Jones, Ernest. "The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet's
Mystery: A Study in Motive." The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (January, 1910): 72-113.
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JONES

the spectator be aroused for an obviously one-sided struggle.
The external situation is similarly distorted for the needs of
this hypothesis.  On which side the people would have been
in any conflict is clearly enough perceived by Claudius, who
dare not even punish Hamlet for killing Polonius.  (Act IV,
Sc. 3),

"Yet must not we put the strong law on him;
He's loved of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgment, but in their eyes;"
and again in Act IV, Sc. 7,
                        "The other motive,
Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general gender bear him;
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber'd for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aim'd them."
The ease with which the people could be roused against
Claudius is well demonstrated after Polonius' death, when
Laertes carried them with him in an irresistible demand for
vengeance, which would promptly have been consummated
had not the king convinced the avenger that he was innocent.
Here the people, the "false Danish dogs" whose loyalty to
Claudius was so feather-light that they gladly hailed as king
even Laertes, a man who had no sort of claim on the throne,
were ready enough to believe in the murderous guilt of their
monarch without any shred of supporting evidence, when the
accusation was not even true, and where no motive for murder
could be discerned at all approaching in weight the two power-
ful ones that had actually led him to kill his brother.  Where
Laertes succeeded, it is not likely that Hamlet, the darling of
the people, would have failed.  Can we not imagine the march
of events during the play before the court had Laertes been at
the head instead of Hamlet; the straining observation of the
fore-warned nobles, the starting-up of the guilty monarch who
can bear the spectacle no longer, the open murmuring of the
audience, the resistless impeachment by the avenger, and the
instant execution effected by him and his devoted friends?
Indeed, the whole Laertes episode seems almost to have been
purposely woven into the drama so as to shew the world how
a pious son should really deal with his father's murderer, how
possible was the vengeance under these particular circum-
stances, and by contrast to illuminate the ignoble vacillation
of Hamlet whose honour had been doubly wounded by the
same treacherous villain.
      Most convincing proof of all that the tragedy cannot be