^{Note 1 in page 741} As in Marston's Antonio's Revenge and Fletcher's Bloody Brother. See also my Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 11–12, 39–40.

^{Note 2 in page 741} Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, p. 9.

^{Note 3 in page 743} Roy Battenhouse, Marlowe's “Tamburlaine” (Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 13–15, 108–113.

^{Note 4 in page 743} See Battenhouse, p. 13, for a typical quotation.

^{Note 5 in page 745} Strongly corroborative is the evidence of Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy, a play manifestly influenced by Eamlet and one which carries this situation to its logical conclusion.

^{Note 6 in page 746} That Heaven was behind all acts of reward or punishment is so much an article of Elizabethan tragic doctrine as to be instantly accepted at its face value by the audience without scrupulous enquiry into the hidden workings by which Heaven produced the results. Nor is it likely that Shakespeare worried much about the exact method or implications of this working in the situation in question. Heaven could readily order the ironic accident which, as a punishment, placed Polonius rather than Claudius behind the arras. However, with the proviso that there is no need to believe that Shakespeare or his audience sought out the implications in full detail, it may be remarked that the action of Heaven was theologically explicable. The crucial point is the distinction between foreknowledge and fore-ordination. It cannot be taken that Heaven fore-ordained that Hamlet should disobey and impulsively attempt revenge before Heaven had provided the opportunity and means for exhibiting the act as one of justice. On the other hand, one cannot limit the knowledge of God; and thus Heaven could foresee that Hamlet would perform this action. Conditional upon this foreknowledge, therefore, Heaven orders it so that Polonius substitutes for Claudius. The actions of Heaven conditional upon God's knowledge of the future are theologically quite different from Heaven's preordination, which wills certain events to take place.

^{Note 7 in page 747} This point needs, emphasis because the prayer scene is still occasionally cited as the climax. The climax is that scene in a play in which an action occurs which tips the scales for or against the fate of the protagonist in terms of the future action. The arguments for the prayer scene as the climax are superficial, for they turn only on the point that Hamlet suffers death in the catastrophe because he spared Claudius in this scene. Two considerations are always present in a tragedy. First, the climax must directly produce a train of action that leads to the catastrophe. Second, if we may briefly define tragedy as a series of morally determinate actions, the climactic scene must involve a morally determined action which justifies the tragic catastrophe to come. If we survey the prayer scene according to these two considerations, we may see that neither applies. Plotwise, no train of action results from the sparing of Claudius. Claudius' own plan, the English voyage with its deadly ending, has already been set in motion, but is to prove abortive. On the contrary, as a direct result of the killing of Polonius the plot picks up Laertes as his revenger. Claudius' own plan of the poisoned cup backfires and is one of the means for his downfall, but Laertes' plan succeeds and is the immediate cause of Hamlet's death. By a direct and continuous line of action the catastrophe goes back to the killing of Polonius. What the action of the play would have been like if Laertes had not had the occasion to revenge the death of his father, we cannot tell. This in itself is enough to remove the prayer scene from consideration as the climax from the point of view of the plot. As for the second requirement—the morally determinate action—if Hamlet's sparing of Claudius is to be a tragic error of such magnitude as to make his subsequent death an act of justice, we must take it that he should have killed Claudius at prayer. This would require the audience to be convinced that Hamlet's decision was wrong in the light of his belief that Claudius was in a state of grace. It is difficult to see how such a theory could be defended. On the other hand, if the ethical climax is to coincide with the plot climax, as it should, we are forced into examining the killing of Polonius as a morally determined action. Greek tragedy might have made of this scene a study of simple fatal error, something like Oedipus slaying his father, and drawn the moral of the ways in which fate interferes with human life. But the Elizabethan is not the Greek drama, and the English tragic writers would have agreed with Milton's God who pronounces, “What I will is Fate.” The general Christian framework of Elizabethan tragic ethics demands that the slaying of Polonius be more than an unlucky accident. So far as I can see, the only way to give it a moral determinism is to argue, as I do, that it was a real error for Hamlet to attempt his private revenge at this time when Heaven had put him in a position of a minister for whom public justice would be arranged at Heaven's own pleasure. The tragic error consists in the fact that Hamlet's emotional drive is too strong to permit him to wait upon what appears to him to be Heaven's extraordinary delay. Paradoxically, therefore, the. tragic fact is not Helmet's delay except for its effect upon his cumulative impatience. but instead his attempt at .action. Once again, Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy must be cited, with its protagonist who is in the same fix but who successfully overcomes the temptation to anticipate Heaven and who therefore survives.