HAMLET certainly did have an uncle. And it is not Claudius (as he is called in that "perverted" form of Hamlet's story which is most familiar to us to whom Mr. Cabell refers. It is a certain Wiglerus who, in spite of his strange and somewhat comic name, turns out to be none other than the stock Cabell hero, although figuring in a highly exotic environment. One would say, offhand, that the world of the Norse sagas is the last place to look for one of Mr. Cabell's latter-day Jurgens: middle-aged, disillusioned-but-invincibly-romantic, garrulous, priapic.

And, on the whole, we should be happier not to find him in such an unfriendly world, mingling blood-feuds with his seductions and urbanity with his conforming to the mores of a primitive society. For the result fails of inclusion in any of the three categories of the old saw. What is more important, Wiglerus' character keeps "Hamlet Had an Uncle" from being a rather good transcription of a saga, and the unfriendly world keeps Wiglerus from making his story a typical Cabell novel.

What Mr. Cabell has tried to do is to present, in comparatively unvarnished form, the original form of the Hamlet-story. This original, which is known to most of us from the prefaces of various editions of Shakespeare's play, is curious and not uninteresting, although it serves chiefly to teach us how brilliantly and completely Shakespeare transformed his material. The saga-Hamlet is in most respects unrecognizable; and he is unquestionably far exceeded in interest by his witty and cynical uncle. To make a Jurgen out of Hamlet would have been impossible; to make one of Wiglerus was at least feasible. And so Wiglerus joined the great tradition.

Mr. Cabell has wandered far afield since he bade farewell to Poictesme. He has explored the land of dreams, Renaissance Italy and now Jutland of the saga-time. But the new climes have not been, on the whole, congenial. For a writer of Mr. Cabell's peculiar gifts, the world of his own imagining was the most comfortable. Certainly his attempt to restore a world and a story which have been clouded over by Shakespeare's play makes neither sense nor a good novel. He may say of Poictesme, as Touchstone once said, "When I I was at home, I was in a better place."