king is praying. Killed now, he might find heaven. Hamlet will wait till he can kill more perfectly, body and soul. Two months have slipped by since Hamlet undertook his duty. This is marked by a passage in the play scene. "How cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within two hours." Ophelia. "Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord." At the beginning of the play, it was "Nay, not two months, not two." The king, who has learnt from Hamlet the danger to himself, loses no time, though Hamlet still delays. Hamlet allows himself to be shipped off to England, with secret orders for his execution there. While he is still thus passive, he sees the forces of young Fortinbras, whose preparation against Denmark has been diverted to the Polack, pass over a plain before him, and again has clear intellectual sense of his own fault. He can tell himself what the play tells to us all, that— "He that made us with such large discourse, That capability and God-like reason To fust in us unused." All deeds of Hamlet are by act without premeditation. By sudden impulse he stabs Polonius behind the arras, without time even to give full birth to the thought that he may be killing the king. No thinking of his could possibly have foreseen or brought the pirate ship that came into engagement with the ship carrying him to England ; and it was not even with design so to return to Denmark that he leapt to the other deck as the ships grappled for action. But when he had returned he was again passive. He accepted passively the challenge to the fencing match, and when he at last did kill his own and his father's murderer, it was by action on the impulse of the moment. It was done rashly, as Hamlet said to Horatio of an act of his on board the ship; and Hamlet's comment on this rashness has in it the soul of the play "Let us know, Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us, Rough hew them how we will." There are many Hamlets in the world with intellectual power for large usefulness, who wait, day by day and year by year, in the hope to do more perfectly what they live to do; die, therefore, and leave their lives unused; while men of lower power, prompt for action, are content and ready to do what they can, well knowing that at the best they can only rough hew, but in humble trust that leaves to God the issues of the little service they may bring. It is a last touch to the significance of this whole play that at its close the man whose fault is the reverse of Hamlet's-the man of ready action, though it be with little thought, the stir of whose energies was felt in the opening scene-re-enters from his victory over the Polack, and the curtain falls on Fortinbras, King. TRANSLATORS CHAPTER XV. YOUNGER WRITERS AT THE END OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN 1586 TO 1603. Translators. SIR JOHN HARINGTON was the son of a John Harington who throve in the service of King Henry VIII., and pleased the king by marrying, in 1546, one of his illegitimate daughters, to whom the king had given the lands of two forfeited monasteries. She died soon afterwards, childless; and John Harington the elder, who went into the service of the Princess Elizabeth, published in 1550 a translation of "The booke of freendeship by M. T. Cicero." He also praised in private verse the princess's six gentlewomen, and took one of them--Isabella, daughter of Sir John Markham-for second wife in 1554. Within the first year of their marriage they were imprisoned, with Princess Elizabeth, in the Tower. In 1561 their son John was born, and had Elizabeth, then queen, for godmother. Sir John John Harington the younger had in his youth the queen for friend. He was educated at Eton and at Christ's College, Cambridge, then studied law at Lincoln's Inn, had reputation at Court for wit, and at home for spending more than his allowance warranted. At the age of about twenty-three he married. While amusing the Court with free epigrams and playful verses, that were passed from hand to hand, he translated for the ladies the twenty-eighth canto of "Orlando Furioso," that canto which Ariosto in its first lines advised ladies, and those who valued ladies, to avoid; he told them that his story was complete without it. The queen thought it impudent to pick out this story of Giocondo for translation, and she bade Harington go home and not show himself again at Court until he brought with him a translation of the whole of the "Orlando." A free translation accordingly was made, in the octave rhyme of the original, with haste and ease, and it was first published, in 1591, as “Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, by John Harington," the translator's age being thirty. Harington prefixed to this first English translation of Ariosto's masterpiece "An Apologie of Poetrie." There was a second edition in 1607, and a third in 1637, "with the addition of the Author's Epigrams,” in four books. Without being a great poet, Harington rhymed easily, and had a ready pen. His version of "Orlando" attempts no subtleties of skill in the exact rendering of lines and stanzas ; but as a reproduction of the whole poem for English readers it was, and is, a very pleasant book. It pleased Elizabeth. In the year after its production she honoured John Harington -not yet Sir John-at Kelston, near Bath, an estate that had belonged to his father's first wife, Henry VIII's daughter. In 1596 Harington was at Court again, and showed his wit in imitation of Rabelais-or as he wrote it, "the reverent Rabbles (quem honoris causa nomino, that is, whom I should not name 'save without reverence')" The piece was called "A new Discourse of a stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Aiax. Written by Misacmos to his friend and Cosin Philostilpnos." "Ajax" stood for "a jakes," and the metamorphosis was really the introduction of a most essential sanitary reform set up, among other curiosities, at his own house at Kelston, the invention of an efficient water-closet with accompanying drainage. The Rabelaisian style, as Harington used it, was deliberately meant to claim free use of homely words in necessary matters; to defend the honesty of nature. It has not an indecent line, is very wholesome in its aim, but is, in the conventional sense, very indelicate. He cites a story to the point, told, he said, “by a grave and godly lady who was grandmother to all his wife's children": "A Hermit and an Angel walking in the streets together met a gong-farmer, with his cart full laden. The poor Hermit, as other men did, stopped his nostrils and betook him to the other side of the street, hastening from the sour carriage all he could; but the Angel kept on his way, seeming no whit offended with the savour, at which the Hermit marvelled. There came not long after by them a woman gorgeously attired, well perfumed, well attended with coaches and torches, to convey her, perhaps, to some nobleman's chamber. The good Hermit, somewhat revived with the fair sight and sweet savour, began to stand at the gaze. On the other side the good Angel now stopped his nose, and both hastened himself away and beckoned his companion from the place. At which the Hermit more marvelling than before, he was told by the Angel that this fine courtesan laden with sin was a more stinking savour afore God and his holy Angels than that beastly cart laden with excrement." The " Metamorphosis" was followed, in the same year, by a mock apology: "An Apologie. 1. Or rather a Retraction. 2. Or rather a Recantation. 3. Or rather a Recapitulation. 4. Or rather a Replication. 5. Or rather an Examination. 6. Or rather an Accusation. 7. Or rather an Explication. 8. Or rather an Exhortation. 9. Or rather a Consideration. 10. Or rather a Confirmation. 11. Or rather all of them. 12. Or rather none of them." There was also, in the same year, "Vlysses upon Aiax. Written by Misodiaboles to his Friend Philaretes." After his wit had roused attention to his "Metamorphosis," which was reprinted three times in swift succession before it was put under ban, Harington published "The Anatomy of the Metamorphosed Ajax," with detailed plans and drawings |