In so far as this is an attempt to explain the specifically new Shakespearian emphasis in _Hamlet_, in contrast to those elements which he borrowed from an earlier play, the first part of the assertion is worth considering. But, as regards the completed play that we possess, novelties, borrowings, and all, the entire sentence gives us merely a false simplification. Shakespeare’s finished _Hamlet_ is a play dealing with many things besides the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son. It is a play dealing with the effect of a whole circle of ruinous events closing in on a man of princely nature, who was a foreigner amid the baseness that surrounded him. Shakespeare showed in _Hamlet_ that it was possible, contrary to all the rules, to write a play which combined the largeness of a biography with essential dramatic unity. Mr. Eliot, however, clings to the idea that Shakespeare failed in _Hamlet_ because he was divided in interest between the theme of the guilty mother and other intractable stuff “that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” Now, every great work of art is like the visible part of an iceberg; it reveals less than it leaves hidden. The greatest poem in the world is no more than a page from that inspired volume that exists in the secret places of the poet’s soul. There is no need to explain the mysteries that crowd about us as we read _Hamlet_ by a theory of Shakespeare’s failure. To summon these mysteries into the narrow compass of a play is the surest evidence of a poet’s triumph. Let us see, however, how Mr. Eliot, holding to his guilty-mother theme, attempts to explain the quality of Shakespeare’s failure. He writes: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that _particular_ emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in _Hamlet_.