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Mr.William Shakespeare, whose well-meaning little costume play Hamlet was given in London for the first time last week, bears a name that is new to us, although we understand, or at least are so assured by the management, that he has a considerable local reputation in Warwickshire as a sonneteer. Why a writer of graceful little sonnets should have the ambition, still less conceive himself to have the ability, to create a tragic play capable of holding the attention of a London audience for three hours, we are unable to imagine. Merely to kill off seven (or was it eight?) of the leading characters in a play is not to write a tragedy. It is not thus that the great master-dramatists have purged our souls with pity and with terror. Mr.Shakespeare, like so many other young writers, mistakes violence for power, and, in his unfortunate lighter moments, buffoonery for humour. The real tragedy of last night was that a writer should so misunderstand and misuse the talent given to him.