"Hamlet" (1602) is believed to have been based on a lost drama of 1589, perhaps by Kyd; the original source is the "History of the Danes" by Saxo Grammaticus, and there was a French version by Belleforest. Of Shakespeare's play there are three versions, a hopelessly imperfect text in a pirated quarto of 1603; abetter, "enlarged to almost as much again" (1604); and the Folio edition of 1623. None of these is good, as a text; and the inconsistencies of the play may in part be due to an admixture of the old piece, and to tamperings with the manuscript. Of "Hamlet" it is vain to speak briefly, and more than enough of speaking at large has been done by a myriad of commentators. The young prince, full of good qualities, is bound with knots which a real Dane of the Saga time would have cut with the short sword. But Hamlet has "the prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming" of life, and death, and love, and contrary duties. Thus he, like Œdipus in the Greek tragedy, becomes as fatal to all around him as if he bore the Evil Eye; and while, like David at Ziklag, he is playing the madman, actual madness hangs over him like the sword of Damocles. Thus Shakespeare has left to the world a marvel of subtle and penetrative thought, of tenderness, of humour; to the critics a wrangle over psychological problems. The same unparalleled powers, the same universality, the same gloomy vision of life, and, in "King Lear," another study of true and of feigned madness, inspire "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Othello," the last the most piteous of all. For in Othello it is not the error of a wavering hero, or the ambition of a man tempted, like Macbeth, by portents and prophecies, but the sheer inborn devilry of a creature in human form, Iago, that "breaks, and brings down death" on the most innocent of victims, Desdemona. "The pity of it" is too awful: the sense of _wyrd_, of masterful destiny, is too cruel. Yet, if Shakespeare were to write tragedies, and to write them on the traditional materials which are the bases of these plays, it was inevitable that, as he wrote, he should have regarded life as he does, and human fortunes as the spoil of wayward and cruel fate. Æschylus could not make pretty melancholy pieces out of the materials of the "Agamemnon" and "Eumenides". He, to be sure, tried to justify the ways of the gods to men, and Shakespeare makes no such effort. His characters, in the immortal words of Nicias to his doomed Athenian army, "have done what men may, and endure what men must". "The rest is silence."