WHEN the first performance of Hamlet ended, a column of people streamed into Maiden Lane and then dispersed, radially through the fields and thoroughfares of Southwark, eastward to London Bridge, northward along Horseshoe Alley to the fleet of wherries waiting on the Thames. A litter of nutshells and other debris remained in the darkening cavern of the Globe. The years have sifted into dust the Globe and all who gathered there; no scholarly effort nor feat of the imagination can reverse that ancient process. And even if the miracle occurred, if we could mingle with Shakespeare's audience reincarnate, its secret would prove no more penetrable than the secret of audiences now. What occurs within the minds and hearts of some thousand men and women is not casually revealed: an audience --almost any audience--is as difficult to appraise as the human race itself.
             Yet, here is a mystery that we cannot leave alone. How much or how little of Hamlet was understood and appreciated by those for whom it was written, what they took from the play and what they were meant to take, what part they played in its creation, whether Shakespeare wrote as he did because of the nature of everyday folk, in spite of it, or both--these questions reach to the core of something larger than dramatic art. They touch upon the worth and destiny of our kind: perfect answers would give us the gift of prophecy.
             Needless to say, my little essay will not supply the answers. It is intended to present the evidence with which the answers must conform. It assumes, perhaps invalidly, that we must map the limits of our knowledge, that we cannot be right about the soul of Shakespeare's audience if we are wrong about its body, that the number, kind, conduct, and visible response of the spectators are relevant factors, that we need a scaffolding of fact for the building of conjecture. In view of the nature of the evidence, even my limited aims may be ambitious enough. Elizabeth...