HAMLET.
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THIS is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read
of in our youth, and whom we seem almost to
remember in our after-years; he who made that
famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice
to the players, who thought "this goodly frame,
the earth, a steril promontory, and this brave
o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical
roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours;" whom "man
delighted not, nor woman neither;" he who
talked with the grave-diggers, and moralised on
Yorick's skull; the school-fellow of Rosencraus
and Guildenstern at Wittenberg; the friend of
Horatio; the lover of Ophelia; he that was mad
and sent to England; the slow avenger of his
father's death; who lived at the court of Horwendillus
five hundred years before we were
born, but all whose thoughts we seem to know
as well as we do our own, because we have read
them in Shakespear.
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Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings
but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What
then, are they not real? They are as real as
our own thoughts. Their reality is in the
reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This
play has a prophetic truth, which is above that
of history. Whoever has become thoughtful
and melancholy through his own mishaps or
those of others; whoever has borne about with
him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought
himself "too much i' th' sun;" whoever has
seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious
mists rising in his own breast, and could find in
the world before him only a dull blank with nothing
left remarkable in it; whoever has known
"the pangs of despised love, the insolence of
office, or the spurns which patient merit of the
unworthy takes;" he who has felt his mind sink
within him, and sadness cling to his heart like
a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and
his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange
things; who cannot be well at ease, while he
sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose
powers of action have been eaten up by thought,
he to whom the universe seems infinite, and
himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes
him careless of consequences, and who goes to
play as his best resource to shove off, to a
second remove, the evils of life by a mock-representation
of them--this is the true Hamlet.
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We have been so used to this tragedy that we
hardly know how to criticise it any more than
we should know how to describe our own faces.
But we must make such observations as we can.
It is the one of Shakespear's plays that we think
of oftenest, because it abounds most in striking
reflections on human life, and because the distresses
of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of
his mind, to the general account of humanity.
Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves,
because he applies it so himself as a
means of general reasoning. He is a great moraliser;
and what makes him worth attending
to is, that he moralises on his own feelings and
experience. He is not a common-place pedant.
If Lear shews the greatest depth of passion,
HAMLET is the most remarkable for the ingenuity,
originality, and unstudied developement
of character. Shakespear had more magnanimity
than any other poet, and he has strewn
more of it in this play than in any other.
There is no attempt to force an interest: every
thing is left tor time and circumstances to unfold.
The attention is excited without effort,
the incidents succeed each other as matters of
course, the characters think and speak and act
just as they might do, if left entirely to themselves.
There is no set purpose, no straining
at a point. The observations are suggested by
the passing scene--the gusts of passion come
and go like sounds of music borne on the wind.
The whole play is an exact transcript of what
might be supposed to have taken place at the
court of Denmark, at the remote period of time
fixed upon, before the modern refinements in
morals and manners were heard of. It would
have been interesting enough to have been admitted
as a by-stander in such a scene, at such
a time, to have heard and seen something of
what was going on. But here we are more than
spectators. We have not only "the outward
pageants and the signs of grief," but "we have
that within which passes shew." We read the
thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions
living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give
us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature:
but Shakespear, together with his own comments,
gives us the original text, that we may
judge for ourselves. This is a very great advantage.
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The character of Hamlet is itself a pure effusion
of genius. It is not a character marked by
strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement
of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is
as little of the hero as a man can well be: but
he is a young and princely novice, full of high
enthusiasm and quick sensibility--the sport of
circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining
on his own feelings, and forced from the
natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness
of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate
action, and is only hurried into extremities
on the spur of the occasion, when he has
no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills
Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters
which Rosencraus and Guildenstern are taking
with them to England, purporting his death.
At other times, when he is most bound to act,
he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical,
dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is
lost, and always finds some pretence to relapse
into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For
this reason he refuses to kill the King when he
is at his prayers, and by a refinement in malice,
which is in truth only an excuse for his own
want of resolution, defers his revenge to some
more fatal opportunity, when he shall be engaged
in some act "that has no relish of salvation in it."
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"He kneels and prays,
And now I'll do't, and so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng'd: that would be scand'd.
He killed my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, send him to heaven.
Why this is reward, not revenge.
Up sword and know thou a more horrid time,
When he is drunk, asleep, or in a rage."
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He is the prince of philosophical speculators,
grand he cannot have his revenge perfect,
according to the most refined idea his wish can
form, he misses it altogether. So he scruples
to trust the suggestions of the Ghost, contrives
the scene of the play to have surer proof of his
uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied with this
confirmation of his suspicions, and the success
of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet
he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself
with it, and tries to reason himself out of it.
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"How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To rust in us unus'd: now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event,--
A thought which quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward;--I do not know
Why yet I live to say, this thing's to do;
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do it. Examples gross as earth excite me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. 'Tis not to be great,
Never to stir without great argument;
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father killed, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?--0, front this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth."
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Still he does nothing; and this very speculation
on his own infirmity only affords him another
occasion for indulging it. It is not for any want
of attachment to his father or abhorrence of
his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it
is more to his taste to indulge his imagination
in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and
refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to
put them into immediate practice. His ruling
passion is to think, not to act: and any vague
presence that flatters this propensity instantly
diverts him from his previous purposes.
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The moral perfection of this character has
been called in question, we think, by those who
did not understand it. It is more interesting than
according to rules: amiable, though not faultless.
The ethical delineations of "that noble
and liberal casuist" (as Shakespear has been well
called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism
of morality. His plays are not copied
either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from
The Academy of Compliments! We confess,
we are a little shocked at the want of refinement
in those who are shocked at the want of refinement
in Hamlet. The want of punctilious exactness
in his behaviour either partakes of the
"license of the time," or else belongs to the
very excess of intellectual refinement in the
character, which makes the common rules of
life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose upon
him. He may be said to be amenable only to
the tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too
much taken up with the airy world of contemplation
to lay as much stress as he ought on
the practical consequences of things. His habitual
principles of action are unhinged and out
of joint with the time. His conduct to Ophelia
is quite natural in his circumstances. It is that
of assumed severity only. It is the effect of
disappointed hope, of bitter regrets, of affection
suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions
of the scene around him! Amidst the
natural and preternatural horrors of his situation,
he might be excused in delicacy from
carrying on a regular courtship. When "his father's
spirit was in arms," it was not a time for
the son to make love in. He could neither marry
Ophelia, nor wound her mind by explaining
the cause of his alienation, which he durst
hardly trust himself to think of. It would have
taken him years to have come to a direct explanation
on the point. In the harassed state of
his mind, he could not have done otherwise
than he did. His conduct does not contradict
what he says when he sees her funeral,
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"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum."
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Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful
than the Queen's apostrophe to Ophelia on
throwing flowers into the grave.
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----"Sweets to the sweet, farewell.
I hop'd thou should'st have been my Hamlet's wife:
I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid,
And not have strew'd thy grave."
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Shakespear was thoroughly a master of the
mixed motives of human character, and he
here shews us the Queen, who was so criminal
in some respects, not without sensibility
and affection in other relations of life.--Ophelia
is a character almost too exquisitely
touching to be dwelt upon. Oh rose of May,
oh flower too soon faded! Her love, her madness,
her death, are described with the truest
touches of tenderness and pathos. It is a character
which nobody but Shakespear could have
drawn in the way that he has done, and to the
conception of which there is not even the smallest
approach, except in some of the old romantic
ballads. Her brother, Laertes, is a character
we do not like so well: he is too hot and choleric,
and somewhat rodomontade. Polonius
is a perfect character in its kind; nor is there
any foundation for the objections which have
been made to the consistency of this part. It
is said that he acts very foolishly and talks
very sensibly. There is no inconsistency in
that. Again, that he talks wisely at one time
and foolishly at another; that his advice to Laertes
is very sensible, and his advice to the King
and Queen on the subject of Hamlet's madness
very ridiculous. But he gives the one as a father,
and is sincere in it; he gives the other
as a mere courtier, a busy-body, and is accordingly
officious, garrulous, and impertinent. In
short, Shakespear has been accused of inconsistency
in this and other characters, only because
he has kept up the distinction which
there is in nature, between the understandings
and the moral habits of men, between the absurdity
of their ideas and the absurdity of their
motives. Polonius is not a fool, but he makes
himself so. His folly, whether in his actions or
speeches, comes under the head of impropriety
of intention.
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We do not like to see our author's plays
acted, and least of all, HAMLET. There is no
play that suffers so much in being transferred
to the stage. Hamlet himself seems hardly
capable of being acted. Mr. Kemble unavoidably
fails in this character from a want of ease
and variety. The character of Hamlet is made
up of undulating lines; it has the yielding flexibility
of "a wave o' th' sea." Mr. Kemble
plays it like a man in armour, with a determined
inveteracy of purpose, in one undeviating
straight line, which is as remote from the
natural grace and refined susceptibility of the
character, as the sharp angles and abrupt starts
which Mr. Kean introduces into the part. Mr.
Kean's Hamlet is as much too splenetic and
rash as Mr. Kemble's is too deliberate and formal.
His manner is too strong and pointed.
He throws a severity, approaching to virulence,
into the common observations and answers.
There is nothing of this in Hamlet. He is, as
it were, wrapped up in his reflections, and only
thinks aloud. There should therefore be no
attempt to impress what he says upon others
by a studied exaggeration of emphasis or manner;
no talking at his hearers. There should
be as much of the gentleman and scholar as
possible infused into the part, and as little of
the actor. A pensive air of sadness should sit
reluctantly upon his brow, but no appearance
of fixed and sullen gloom. He is full of weakness
and melancholy, but there is no harshness
in his nature. He is the most amiable of misanthropes.
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