nor in any honest quality was in any wise comparable with her disdained husband."

"Bothwell was an Ape in purple."

"Neither is the cause unknown why she did it. Even that the same filthy marriage with Bothwell might be accomplished."

"One is divorced, another is coupled, and that in such posting speed, as they might have scant have hasted to furnish any triumph of some noble victory." [Oration. Scotch version.]

Here, again, we have phrases which closely resemble Shakespeare's "posting to incestuous sheets."

Both Hamlet and the ghost lay enormous stress on this indecent haste, and on the contrast between the two husbands:

"A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:—why she, even she,—
O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer . . .
within a month
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes."'

We may observe also that this hasty marriage was held from the beginning to affect closely James himself.

Burton quotes from the memoirs of Sir James Melville:

"every good subject that loved the queen's honour and the prince's security had sad hearts and thought her majesty would be dishonoured and the prince in danger to be cut off by him who had slain his father."

Now here, again, we have the atmosphere of Hamlet: the queen's disgraceful haste, the secrecy and suspicion and the peril of her son.

Buchanan says [Detection.]:

"When of the forty days appointed for the mourning, scarce twelve were yet fully past . . . taking heart of grace unto her, and neglecting such trifles, she cometh to her own bias, and openly sheweth her own natural conditions."

Buchanan dwells on the fact that before the marriage, Bothwell was accused of having committed fornication with his wife's own kinswoman . . . and the divorce with Lady Jane Bothwell was "posted forward."

"And so at length within the eight days (from the time of the divorce commenced), she finished that unmatrimonial matrimony, all good men so far detesting or at least grudgingly forejudging the unlucky end thereof.

" . . . but Monsieur de Croce though he was earnestly desired could not with his honour be present at the feast."

Buchanan makes out Bothwell to be a kind of specialist in adultery: "Bothwell had then alive two wives already, not yet divorced and the third neither lawfully married nor orderly divorced."

"The deed," says Buchanan, "of itself is odious in a woman, it is monstrous in a wife, not only excessively loved but also most zealously honoured, it is incredible. And being committed against him . . . whose affection requires love . . . upon that young man in whom there is not so much as alleged any just cause of offence."

Here, again, we may remember what Hamlet says of his father's affection for his mother:

"he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly."

Throughout Shakespeare's drama enormous stress is laid on the difference in character and appearance between the two husbands. Now almost all the contemporary records stress this difference in the case of Darnley and Bothwell.

"He (i.e. Darnley) was a comely Prince of a fair and large stature of body, pleasant in countenance, affable to all men and devout, well-exercised in martial pastimes upon horseback as any prince of that age." [Historie of James the Sixt.]

Compare Horatio's address to the ghost, [Act I, i]

"What art thou that usurp'st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march?"

And also the description of Marcellus:

"With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch."

In 1566 de Silva learned from Mauvissière that he (Darnley) mostly passed his time in warlike exercises, and was a good horseman. Causin speaks of him as "being accomplished with all excellent endowments both of body and of mind." [Quoted by Hay Fleming.]

Knox's continuator thus describes him: "He was of a comely stature and none was like unto him within this island."

Buchanan says in his Detection (of Mary): "She long beheld with greedy eyes his dead corpse, the goodliest corpse of any gentleman that ever lived in this age."

Compare this with Horatio's speech [Act I, ii.]:

"I saw him once; he was a goodly king,"

and Hamlet's reply:

"He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again."

Again we note as somewhat curious the immense stress that is laid upon the armour of the ghost; it makes him more dignified and more warlike. So, also, Darnley had a fancy for appearing in full armour which some persons thought an affectation, and which his enemies ridiculed; thus in 1565 he appeared in full armour at Mary's side in their brief war against the Lords of the Congregation; it was, in that age at any rate, a real peculiarity.

Bothwell, on the other hand, is persistently described by Buchanan and others as a needy adventurer, given to vices of a low cast: drunkenness and licentiousness.

Buchanan says:

"What was there in him Bothwell that was of a woman of any honest countenance to be desired, was there any gift of eloquence or grace of beauty or virtue of mynd. . . . As for his eloquence we need not speak . . . they that have heard him are not ignorant of his rude utterance and blockishness . . . his enemies face he never durst abide . . . by a thief, a notable coward, he was deadly wounded and thrown to the ground . . . . He was brought up in the Bishop of Murray's palace . . . in drunkenness and whoredoms, among vile ministries of dissolute misorder. . . . Bothwell was a man in extreme poverty, doubtful whether he were more vile or more wicked. . . . As for excessive and immoderate use of lechery, he therein no less sought to be famous than other men do shun dishonour and infamy."

We have thus in Bothwell exactly the same type of character as that depicted in Claudius: Hamlet alludes with emphatic disgust to the heavy drinking of the king, he dwells on his licentiousness and points the bitter contrast between Claudius and his brother, exactly as Buchanan points the contrast between the hideousness and licentiousness of Bothwell and the beauty and stateliness of Darnley (Acts III-IV.).

"See, what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, . . .
This was your husband. Look you now, what follows;
Here is your husband; like a mildewed ear
Blasting his wholesome brother. . . .
                          Ha! have you eyes?
You cannot call it love."

So Buchanan insists that the passion of Mary for Bothwell cannot properly have been called love, but only that insensate rage of lust which sometimes seizes upon women and blinds them to all that is base in character and hideous in person.

Hamlet accuses Claudius [Act III, iii.] of exactly the vices condemned in Bothwell: he speaks of killing him

"When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At gaming, swearing or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't."

His drunkenness, of course, and its corrupting effect on the court is insisted'on from the very beginning [Act I, ii.]: Hamlet says to Horatio:

"what is your affair in Elsinore?
We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart."

Bothwell's enemies had accused him of practising art magic, and both Mary's friends and enemies, including the hostile lords in their proclamations, averred that Bothwell had won her favour by unlawful means, philtres, witchcraft, or what we may call hypnotism.

Shakespeare does not represent Hamlet as accusing Claudius of the Black Art, but he may be referring to these accusations when he makes the ghost accuse him of seducing the queen "with witchcraft of his wicked wit."

I have already pointed out, [Introduction.] that in Hamlet the ghost is a Catholic, whereas his son is a Protestant, and this is another matter in which the play differs totally from the saga and corresponds closely with the history.

Horatio, in the opening of the play, [Act I, ii.] has just come from Wittenberg, and Hamlet greets him as his "fellow-student"; Hamlet also desires to return to Wittenberg, which Claudius does not wish to permit.

                         "For your intent
In going back to school in Wittenberg
It is most retrograde to our desire." [Act I, ii.]

Nothing, of course, is said of any Wittenberg in the saga, and I am positive that any reader who cares to refer to Saxo Grammaticus will feel that the mention of any modern university would be singularly out of place in that barbarous production.

But Wittenberg, on account of its association with Luther, was famous as one of the chief Protestant centres of Europe; Scottish universities, as already pointed out, had in the sixteenth century a very close and intimate connection with German Protestant universities, and thus the mention of Wittenberg certainly suggests a Protestant connection for both Horatio and Hamlet.

It is equally clear that the ghost is Catholic. He speaks of purgatory, and of himself as being condemned to its penalties [Act I, v.]:

"Doom'd for a certain time to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away:"

The ghost, be it noted, lays no claim to entire innocence of life; he admits " foul crimes." In the whole cruel and bitter story of his murder the thing that grieves him most is that he had no opportunity for absolution and extreme unction.

"Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head;
O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!"

Now here, again, we have an exact parallel with the history; Darnley was a Catholic, he had committed "foul crimes," and he was cut off without the possibility of absolution and extreme unction. The son, James I, was a Protestant and a very keen and eager student, a fact on which he greatly plumed himself, of Protestant theology.

In the saga story there is, of course, no ghost. Its function would, indeed, be totally unnecessary as neither Amleth nor anyone else has the least doubt as to the guilt of the king, who, as we have seen, acknowledged it.

In the history, however, the guilt of the culprits certainly was doubtful; Bothwell seized the supreme power; he was not at first openly accused, but suspicions were rife against him. Burton says: "Those who dared not speak openly gave utterance in the dark, and midnight accusations were heard with mysterious awe. Sir William Drury tells Cecil of a man who went about crying: 'Vengeance on those who . . . caused the shedding of innocent blood. O Lord! open the heavens and pour down vengeance.'" [History of Scotland.]

Buchanan alludes to the same thing: people dared not openly accuse Bothwell of the offence,

"specially as he himself was doer, judge, enquirer and examiner. Yet this fear which stopped the mouths of every man in particular could not restrain the multitude. Because both by books set out, by pictures and by cries in the dark night, it was so set out and handled that the doers of the mischievous fact might easily understand that those secrets of theirs were come abroad."

Buchanan has also a curious tale of an apparition which came to the Earl of Athol and three of his friends on the night of the Darnley murder, wakened them out of their sleep, and apprised them of the crime.

As we have also seen, there was a contemporary ballad which represented the ghost of Darnley as returning to tell his own pitiful tale.

In the original prose story there was no voice crying out murder in the night and no apparition; Shakespeare seems to have put them together, and dramatised them into the truly magnificent conception of the ghost of Hamlet's father.

There was certainly a ghost in the earlier Hamlet—the play ascribed to Kyd—but, as I have already remarked, we have no means of knowing whether Kyd was using historical sources or not.

Other curious details in the ghost-scene are worthy of comment. Thus the ghost tells Hamlet that it is compelled to depart; but, when Hamlet exacts the oath of silence from Horatio and the soldiers, the ghost reappears in the most extraordinary way beneath the ground, so that Hamlet refers to him as "this fellow in the cellarage" and calls him "an old mole."

Now it was the murder of Rizzio which steeled Mary's heart against her husband, and it was very generally believed that Mary took an oath to murder him over Rizzio's grave. The Lennox MSS. are the main authorities for this incident; they aver that, when Darnley and Mary were escaping together through the vaults of Holyrood, Darnley paused and uttered remorseful words over Rizzio's new-made grave; they aver that Mary, seeing the grave, said "it should go very hard with her but a fatter than Rizzio should lie anear him ere one twelvemonth was at an end." Moreover, on the evening preceding Darnley's death, Mary is said to have reminded him of this very incident:

"Rizzio," says Mr Andrew Lang, "was buried in the chapel vaults. In their escape Mary and Darnley passed by his grave; she is said to have declared that 'ere a year he should have a fatter by his side!' On the evening preceding Darnley's death she reminded him that it was a year since Rizzio's murder." [Mystery of Mary Stuart.]

Martin Hume speaks of the pretended reconciliation of the husband and wife:

"In the course of their loving talk Mary dropped a sinister hint that just a year had passed since Rizzio's murder; and, when she had gone, Darnley in the hearing of his pages, expressed his uneasiness that she had recollected it, for he at least had not forgotten her threat over Rizzio's grave." [Love Affairs of Mary Stuart.]

Buchanan says [Defection.]:

"One Sunday night she discovered herself, and fetching a deep sigh: 'O says she, this time twelve month was David Rizzio slain.' This it seems came from her heart; for within a few days, the unfortunate young Man, as an Inferiæ to the Ghost of a Fidler, was strangled in his Bed . . . and his Body thrown out into the garden"; and again "suddenly, without any Funeral Honour in the Night Time, by common Carriers of dead Bodies, upon a vile Bier, she caused him to be buried by David Rizzio."

It was thus a definite belief of Shakespeare's age, as the quotations above clearly show, that the oath ensuring the murder of Darnley had been taken in the vaults of Holyrood over the grave of Rizzio, and that this oath was punctually and to the time fulfilled.

Does it not look as if it were this that had suggested the scene when the ghost in his turn reminds Hamlet of his oath with the voice that comes from the "Cellarage." The whole incident was, to the last degree, gruesome and suggestive, and is it not most exceedingly plausible that a popular dramatist and a tragic dramatist would prefer to work upon the emotions that he knew to be existing in the minds of his audience? This is why we cannot be assured that we understand Shakespeare fully unless we take into account the Elizabethan point of view, for the associations existing in their minds, and to which the dramatist would naturally appeal, do not exist in ours.

Another resemblance to the Darnley murder lies in the attitude of the queen who is always loyal to her second husband; she will not leave him even for Hamlet's bitter rebukes, and she takes his part until the end.

This, of course, was characteristic of Mary Queen of Scots, who could not be persuaded to renounce Bothwell,

Throckmorton, in a letter to Elizabeth, July 1564, says:

"The queen will not by any means be induced to lend her authority to prosecute the murder, nor will not consent by any persuasion to abandon the lord Bothwell for her husband, but avoweth constantly that she will live and die with him and sayeth that if it were put to her choice to relinquish her crown and kingdom for the lord Bothwell she would leave her kingdom and dignity to live as a simple damoiselle with him and that she will never consent that he shall fare worse or have more harm than herself."

So Throckmorton says again to Elizabeth:

"She will by no means yield to abandon Bothwell for her husband, nor relinquish him; which matter will do her most harm of all and hardneth these lords to great severity against her."

So the Lords of Scotland communicate to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, July 1567:

"We began to deal with her majesty, and to persuade her that, for her own honour, the safety of her son, the discharging of her conscience . . . she would be content to separate herself from that wicked man, to whom she was never lawfully joined, and with whom she could not remain without a manifest loss of honour . . . but all in vain."

Throckmorton himself repeatedly states to Elizabeth that the Lords were willing to be lenient to Mary personally.

"I have also persuaded herself to renounce Bothwell for her husband and to be contented to suffer a divorce to pass between them; she hath sent me word that she will in no wise consent to it but will rather die."

It is impossible not to see the likeness between this and Hamlet's expostulation with the queen, [Act III, iv.] when he reproaches her with the dishonour she has brought upon herself, appeals to her conscience, and finally implores her to leave his uncle:

"Good-night: but go not to mine uncle's bed;
                         . . . Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy."

Once again there is no parallel whatever in the original prose source.

One more curious detail may be added.

Claudius, in Hamlet, is specially associated with three courtiers called respectively, Osric, [Act V, ii.] Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, [Act IV, ii.] and among the people who received the captured Bothwell in Denmark was a certain "Eric Rosencrantz." [Les Affeires du Conte de Bodwel (Bannatyne Club).]

I have already pointed out that there was a Guildenstern at the court of Scotland.

Before leaving, finally, the subject of the Darnley murder, it is important to remember that James I and Bothwell were, from the outset, pitted against each other by their respective supporters. The prince, though only an infant, was legally represented as demanding vengeance for his murdered father, and Bothwell was very generally supposed to have designs upon his life.

"Bothwell after his marriage to the queen," says Sir James Melville, "was very earnest to get the Prince in his hands but my Lord of Mar would not deliver him, praying me to help to save the Prince out of their hands who had slain his father and had made his vaunt already among his familiars that, if he could get him once in his hands, he should warrant him from revenging of his father's death."

Similarly the proclamation issued 1567 by the Confederate Lords said that Bothwell had murdered the king, had entrapped the queen into an "unhonest marriage," and had made preparations "to commit the like murther upon the son as was upon the father."

At the battle of Carberry Hill the Confederate Lords had, as their standard, their favourite picture of the murdered man and of the infant prince kneeling by the side of the corpse, and demanding vengeance.

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