I have seen many Hamlets. I have seen romantic, tragic, passionate,
morbid, enigmatical, over-subtle and over-exceptional Hamlets, the very
bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." And as almost every actor has
acted this part, every one of them gives a different interpretation:
that is to say, from the time of Shakespeare to our own age. One knows
that Shakespeare, besides other of the dramatists, acted at least one
part, which seems to have surprised his audience: the Ghost in _Hamlet._
And as Shakespeare put more of his inner self into Hamlet's mouth than
into the mouth of any of his other characters, it is not to be forgotten
that perhaps the most wonderful prose in our language is spoken by
Hamlet in that famous scene with the Players. Take, for instance, this
speech:
I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, foregone
all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile
promontory, that most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
over-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors. 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 appearance how like a god!
The beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither,
though by your smiling you seem to say so.
If any prose is immortal, this is; and creative also, and imaginative,
and lyrical: it has vision, and it has the sense of the immense contrast
between "this majestical roof" and "this quintessence of dust" to which
we are all reduced at the end.
I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should
give one the impression of assisting at "a solemn music." The rhythm of
Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally different from that of Beethoven,
and _Romeo and Juliet_ is a suite, _Hamlet_ a symphony. To act either of
these plays with whatever qualities of another kind, and to fail in
producing this musical rhythm from beginning to end, is to fail in the
very foundation. It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice his
drama to his poetry, and even _Hamlet_ has been quoted against him. But
let _Hamlet_ be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere meditation
will be realized as a part of that thought which makes or waits on
action. The outlines of the tragedy are crude, irresistible melodrama,
still irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though
it comes to us by means of its poetry, comes to us legitimately as a
growth out of melodrama.
I have often asked myself this question, when I have sat in the stalls
watching a play, and having to write about it: is the success of this
piece due to the playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? Nor
is any question more difficult to answer than this; which Lamb certainly
does his best to answer in one of his underlined sentences, in regard to
the actor. "_He must be thinking all the while of his appearance,
because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it._"
And again when he says: "In fact, the things aimed at in theatrical
representations are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the form and the
gesture, and to give a more favorable hearing to what is spoken: it is
not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says, but how
he speaks it." Was anything more fundamentally true ever said on what
the actor _ought_ to do? Lamb answered it again, in his instinctive
fashion of aiming his arrow straight at the mark, when he said of a
performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that
"it seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed
no distinct shape," but that "when the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood."
Every artist who has the sense of the sublime knows that the pure genius
is essentially silent, and that his revelation has in it more of vision
than of reality. For when he deigns to appear, he is constrained, under
penalty of extinction, to lessen himself so as to pass into the
Inaccessible. He creates; if he fails in creation, he is of necessity
condemned to the utter darkness. He is the ordinator of chaos: he calls
and disposes of the blind elements; and when we are uplifted in our
admiration before some sublime work, it is not that he creates an idea
in us: it is that, under the divine influence of the man of genius, this
idea, which was in us, obscure to itself, is reawakened.
I am confronted now with Villiers de l'Isle Adam in his conjectures in
regard to certain questions--never yet settled--in _Hamlet._ A modern
man of taste might ask what Shakespeare would have answered if the actor
who played Hamlet's part were to interrogate the Specter "escaped from
hideous Night" as to whether he had seen God's face, whether he wanted
to be concerned with, not the eternal mysteries, but with what he had
seen in hell and what he hated seeing on earth; and, if he had come only
to utter absurdities, really, why need he have died at all?
The Ghost, by the mere fact of being there, seems, at first sight, an
absurdity; but if he has really seen God and the Absolute and if he has
entered into them--which is impossible--the sublimity of his words might
seem to be superfluous; and yet the incoherencies that he utters are all
the more terrifying because of their incomprehensibility. "The secret of
the Absolute cannot be expressed with syntax, and therefore one cannot
ask the ghost to produce more than an _impression._" The Specter, for
Shakespeare, is not a human being: he is obsession. Had he wanted Hamlet
really to perceive the ghost and had he thought this dramatic effect
ought to seize on the imagination of the audience, it was because he was
certain that every one of them, in the ghost perceived by Hamlet, would
see the familiar ghost that actually haunts himself.
Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be" is a magnificent disavowal--on
the part of Shakespeare. And if one excuses the contradiction by
supposing that Hamlet tried to deliver himself from the obsession, to
doubt, one can only reply that he never doubts the Ghost itself, but the
nature of this ghost; for he says at the end of the second act:
The spirit I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
(As he is very potent with such spirits),
Abuses me to damn me.
Therefore if we compare the motive and the spirit of those sickly
phrases with those of the soliloquy, we shall realize that this has _no
relation whatsoever_ with the superstitious character of Hamlet; even
more so, because every single word of them is in flagrant contradiction
with the entire drama.
I have no intention of discussing either Mr. Martin Hervey's
representation of Hamlet or the somber and sinister Hamlet acted by
Josef Keinz in Berlin; or the performance of Tree, or of
Forbes-Robertson; or of any one's, with the exception of that given by
Edward Sothern. He is by no means the only Hamlet, for there are
always--to quote Browning--"points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the
Germans yet." Sothern had depth in his acting; and there was nothing
fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation,
in which no symbol, no figment of a German brain, no metaphysical Faust,
loomed before us, but a man more to be pitied and not less to be honored
than any man in Elsinore. Yet when one considers what Hamlet actually
was--and there is no getting at the depths of his mystery--one finds,
for one thing, a man too intensely restless to make up his mind on any
question of thought, of conduct, and that he does for the most part the
opposite of what he says. The pretense of madness is an almost
transparent pretense, and used often for a mere effect of malicious wit,
in the confusion of fools, or at the prompting of mere nerves. To me
Hamlet seems to be cursed with the veritable genius of inaction. Always
he is alone, even when he is in a crowd; he is the most sensitive of all
Shakespeare's creations; his nerves are jarred, when knaves would play
on him as one plays on an instrument; his blood is feverish, infected
with the dark melancholy that haunts him. Does he love Ophelia? I see in
him no passion for loving: to him passion is an abstract thing. In any
case, irresolution is baneful to him; irresolution that loses so many
chances, for which no one forgives himself. This Swinburne denies,
supposing that the signal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature "is
by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but
rather the strong conflux of contending forces;" adding, what is
certainly true, that the compulsory expedition of Hamlet to England and
his hot-headed daring prove to us his almost unscrupulous resolution in
time of practical need. Only, when all Hamlet's plans of revenge have
been executed, with the one exception of his unnecessary death, before
he utters his last immortal words "The rest is silence," the thought of
death to him is as if a veil had been withdrawn for an instant, the veil
which renders life possible, and, for that instant, he has seen.