Of course, I've a theory of my own about Hamlet. It seems to me that the difficulty most persons experience in endeavouring to penetrate what they call "the mystery" of the Prince's character arises from the fact that they read the play either carelessly or with some prepossession, to fit which they bend all that he says or does. The German critics blunder through forgetting how essentially sane and unmystical was Shakespeare in every fibre of his mind. To him the cloudy symbolism of the second part of Faust would have sounded very like nonsense. His interest was in man--the normal, typical man and his passions of hate, love, ambition, revenge, envy, humour.... To me the key to Hamlet seems to be a proper regard for the attitude of the mind of the seventeenth century toward the belief in ghosts. The Englishman of Shakespeare's day hardly doubted their existence, but was unsettled as to the nature and origin of spectres. Whether they were truly shades of the departed ones which they resembled, or were merely horrid delusions of the mind, projected upon it by some malign and hellish influence, they were not clear. Hamlet says: "The spirit that I have seen May be the devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and melancholy, (as he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds More relative than this...." Personally, my method of endeavouring to clear vexed questions is to make an effort to conceive of my own emotions and actions in a like difficulty. To understand Hamlet I try to imagine what my frame of mind would be if P---- had died, suddenly and tragically, during my absence. Hastening home in all the turmoil of grief and shock I find H---- has grasped all P----'s fortune and has promptly married M----, whom I had expected to find as afflicted as I. Naturally I would be deeply horrified and offended and greatly puzzled over such a situation. When one injects the warmth and power of one's own emotions into a situation by personifying it with one's own kinspeople one begins to realize Hamlet's condition of mind prior to the appearance of the Ghost. A ghostly visitation not being imaginable nowadays, one may suppose one's self having a vivid and circumstantial dream, making all these curious conditions clear by an explanation of hideous criminality. The hysterical distraction of Hamlet's interview with the Ghost seems natural enough when one pictures one's own horror and incredulity on awaking from such a vision.