design. "When Shakespeare's plan is understood most of the criticisms of
Rymer and Voltaire vanish away," Johnson was to write some thirty years
later. Anonymous holds steadily for the integrity of Shakespeare's plan
in Hamlet. Of Act I, iii he says, "Concerning the Design of this scene,
we shall find it is necessary towards the whole plot of the Play"; he
speaks of I, iv as an "important Scene, on which turns the Whole Play";
the killing of Polonious, he explains, "was in Conformity to the Plan
_Shakespeare_ built his Play upon"; and finally, of the piece as a
whole, he asserts that "there is not one Scene but what some way or
other conduces toward the _Denoument_ of the Whole; and thus the Unity
of Action is indisputably kept up by everything tending to what we may
call the main Design, and it all hangs by Consequence so close together,
that no Scene can be omitted, without Prejudice to the Whole." When one
recalls that the idea of unity of design as evolved in Thomas Warton,
Hurd, and Johnson was the intermediate step on the way to a full theory
of organic unity we see the importance of such passages in the forward
march of criticism.

There is in the _Remarks_ a closer examination of event and character
than is usual in the period, again in the light of what it reasonable
and natural. The includes some "psychologizing" of persons in the play,
specifically in partial analyses of Laertes, Polonious, and Hamlet,
enough to foreshadow the later vogue but none of it very remarkable.
More worthy of notice is the author's use of a psychological method that
is to reappear in developed form in Coleridge: that is, a study of
successive scenes leading to a climactic moment--in this case Hamlet's
meeting with the ghost--for evidence of a skillful working up through
right preparatory touches to a point where the audience, in the words of
Anonymous, "are forced ... entirely to suspend their most fixed Opinions
and believe ..." This may have been done before in criticism; but if so