She is the mother of the physiological criticism which issues from insane asylums to wonder why Hamlet is not an inmate: and Hamlet himself, by deceiving his mother, furnished to psychological criticism the text that he was mad in craft. Between the lines of the genuine Hamlet you can read that Shakspeare belonged to neither school. Hamlet gives us unconsciously an opportunity to infer his ability to frame the incoherences which real madness suggests to one who would feign it. It occurs directly upon the Queen's suspicion, who, being unable to see her husband's ghost standing in her chamber, exclaims,-- "This is the very coinage of your brain: This bodiless creation ecstasy Is very cunning in." Hamlet, repelling the insinuation, says,-- "It is not madness That I have uttered: bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word, which madness Would gambol from." And herein he implies that as he can construct the phrases of sanity, being all the time of a sound mind, so the soundness would serve him to invent the _non sequiturs_ of madness. If, then, he purposed to feign it when he said that perhaps he might hereafter put on an antic disposition, the reader may ask why so subtle a person did not carry out his plan. No doubt, it occurred to him that, as he travelled towards his purpose, his demeanor must be of the kind that would cover up his traces. But he could baffle Polonius and the other spies by the natural penetration of a mind that suspicion had sharpened. Those emergencies did not call for any style of feigning. It is enough for him to finger the ventages of a recorder and invite Guildenstern to play upon it; the latter understands that he knows no touch of Hamlet, and leaves the heart of that mystery to be voiced by the varying breaths of critics. When Hamlet explains to Polonius that he is reading slanders, and then describes the old man himself as having a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams, yet holds it hardly fair to have it thus set down,--"For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward,"--Polonius, who is nothing if not satirical upon himself, muses apart, saying, "Though this be madness, yet there's method in 't;" and there he blundered as patly into Shakspeare's secret as he did into his own death. And why do so many actors make Hamlet appear to be conscious of the manɶuvre to throw Ophelia in his way that the King and Polonius may mark his tone from the place where they hide? Shakspeare has left no loop-hole for this supposition that Hamlet, observing the trick, assumes a tone of flightiness towards Ophelia, in order to throw off the spies and make them infer that he is mad. The scene being over, the King is wrong when he says,-- "Love! his affections do not that way tend;" but right when he adds,-- "Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little, Was not like madness."