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Chapter 10: Interfaces
Test Bank
Multiple Choice
Answer: b
Answer: d
Answer: b
Answer: a
Answer: b
Answer: d
Answer: d
Answer: c
Answer: a
Answer: c
Answer: a
12. Suppose you are writing an interface called Resizable, which includes one void
method called resize.
Which of the following can be used to complete the interface declaration correctly?
Answer: c
_____________________________
{
// code to encrypt the text using encryption key goes here
}
}
Which of the following method headers should be used to complete the SecretText
class?
Answer: b
void changeSize();
}
Answer: a
The compiler complains that the getMeasure method has a weaker access level than the
Measurable interface. Why?
a) All of the methods in a class have a default access level of package access, while the
methods of an interface have a default access level of private.
b) All of the methods in a class have a default access level of package access, while the
methods of an interface have a default access level of public.
c) The variable onHandCount was not declared with public access.
d) The getMeasure method was declared as private in the Measurable interface.
Answer: b
17. Which of the following is true regarding a class and interface types?
a) You can convert from a class type to any interface type that is in the same package as
the class.
b) You can convert from a class type to any interface type that the class implements.
c) You can convert from a class type to any interface type that the class defines.
d) You cannot convert from a class type to any interface type.
Answer: b
a)
Coin dime = new Coin(0.1, "dime");
Measurable x = dime;
b)
Coin dime = new Coin(0.1, "dime");
Dataset x = dime;
c)
Coin dime = new Coin(0.1, "dime");
DataSet x == (Measureable)dime;
d)
Coin dime = new Coin(0.1, "dime");
BankAccount x = dime;
Answer: a
19. Which of the following statements about converting between types is true?
a) When you cast number types, you take a risk that an exception will occur.
b) When you cast number types, you will not lose information.
c) When you cast object types, you take a risk of losing information.
d) When you cast object types, you take a risk that an exception will occur.
Answer: d
a) You can define an interface variable that refers to an object of any class in the same
package.
b) You cannot define a variable whose type is an interface.
c) You can instantiate an object from an interface class.
d) You can define an interface variable that refers to an object only if the object belongs
to a class that implements the interface.
Answer: d
21. You have created a class named Motor that implements an interface named
Measurable. You have declared a variable of type Measureable named
motorTemperature. Which of the following statements is true?
Answer: b
22. ____ occurs when a single class has several methods with the same name but
different parameter types.
a) Casting
b) Polymorphism
c) Overloading
d) Instantiation
Answer: c
a) overloading
b) callback
c) early binding
d) polymorphism
Answer: d
24. If you have multiple classes in your program that have implemented the same
interface in different ways, how is the correct method executed?
a) The Java virtual machine must locate the correct method by looking at the class of the
actual object.
b) The compiler must determine which method implementation to use.
c) The method must be qualified with the class name to determine the correct method.
d) You cannot have multiple classes in the same program with different implementations
of the same interface.
Answer: a
What method invocation can be used to complete the code segment below?
a) increaseSize()
b) decreaseSize()
c) display()
d) display(5)
Answer: c
26. Which of the following can potentially be changed when implementing an interface?
Answer: c
28. The method below is designed to print the smaller of two values received as
arguments. Select the correct expression to complete the method.
Answer: d
a) A callback can allow you to implement a new method for a class that is not under your
control.
b) A callback can be implemented using an interface.
c) A callback is a mechanism for specifying code to be executed later.
d) A callback method declared in an interface must specify the class of objects that it will
manipulate.
Answer: d
Answer: b
31. You wish to implement a callback method for an object created from a system class
that you cannot change. What approach does the textbook recommend to accomplish
this?
Answer: d
Answer: c
What parameter declaration can be used to complete the callback measure method?
a) Object anObject
b) String anObject
c) Object aString
d) String aString
Answer: a
Title: Identify correct parameter declaration to complete callback method
Difficulty: Easy
Section Reference 1: 10.4 Using Interfaces for Callbacks
34. Assuming that interface Resizable is declared elsewhere, consider the following
class declaration:
Which of the following declarations can be used to complete the main method?
Answer: b
Title: Identify correct declaration using inner class to complete main method
Difficulty: Medium
Section Reference 1: 10.5 Inner Classes
a) An inner class can only be defined within a specific method of its enclosing class.
b) An inner class can only be defined outside of any method within its enclosing class.
c) An inner class must implement an interface.
d) An inner class may be anonymous.
Answer: d
Answer: d
Answer: b
Answer: d
a) An anonymous class.
b) An anonymous object.
c) An abstract object.
d) An abstract class.
Answer: b
a) A mock class does not provide an implementation of the services of the actual class.
b) A mock class provides a complete implementation of the services of the actual class.
c) A mock class provides a simplified implementation of the services of the actual class.
d) A mock class must be an interface.
Answer: c
41. What role does an interface play when using a mock class?
a) The mock class should be an interface that will be implemented by the real class.
b) The real class should be an interface that will be implemented by the mock class.
c) Interfaces are not involved when using mock classes.
d) An interface should be implemented by both the real class and the mock class to
guarantee that the mock class accurately simulates the real class when used in a program.
Answer: d
a) Your program must instruct the Java window manager to send it notifications about
specific types of events to which the program wishes to respond.
b) The Java window manager will automatically send your program notifications about
all events that have occurred.
c) Your program must respond to notifications of all types of events that are sent to it by
the Java window manager.
D) Your program must override the default methods to handle events.
Answer: a
Which of the following method headers should be used to complete the ClickListener
class?
Answer: a
44. ____ are generated when the user presses a key, clicks a button, or selects a menu
item.
a) Listeners
b) Interfaces.
c) Events.
d) Errors.
Answer: c
45. A/an ____ belongs to a class whose methods describe the actions to be taken when a
user clicks a user-interface graphical object.
a) Event listener
b) Event source
c) Action listener
d) Action method
Answer: a
a) A JButton object.
b) An event listener.
c) An inner class.
d) An event adapter.
Answer: a
47. To respond to a button event, a listener must supply instructions for the ____ method
of the ActionListener interface.
a) actionEvent.
b) actionPerformed
c) eventAction
d) eventResponse
Answer: b
48. To associate an event listener with a JButton component, you must use the ___
method of the JButton class.
a) addEventListener.
b) addActionListener.
c) addButtonListener.
d) addListener
Answer: b
49. The methods of a/an ____ describe the actions to be taken when an event occurs.
a) event source
b) event listener
c) event interface
d) action source
Answer: b
50. When an event occurs, the event source notifies all ____.
a) components
b) panels
c) interfaces
d) event listeners
Answer: d
Section 10.7 Event Handling
Title: When an event occurs, the event source notifies all ____.
Difficulty: Easy
a) text area
b) table
c) panel
d) rectangle
Answer: c
a)
public interface AccountListener()
{
void actionPerformed(AccountEvent event);
}
b)
public interface AccountListener()
{
void actionPerformed(AccountEvent);
}
c)
public interface AccountListener
{
void actionPerformed(AccountEvent event);
}
d)
public abstract AccountListener
{
void actionPerformed(AccountEvent event);
}
Answer: c
Answer: a
a) frame.add(panel);
b) frame.add(JPanel panel);
c) frame.addComponent(panel);
d) frame.addComponent(JPanel panel);
Answer: a
Section 10.8 Building Applications with Buttons Title: How to add a panel to a frame.
Difficulty: Easy
/**
An action listener that prints.
*/
public class ClickListener implements ActionListener
{
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event)
{
System.out.println("I was clicked.");
}
}
Which of the following statements will complete this code?
a) java.swing.event.ActionEvent;.
b) javax.swing.event.ActionEvent;
c) javax.awt.event.ActionEvent;
d) java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
Answer: d
56. Event listeners are often installed as ____ classes so that they can have access to the
surrounding fields, methods, and final variables.
a) Inner
b) Interface
c) Abstract
d) Helper
Answer: a
a) An inner class may not be declared within a method of the enclosing scope.
b) An inner class may only be declared within a method of the enclosing scope.
c) An inner class can access variables from the enclosing scope only if they are passed as
constructor or method parameters.
d) The methods of an inner class can access variables declared in the enclosing scope.
Answer: d
Answer: b
59. An inner class can access local variables from the enclosing scope only if they are
declared as ____.
a) private
b) public
c) static
d) final
Answer: b
Answer: d
Section 10.8 Building Applications with ButtonsTitle: Which statement creates a button?
Difficulty: Easy
61. To build a user interface that contains graphical components, the components ____.
a) Must be added directly to a frame component.
b) Must each be added to a separate panel.
c) Must be added to a panel that is contained within a frame.
d) Must be added to a frame that is contained within a panel.
Answer: c
Section 10.8 Building Applications with ButtonsTitle: To build a user interface, the
graphical components ____.
Difficulty: Easy
62. How do you specify what the program should do when the user clicks a button?
a) Specify the actions to take in a class that implements the ButtonListener interface.
b) Specify the actions to take in a class that implements the ButtonEvent interface .
c) Specify the actions to take in a class that implements the ActionListener interface.
d) Specify the actions to take in a class that implements the EventListener interface.
Answer: c
Section 10.8 Building Applications with ButtonsTitle: How to specify action for a
button?
Difficulty: Medium
63. A(n) ____ has an instance method addActionListener() for specifying which
object is responsible for implementing the action associated with the object.
a) JFrame
b) JSlider
c) JButton
d) JLabel
Answer: c
Section 10.8 Building Applications with ButtonsTitle: How to specify action for a button.
Difficulty: Medium
Answer: c
Section 10.8 Building Applications with ButtonsTitle: What is wrong with this listener
code?
Difficulty: Medium
Which of the local variables can be accessed within the actionPerformed method?
Answer: c
Section 10.8 Building Applications with ButtonsTitle: Which local variables can be
accessed?
Difficulty: Medium
66. Consider the following code snippet which is supposed to show the total order
amount when the button is clicked:
public static void main(String[] args)
{
final Order myOrder = new Order();
JButton button = new JButton("Calculate");
final JLabel label = new JLabel("Total amount due");
. . .
class MyListener implements ActionListener
{
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event)
{
label.setText("Total amount due " + myOrder.getAmountDue());
}
}
ActionListener listener = new MyListener();
}
Answer: b
a) setPreferredDimensions.
b) setInitialDimensions.
c) setPreferredSize.
d) setInitialSize.
Answer: c
68) Assuming that the ClickListener class implements the ActionListener interface,
what statement should be used to complete the following code segment?
a) myPanel.addActionListener(listener);
b) myButton.addActionListener(listener);
c) myPanel.addActionListener(myButton);
d) myButton.addActionListener(ClickListener);
Answer: b
Title: Identify correct statement to add event listener object to a graphical object
Difficulty: Medium
Section Reference 1: 10.8 Building Applications with Buttons
69) Assume that the TimerListener class implements the ActionListener interface. If
the actionPerformed method in TimerListener needs to be executed every second,
what statement should be used to complete the following code segment?
Answer: d
a) java.awt.
b) javax.awt.
c) java.swing.
d) javax.swing.
Answer: d
71. When you use a timer, you need to define a class that implements the ____ interface.
a) TimerListener
b) TimerActionListener
c) ActionListener
d) StartTimerListener
Answer: c
72. The ____ class in the javax.swing package generates a sequence of events, spaced
apart at even time intervals.
a) TimeClock
b) Timer
c) Clock
d) StopWatch
Answer: b
Section 10.9 Processing Timer Events
Title: Which class generates events at even time intervals?
Difficulty: Easy
frame.setSize(FRAME_WIDTH, FRAME_HEIGHT);
frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
frame.setVisible(true);
Answer: d
public RectangleComponent()
{
// The rectangle that the paint method draws
box = new Rectangle(BOX_X, BOX_Y,
BOX_WIDTH, BOX_HEIGHT);
}
Hamlet's faith and trust in humankind are shattered before the Ghost
appears to him. From the moment when his father's spirit
communicates to him a far more appalling insight into the facts of
the situation, his whole inner man is in wild revolt.
This is the cause of the leave-taking, the silent leave-taking, from
Ophelia, whom in letters he had called his soul's idol. His ideal of
womanhood no longer exists. Ophelia now belongs to those "trivial
fond records" which the sense of his great mission impels him to
efface from the tablets of his memory. There is no room in his soul
for his task and for her, passive and obedient to her father as she is.
Confide in her he cannot; she has shown how unequal she is to the
exigencies of the situation by refusing to receive his letters and
visits. She actually hands over his last letter to her father, which
means that it will be shown and read at court. At last, she even
consents to play the spy upon him. He no longer believes or can
believe in any woman.
He intends to proceed at once to action, but too many thoughts
crowd in upon him. He broods over that horror which the Ghost has
revealed to him, and over the world in which such a thing could
happen; he doubts whether the apparition was really his father, or
perhaps a deceptive, malignant spirit; and, lastly, he has doubts of
himself, of his ability to upraise and restore what has been
overthrown, of his fitness for the vocation of avenger and judge. His
doubt as to the trustworthiness of the Ghost leads to the
performance of the play within the play, which proves the King's
guilt. His feeling of his own unfitness for his task leads to continued
procrastination.
During the course of the play it is sufficiently proved that he is not,
in the main, incapable of action. He does not hesitate to stab the
eavesdropper behind the arras; without wavering and without pity
he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to certain death; he boards
a hostile ship; and, never having lost sight of his purpose, he takes
vengeance before he dies. But it is clear, none the less, that he has a
great inward obstacle to overcome before he proceeds to the
decisive act. Reflection hinders him; his "resolution is sicklied o'er
with the pale cast of thought," as he says in his soliloquy.
He has become to the popular mind the great type of the
procrastinator and dreamer; and far on into this century, hundreds
of individuals, and even whole races, have seen themselves reflected
in him as in a mirror.
We must not forget, however, that this dramatic curiosity—a hero
who does not act—was, to a certain extent, demanded by the
technique of this particular drama. If Hamlet had killed the King
directly after receiving the Ghost's revelation, the play would have
come to an end with the first act. It was, therefore, absolutely
necessary that delays should arise.
Shakespeare is misunderstood when Hamlet is taken for that entirely
modern product—a mind diseased by morbid reflection, without
capacity for action. It is nothing less than a freak of ironic fate that
he should have become a sort of symbol of reflective sloth, this man
who has gunpowder in every nerve, and all the dynamite of genius
in his nature.
It was undeniably and indubitably Shakespeare's intention to give
distinctness to Hamlet's character by contrasting it with youthful
energy of action, unhesitatingly pursuing its aim.
While Hamlet is letting himself be shipped off to England, the young
Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, arrives with his soldiers, ready to risk
his life for a patch of ground that "hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it." Hamlet says to himself
(iv. 4):
"How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! ...
... I do not know
Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do.'"
And he despairs when he contrasts himself with Fortinbras, the
delicate and tender prince, who, at the head of his brave troops,
dares death and danger "even for an egg-shell":
"Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake."
But with Hamlet it is a question of more than "honour," a conception
belonging to a sphere far below his. It is natural that he should feel
ashamed at the sight of Fortinbras marching off to the sound of
drum and trumpet at the head of his forces—he, who has not carried
out, or even laid, any plan; who, after having by means of the play
satisfied himself of the King's guilt, and at the same time betrayed
his own state of mind, is now writhing under the consciousness of
impotence. But the sole cause of this impotence is the paralysing
grasp laid on all his faculties by his new realisation of what life is,
and the broodings born of this realisation. Even his mission of
vengeance sinks into the background of his mind. Everything is at
strife within him—his duty to his father, his duty to his mother,
reverence, horror of crime, hatred, pity, fear of action, and fear of
inaction. He feels, even if he does not expressly say so, how little is
gained by getting rid of a single noxious animal. He himself is
already so much more than what he was at first—the youth chosen
to execute a vendetta. He has become the great sufferer, who jeers
and mocks, and rebukes the world that racks him. He is the cry of
humanity, horror-struck at its own visage.
There is no "general meaning" on the surface of Hamlet. Lucidity
was not the ideal Shakespeare had before him while he was
producing this tragedy, as it had been when he was composing
Richard III. Here there are plenty of riddles and self-contradictions;
but not a little of the attraction of the play depends on this very
obscurity.
We all know that kind of well-written book which is blameless in
form, obvious in intention, and in which the characters stand out
sharply defined. We read it with pleasure; but when we have read it,
we are done with it. There is nothing to be read between the lines,
no gulf between this passage and that, no mystic twilight anywhere
in it, no shadows in which we can dream. And, again, there are
other books whose fundamental idea is capable of many
interpretations, and affords matter for much dispute, but whose
significance lies less in what they say to us than in what they lead us
to imagine, to divine. They have the peculiar faculty of setting
thoughts and feelings in motion; more thoughts than they
themselves contain, and perhaps of a quite different character.
Hamlet is such a book. As a piece of psychological development, it
lacks the lucidity of classical art; the hero's soul has all the
untranspicuousness and complexity of a real soul; but one
generation after another has thrown its imagination into the
problem, and has deposited in Hamlet's soul the sum of its
experience.
To Hamlet life is half reality, half a dream. He sometimes resembles
a somnambulist, though he is often as wakeful as a spy. He has so
much presence of mind that he is never at a loss for the aptest
retort, and, along with it, such absence of mind that he lets go his
fixed determination in order to follow up some train of thought or
thread some dream-labyrinth. He appals, amuses, captivates,
perplexes, disquiets us. Few characters in fiction have so disquieted
the world. Although he is incessantly talking, he is solitary by nature.
He typifies, indeed, that solitude of soul which cannot impart itself.
"His name," says Victor Hugo, "is as the name on a woodcut cut of
Albert Dürer's: Melancholia. The bat flits over Hamlet's head; at his
feet sit Knowledge, with globe and compass, and Love, with an
hour-glass; while behind him, on the horizon, rests a giant sun,
which only serves to make the sky above him darker." But from
another point of view Hamlet's nature is that of the hurricane—a
thing of wrath and fury, and tempestuous scorn, strong enough to
sweep the whole world clean.
There is in him no less indignation than melancholy; in fact, his
melancholy is a result of his indignation. Sufferers and thinkers have
found in him a brother. Hence the extraordinary popularity of the
character, in spite of its being the reverse of obvious.
Audiences and readers feel with Hamlet and understand him; for all
the better-disposed among us make the discovery, when we go forth
into life as grown-up men and women, that it is not what we had
imagined it to be, but a thousandfold more terrible. Something is
rotten in the state of Denmark. Denmark is a prison, and the world
is full of such dungeons. A spectral voice says to us: "Horrible things
have happened; horrible things are happening every day. Be it your
task to repair the evil, to rearrange the course of things. The world
is out of joint; it is for you to set it right." But our arms fall
powerless by our sides. Evil is too strong, too cunning for us.
In Hamlet, the first philosophical drama of the modern era, we meet
for the first time the typical modern character, with its intense
feeling of the strife between the ideal and the actual world, with its
keen sense of the chasm between power and aspiration, and with
that complexity of nature which shows itself in wit without mirth,
cruelty combined with sensitiveness, frenzied impatience at war with
inveterate procrastination.
[1] See Hermann Türck: Das psychologische Problem in der Hamlet-Tragödie.
1890.
[2] See E. Sullivan: "On Hamlet's Age." New Shakspere Society's Transactions.
1880-86.
XV
HAMLET AS A DRAMA
"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you would make of
me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my
stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would
sound me from my lowest notes to the top of my compass: and
there is much music, excellent music in this little organ; yet
cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to
be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will,
though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."
XVI
XVII
Who could have imagined that Hamlet, three years after its
publication, would be so well-known and so dear to English sailors
that they could act it for their own amusement at a moment's notice!
Could there be a stronger proof of its universal popularity? It is a
true picture of the culture of the Renaissance, this tragedy of the
Prince of Denmark acted by common English sailors off the west
coast of Africa. It is a pity that Shakespeare himself, in all human
probability, never knew of it.
Hamlet's ever-increasing significance as time rolls on is proportionate
to his significance in his own day. A great deal in the poetry of the
nineteenth century owes its origin to him. Goethe interpreted and
remodelled him in Wilhelm Meister, and this remodelled Hamlet
resembles Faust. The trio, Faust, Gretchen, Valentin, in Goethe's
drama answers to the trio, Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes. Faust
transplanted into English soil produced Byron's Manfred, a true
though far-off descendant of the Danish Prince. In Germany, again,
the Byronic development assumed a new and Hamlet-like (or rather
Yorick-like) form in Heine's bitter and fantastic wit, in his hatreds and
caprices and intellectual superiority. Borne is the first to interpret
Hamlet as the German of his day, always moving in a circle and
never able to act. But he feels the mystery of the play, and says
aptly and beautifully, "Over the picture hangs a veil of gauze. We
want to lift it to examine the painting more closely, but find that the
veil itself is painted."
In France, the men of Alfred de Musset's generation, whom he has
portrayed in his Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle, remind us in
many ways of Hamlet—nervous, inflammable as gunpowder, broken-
winged, with no sphere of action commensurate with their desires,
and with no power Of action in the sphere which lay open to them.
And Lorenzaccio, perhaps Musset's finest male character, is the
French Hamlet—practised in dissimulation, procrastinating, witty,
gentle to women yet wounding them with cruel words, morbidly
desirous to atone for the emptiness of his evil life by one great deed,
and acting too late, uselessly, desperately.
Hamlet, who centuries before had been young England, and was to
Musset, for a time, young France, became in the 'forties, as Borne
had foretold, the accepted type of Germany. "Hamlet is Germany,"
sang Freiligrath.[1]
Kindred political conditions determined that the figure of Hamlet
should at the same period, and twenty years later to a still greater
extent, dominate Russian literature. Its influence can be traced from
Pushkin and Gogol to Gontscharoff and Tolstoi, and it actually
pervades the whole life-work of Turgueneff. But in this case Hamlet's
vocation of vengeance is overlooked; the whole stress is laid on the
general discrepancy between reflection and power of action.
In the development of Polish literature, too, during this century,
there came a time when the poets were inclined to say: "We are
Hamlet; Hamlet is Poland." We find marked traits of his character
towards the middle of the century in all the imaginative spirits of
Poland: in Mickiewicz, in Slowacki, in Krasinski. From their youth
they had stood in his position. Their world was out of joint, and was
to be set right by their weak arms. High-born and noble-minded,
they feel, like Hamlet, all the inward fire and outward impotence of
their youth; the conditions that surround them are to them one
great horror; they are disposed at one and the same time to
dreaming and to action, to over-much reflection and to recklessness.
Like Hamlet, they have seen their mother, the land that gave them
birth, profaned by passing under the power of a royal robber and
murderer. The court to which at times they are offered access strikes
them with terror, as the court of Claudius struck terror to the Danish
Prince, as the court in Krasinski's Temptation (a symbolic
representation of the court of St. Petersburg) strikes terror to the
young hero of the poem. These kinsmen of Hamlet are, like him,
cruel to their Ophelia, and forsake her when she loves them best;
like him, they allow themselves to be sent far away to foreign lands;
and when they speak they dissemble like him—clothe their meaning
in similes and allegories. What Hamlet says of himself applies to
them: "Yet have I something in me dangerous." Their peculiarly
Polish characteristic is that what enervates and impedes them is not
their reflective but their poetic bias. Reflection is what ruins the
German of this type; wild dissipation the Frenchman; indolence, self-
mockery, and self-despair the Russian; but it is imagination that
leads the Pole astray and tempts him to live apart from real life.
The Hamlet character presents a multitude of different aspects.
Hamlet is the doubter; he is the man whom over-scrupulousness or
over-deliberation condemns to inactivity; he is the creature of pure
intelligence, who sometimes acts nervously, and is sometimes too
nervous to act at all; and, lastly, he is the avenger, the man who
dissembles that his revenge may be the more effectual. Each of
these aspects is developed by the poets of Poland. There is a touch
of Hamlet in several of Mickiewicz's creations—in Wallenrod, in
Gustave, in Conrad, in Robak. Gustave speaks the language of
philosophic aberration; Conrad is possessed by the spirit of
philosophic brooding; Wallenrod and Robak dissemble or disguise
themselves for the sake of revenge, and the latter, like Hamlet, kills
the father of the woman he loves. In Slowacki's work the Hamlet-
type takes a much more prominent place. His Kordjan is a Hamlet
who follows his vocation of avenger, but has not the strength for it.
The Polish tendency to fantasticating interposes between him and
his projected tyrannicide. And while Slowacki gives us the radical
Hamlet type, so we find the corresponding conservative Hamlet in
Krasinski. The hero of Krasinski's Undivine Comedy has more than
one trait in common with the Prince of Denmark. He has Hamlet's
sensitiveness and power of imagination. He is addicted to
monologues and cultivates the drama. He has an extremely tender
conscience, but can commit most cruel actions. He is punished for
the excessive irritability of his character by the insanity of his wife,
very much as Hamlet, by his feigned madness, leads to the real
madness of Ophelia. But this Hamlet is consumed by a more modern
doubt than that which besets his Renaissance prototype. Hamlet
doubts whether the spirit on whose behest he is acting is more than
an empty phantasm. When Count Henry shuts himself up in "the
castle of the Holy Trinity," he is not sure that the Holy Trinity itself is
more than a figment of the brain.
In other words: nearly two centuries and a half after the figure of
Hamlet was conceived in Shakespeare's imagination, we find it living
in English and French literature, and reappearing as a dominant type
in German and two Slavonic languages. And now, three hundred
years after his creation, Hamlet is still the confidant and friend of
sad and thoughtful souls in every land. There is something unique in
this. With such piercing vision has Shakespeare searched out the
depths of his own, and at the same time of all human, nature, and
so boldly and surely has he depicted the outward semblance of what
he saw, that, centuries later, men of every country and of every race
have felt their own being moulded like wax in his hand, and have
seen themselves in his poetry as in a mirror.
[1]
"Deutschland ist Hamlet! Ernst und stumm
In seinen Thoren jede Nacht
Geht die begrabne Freiheit um,
Und winkt den Männern auf der Wacht.
Da steht die Hohe, blank bewehrt,
Und sagt dem Zaudrer, der noch zweifelt:
'Sei mir ein Rächer, zieh dein Schwert!
Man hat mir Gift in's Ohr geträufelt.'"
XVIII
HAMLET AS A CRITIC
Along with so much else, Hamlet gives us what we should scarcely
have expected—an insight into Shakespeare's own ideas of his art as
poet and actor, and into the condition and relations of his theatre in
the years 1602-3.
If we read attentively the Prince's words to the players, we see
clearly why it is always the sweetness, the mellifluousness of
Shakespeare's art that his contemporaries emphasise. To us he may
seem audacious, harrowingly pathetic, a transgressor of all bounds;
in comparison with contemporary artists—not only with the specially
violent and bombastic writers, like the youthful Marlowe, but with all
of them—he is self-controlled, temperate, delicate, beauty-loving as
Raphael himself. Hamlet says to the players—
"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of