Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of _Romeo and Juliet_. The lines in Act V. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep ... Up from my cabin, My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire; Finger’d their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing versification, _Measure for Measure_, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in _Coriolanus_. _Coriolanus_ may be not as “interesting” as _Hamlet_, but it is, with _Antony and Cleopatra_, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought _Hamlet_ a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
The grounds of _Hamlet’s_ failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother’s degradation.... The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt of a mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. _Hamlet_, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the _Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois_, Act V. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_ not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.