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Goethe, Coleridge, Schlegel, Lamb, Hazlitt, | But their incredulity is at once subdued; and we may add Mrs. Jameson, besides and a resolution is taken by Horatio upon anonymous writers out of number, and some the conviction that what he once held as a of the very highest order of excellence, "fantasy," is a dreadful thing, of whose exhave brought to the illustration of this play istence there can be no doubt:a most valued fund of judgment, taste, and æsthetical knowledge. To condense what is most deserving of remembrance in these admirable productions, within due limits, would be impossible. We must endeavour, therefore, to feel ourselves in the condition of one who has, however imperfectly, worked out in his own mind a comprehension of the idea of Shakspere; occasionally assisting our development of this inadequate comprehension by a few extracts from some of the eloquent pages to which we have adverted.

The opening of 'Hamlet' is one of the most absorbing scenes in the Shaksperean drama. It produces its effect by the supernatural being brought into the most immediate contact with the real. The sentinels are prepared for the appearance of the ghost, -Horatio is incredulous,—but they are all surrounded with an atmosphere of common life. "Long live the King,' -"Get thee to bed,"-" "Tis bitter cold,"- "Not a mouse stirring," and the familiar pleasantry of Horatio, a piece of him,”-exhibit to us minds under the ordinary state of human feeling. At the moment when the recollections of Bernardo arise into that imaginative power which belongs to the tale he is about to tell, the ghost appears. All that was doubtful in the narrative of the supernatural vision—what left upon Horatio's mind the impression only of a thing," becomes as real as the silence, the cold, and the midnight. The vision is then, "most like the King,"

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"Such was the very armour he had on." The ghost remains but an instant; and we are again amongst the realities of common life, the preparations for war-the history of the quarrel that caused the preparation. The vision, in the mind of Horatio, is connected with the fates of his "climatures and

countrymen." When the ghost re-appears, there is still a tinge of scepticism in the soldiers:

"Shall I strike at it with my partizan?"

"Let us impart what we have seen to-night
Unto young Hamlet: for, upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him."
We have here, by anticipation, all the deep
and inexplicable consequences of this vision
laid upon young Hamlet; it is his destiny-
it is to him the-

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Prologue to the omen coming on."

Goethe, in his 'Wilhelm Meister,' has made his hero describe the mode in which he endeavoured to understand Hamlet.' "I set about investigating every trace of Hamlet's character, as it had shown itself before his father's death. I endeavoured to distinguish what in it was independent of this mournful event; independent of the terrible events that followed; and what most probably the young man would have been, had no such thing occurred." In this spirit he tells us, that he was pleasing, polished, courteous, united the idea of moral rectitude with princely elevation, desirous of | praise, pure in sentiment, tasteful, calm in his temper, artless in his conduct, possessing more mirth of humour than of heart. This is ingenious, but it appears to us to refine somewhat too much. In Shakspere's dramas, the characters, as they are developed by the incidents, expound themselves, and in the order in which the exposition becomes necessary. Wilhelm Meister's preliminary analysis of Hamlet's character stands only in the place of the description by which dramatists inferior to Shakspere present a character to an audience. Our poet first shows us what Hamlet is, before his mind is laid under the terrific weight and responsibility of a revelation. His moral sense is outraged by the indecent marriage of his mother. We have a slight intimation that his honourable ambition was disappointed in the election of his uncle to the sovereignty. The sudden death of his father had called forth all the sensi

bilities that belonged to a deeply meditative nature:

"I have that within which passeth show."

It is in this period that his own wounded spirit compels him to look with a jaundiced eye upon "all the uses of this world," and to indulge a wish, restrained only by a sense of piety, that the "unweeded garden" might be left by him to be possessed by "things rank, and gross in nature." But he communes with himself in a tone which bespeaks the habitual refinement of his thoughts; and his words shape themselves into images which belong to the high and cultivated intellect. The mode in which he receives Horatio shows that his dejection is not habitual. It has been impressed on his nature by a sudden

blow

;—a father dead,—a mother disgracefully married,-a crown snatched from him. He welcomes his old friend with the warmth and frankness of the gentleman; but the abiding sorrow in a moment comes over him :

"I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student." The disclosure of Horatio's purpose in his visit is admirably managed in its abruptness. Nothing, it appears to us, within the power of language, can produce the effect of the questions which Hamlet puts to Horatio;

and his answer to the somewhat commonplace remark, "It would have much amaz'd you ;"".

'—“ very like, very like,” is something beyond art; it looks like an instinctive perception of the most complex mental pro

cesses.

one

Coleridge calls the next scene, that between Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius, “ of Shakspere's lyric movements ;" and he elegantly adds, "you experience the sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop." It was necessary to interpose a scene between Horatio's narrative and the appearance of the ghost to Hamlet; and the scene before us carries out the dramatic characters which are essential to the plot, without interrupting the main interest. But the hour of Hamlet's trial is come. The revelation is to be made. He is to endure an ordeal which is to shake his disposition,

"With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls."

The vision, which, even when his incredulity has passed away, seems to Horatio only a "thing majestical," is to Hamlet, "king, father, royal Dane." From the first word

of Horatio's narrative to this moment of the

real presence of the apparition, Hamlet has

no doubts. The excited state of his mind

had prepared him to welcome the belief that than are dreamt of in our philosophy." "there are more things in heaven and earth Beautifully characteristic is his determina

tion to follow the vision; and when the revelation comes, who could have managed it like Shakspere! The images are of this

world, and are not of this world. They belong at once to popular superstition, and to the highest poetry. Nothing can be more distinct than the narrative of the vision; nothing more mysterious than the "eternal blazon" that "must not be to ears of flesh and blood." How exquisite are the last lines of the ghost ;-full of the poetry of external nature, and of the depth of human affections, as if the spirit that had for so short a time been cut off from life, to know the secrets of the "prison-house," still clung to the earthly remembrance of the beautiful and the tender that even a

spirit might indulge :

"The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And 'gins to pale his ineffectual fire: Adieu, adieu, Hamlet! remember me." The modes in which Hamlet thinks aloud, after the spirit has faded away, suggests this subtle illustration to Coleridge: "Shakspere alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalized truths that 'observation had copied there,'-followed immediately by the speaker noting down the generalized fact

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.""

Coleridge, of course, means to offer this as a trait of the disturbance of Hamlet's intellect (not madness, even in the popular sense of the term,-certainly not madness,

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physiologically speaking, but unfixedness, | to us, at some short period after the superderangement, we would have said, had not natural visitation :— that word become a sort of synonym for madness), which Shakspere intended, as it appears to us, to exhibit as the result of his

supernatural visitation. Goethe says, "To

me it is clear that Shakspere meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it." Coleridge, in speaking of that part of the scene after the interview with the ghost, in which Hamlet assumes what has been called " an improbable eccentricity," attributes to Hamlet "the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous, a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium." He adds, "For you may perhaps observe that | Hamlet's wildness is but half false." It is under the immediate influence of this "disorder in his soul," this "shaking and unsettling of its powers from their due sources of action,' "* that Hamlet takes the instantaneous resolution of feigning himself mad. He feels that his mind is horridly disturbed with thoughts beyond mortal reach; but he believes that the habitual powers of his intellect can control this disturbance, and even render it an instrument of his own safety. The very able writer from whose anonymous paper we have just quoted says, "If there be anything disproportioned in his mind, it seems to be this only,--that intellect is in excess. It is even ungovernable, and too subtle. His own description of perfect man, ending with 'In apprehension how like a god!' appears to me consonant with that character, and spoken in the high and overwrought consciousness of intellect. Much that requires explanation in the play may perhaps be explained by this predominance and consciousness of great intellectual power. Is it not possible that the instantaneous idea of feigning himself mad belongs to this ?"

It is here, then, that the complexity of Hamlet's character begins. It is in the description of Ophelia that he is first presented

*Blackwood's Magazine, vol. ii. page 504.

"He took me by the wrist, and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face,
As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so;
At last, a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and
down,―

He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound, That it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being: That done, he lets me go : And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd, He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; For out o' doors he went without their help, And, to the last, bended their light on me." This was not the "antic disposition" which Hamlet thought meet to put on. It was not the "ecstacy of love," produced by Ophelia's coldness, according to Polonius. But it was the utterance, as far as it could be uttered, of his sense of the hard necessity that was put upon him to go forth to a mortal struggle with evil powers and influences;—to cast away all the high and pleasant thoughts that belonged to the cultivation of his understanding ;—to tear himself from all the soothing and delicious fancies that would arise out of the growth of his affection for that simple maid upon whom he bestowed "a sigh so piteous." Under the pressure of the one absorbing "commandment" that had been imposed upon him, he had vowed that it should live "within the volume of his brain, unmixed with baser matter." All else in the world had become to him mean and unimportant. Love was now to him a "trivial fond record,"—the wisdom of philosophy, "the saws of books." All that youth and observation copied," was to be forgotten in that dread word, "remember me." But Hamlet had put the "antic disposition on." The King had seen his "transformation." The courtiers talked familiarly of his "lunacy." The disguise which he had adopted was not accidentally chosen. The subtlety of his intellect directed him to that tone of wayward sarcasm in which, while he appeared to others to be merely wandering, the bitter

ness of his soul might be relieved by the utterance of "wild and hurling words." But even in this disguise his intellectual supremacy is constantly manifested. "He is far gone, far gone," says Polonius; but, "how pregnant his replies are," very quickly follows. In the scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the natural Hamlet instantly comes back. They were his school-fellows; they ought to have been his friends. To them, therefore, he is the Hamlet they once knew; the gentleman - the scholar. He even discloses to them a glimpse of the deep melancholy with which his soul laboured: "O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreams." But he goes no further :—he sees through their purpose; "nay, then I have an eye of you." They were to be spies upon him; and from that moment he hates them. They stood, or they appeared to stand, between him and the great purpose of his life. But he suppresses his feelings, and bursts out in that majestic piece of rhetoric which could only have been conceived by a being of the highest intellectual power, in the full possession of that power: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!" The writer in Blackwood truly says, that this is "spoken in the high and overwrought consciousness of intellect." Hamlet has described his melancholy to his old school-fellows, the indifference with which he views "this visible world." Here again, unquestionably, he is not feigning. He knows that the admission of his melancholy will put the spies upon a false scent. Burton's 'Anatomy' was not published when Shakspere wrote this play; and yet how consonant is the following passage of that book with Shakspere's conception of the melancholy Hamlet: "Albertus Durer paints Melancholy like a sad woman, leaning on her arm with fixed looks, neglected habit, &c., held therefore by some proud, soft, sottish, or half-mad, as the Abderites esteemed of Democritus: and yet of a deep reach,

excellent apprehension, judicious, wise, and witty." In the scene with the players Hamlet is perfectly at ease, "judicious, wise, and witty." He has escaped for a moment, out of the dense clouds of the one o'er-mastering thought, into the sunny region of taste and fancy in which he once dwelt. But even here the one thought follows him :— "Dost thou hear me, old friend; can you play the murder of Gonzago ?" Then comes, "Now I am alone;" and, as Charles Lamb has beautifully expressed it, "the silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting are reduced to words, for the sake of the reader." But, in the midst of his paroxysm, his intellectual activity predominates : About, my brains;" and he escapes from the thought

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"I should have fatted all the region kites With this slave's offal,"

into

"I'll have grounds More relative than this: The play's the thing." The indecision of Hamlet is thus described by Goethe: "A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away." The writer in 'Blackwood's Magazine' takes another view of this indecision, which, to our minds, is more philosophic: "He sees no course clear enough to satisfy his understanding." Hamlet, be it observed, is not without nerve. Let us recollect―"I will watch to-night,”—and,

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'something after death," as if the mystery could be pierced by the eye of reason. Of the soliloquy, "To be, or not to be," Coleridge remarks, "This speech is of absolutely universal interest, and yet to which of all Shakspere's characters could it have been appropriately given but to Hamlet?" But we must mark the period of its introduction. It immediately precedes the scene of Hamlet's abrupt behaviour to Ophelia. It does so in the original sketch. She comes upon him with

"My lord, I have remembrances of yours," at a moment when his mind had surrendered itself to a train of the most solemn thought, induced by following out all the mysterious and fearful circumstances connected with his own being, and the awful responsibilities that were imposed upon him. It appears to us, that his rude denial of having given Ophelia "remembrances," and his “Ha, ha! are you honest?" with all the bitter words that follow, are meant to indicate the disturbance which is produced in his mind by the clashing of his love for her with the predominant thought that now makes all that belongs to his personal happiness worthless. His invective against women is not more bitter than his invective against himself:“What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth!" His bitterness escapes in generalizations: it is not against Ophelia, but against her sex, that he exclaims. To that gentle creature, the harshest thing he says is, "Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." Coleridge thinks that the "certain harshness" in Hamlet's manner is produced by his perceiving that Ophelia was acting a part towards him and that they were watched. We doubt whether Shakspere intended Hamlet to be here feigning. The passionate words are merely the exponents of the contest within, the contest between his love and the purpose which appeared to him to exclude all other thoughts. There was a real disturbance of his soul, which could only recover its balance by such an outbreak. The character of the disturbance is indicated by the contradiction of "I did love you once,"

and "I loved you not;" and, perhaps, as Lamb expresses it, these "tokens of an unhinged mind" are mixed "with a profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that loving intercourse which can no longer find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do." At any rate, the gentle and tender Ophelia is not outraged. Her pity only is excited; and, if the apparent harshness of Hamlet requires a proper appreciation of his character to reconcile it with our admiration of him, Shakspere has at this moment most adroitly presented to us that description of him which Goethe anticipated—

"The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,

The expectancy and rose of the fair state."

Hamlet recovers a temporary tranquillity. He has something to do; and that something is connected with his great business. It is more agreeable that it postpones that one duty, while it seems to lead onward to it. He has to prepare the players to speak his speech. Those who look upon the surface only may think these directions uncharacteristic of Hamlet; but nothing can really be more appropriate than that these rules of art, so just, so universal, and so complete, should be put by Shakspere into the mouth of him who had pre-eminently "the scholar's tongue." Hamlet revels in this lesson; and it has produced a calm in his spirits, which is displayed in that affectionate address to Horatio, in which he appears to repose upon his friend as one

"Whose blood and judgment are so well co

mingled,"

to be, as it were, a prop to his own "weakness and melancholy." Be it observed that this is the first indication we have had that he has admitted Horatio into his confidence::"There is a play to-night before the king: One scene of it comes near the circumstance Which I have told thee of my father's death." The satisfaction he takes in the device of the one scene"-the hopes which he has that his doubts may be resolved-lend a real

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