“_Mar._ Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch,” &c.
How delightfully natural is the transition, to the retrospective
narrative! And observe, upon the Ghost’s reappearance, how much Horatio’s
courage is increased by having translated the late individual spectator
into general thought and past experience,—and the sympathy of Marcellus
and Bernardo with his patriotic surmises in daring to strike at the Ghost;
whilst in a moment, upon its vanishing, the former solemn awe-stricken
feeling returns upon them:—
“We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence.”
_Ib._ Horatio’s speech:—
... “I have heard,
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day,” &c.
No Addison could be more careful to be poetical in diction than
Shakespeare in providing the grounds and sources of its propriety. But how
to elevate a thing almost mean by its familiarity, young poets may learn
in this treatment of the cock-crow.
_Ib._ Horatio’s speech:—
... “And, by my advice,
Let us impart what we have seen to-night
Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life,
The spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.”
Note the inobtrusive and yet fully adequate mode of introducing the main
character, “young Hamlet,” upon whom it transferred all the interest
excited for the acts and concerns of the king his father.
_Ib._ sc. 2. The audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the
royal court, in order that Hamlet may not have to take up the leavings of
exhaustion. In the king’s speech, observe the set and pedantically
antithetic form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels
of conscience,—the strain of undignified rhetoric,—and yet in what follows
concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he
not a royal brother?—
_Ib._ King’s speech:—
“And now, Laertes, what’s the news with you?” &c.
Thus with great art Shakespeare introduces a most important, but still
subordinate character first, Laertes, who is yet thus graciously treated
in consequence of the assistance given to the election of the late king’s
brother instead of his son by Polonius.
_Ib._—
“_Ham._ A little more than kin, and less than kind.
_King._ How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
_Ham._ Not so, my lord, I am too much i’ the sun.”
Hamlet opens his mouth with a playing on words, the complete absence of
which throughout characterises Macbeth. This playing on words may be
attributed to many causes or motives, as either to an exuberant activity
of mind, as in the higher comedy of Shakespeare generally;—or to an
imitation of it as a mere fashion, as if it were said—“Is not this better
than groaning?”—or to a contemptuous exultation in minds vulgarised and
overset by their success, as in the poetic instance of Milton’s Devils in
the battle;—or it is the language of resentment, as is familiar to every
one who has witnessed the quarrels of the lower orders, where there is
invariably a profusion of punning invective, whence, perhaps, nicknames
have in a considerable degree sprung up;—or it is the language of
suppressed passion, and especially of a hardly smothered personal dislike.
The first and last of these combine in Hamlet’s case; and I have little
doubt that Farmer is right in supposing the equivocation carried on in the
expression “too much i’ the sun,” or son.
_Ib._—
“_Ham._ Ay, madam, it is common.”
Here observe Hamlet’s delicacy to his mother, and how the suppression
prepares him for the overflow in the next speech, in which his character
is more developed by bringing forward his aversion to externals, and which
betrays his habit of brooding over the world within him, coupled with a
prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half embodyings of thought,
and are more than thought, and have an outness, a reality _sui generis_,
and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and
movements within. Note also Hamlet’s silence to the long speech of the
king which follows, and his respectful, but general, answer to his mother.
_Ib._ Hamlet’s first soliloquy:—
“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” &c.
This _tædium vitæ_ is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet
mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which
necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just
coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the
result; but where the former is deficient, and the mind’s appetency of the
ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmoving. In such cases,
passion combines itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his
mind the relation of the appearance of his father’s spirit in arms is made
all at once to Hamlet:—it is—Horatio’s speech in particular—a perfect
model of the true style of dramatic narrative;—the purest poetry, and yet
in the most natural language, equally remote from the ink-horn and the
plough.
_Ib._ sc. 3. This scene must be regarded as one of Shakespeare’s lyric
movements in the play, and the skill with which it is interwoven with the
dramatic parts is peculiarly an excellence of our poet. You experience the
sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop. You will observe in
Ophelia’s short and general answer to the long speech of Laertes the
natural carelessness of innocence, which cannot think such a code of
cautions and prudences necessary to its own preservation.
_Ib._ Speech of Polonius (in Stockdale’s edition):—
“Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase),
Wronging it thus, you’ll tender me a fool.”
I suspect this “wronging” is here used much in the same sense as
“wringing” or “wrenching,” and that the parenthesis should be extended to
“thus.”
_Ib._ Speech of Polonius:—
... “How prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows:—these blazes, daughter,” &c.
A spondee has, I doubt not, dropped out of the text. Either insert “Go to”
after “vows”;—
“Lends the tongue vows: Go to, these blazes, daughter”—
or read—
“Lends the tongue vows:—These blazes, daughter, mark you”—
Shakespeare never introduces a catalectic line without intending an
equivalent to the foot omitted in the pauses, or the dwelling emphasis, or
the diffused retardation. I do not, however, deny that a good actor might,
by employing the last mentioned means—namely, the retardation, or solemn
knowing drawl—supply the missing spondee with good effect. But I do not
believe that in this or any other of the foregoing speeches of Polonius,
Shakespeare meant to bring out the senility or weakness of that
personage’s mind. In the great ever-recurring dangers and duties of life,
where to distinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims
collected by the experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact,
as in the admonitions to his son and daughter, Polonius is uniformly made
respectable. But if an actor were even capable of catching these shades in
the character, the pit and the gallery would be malcontent at their
exhibition. It is to Hamlet that Polonius is, and is meant to be,
contemptible, because in inwardness and uncontrollable activity of
movement, Hamlet’s mind is the logical contrary to that of Polonius; and
besides, as I have observed before, Hamlet dislikes the man as false to
his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the crown.
_Ib._ sc. 4. The unimportant conversation with which this scene opens is a
proof of Shakespeare’s minute knowledge of human nature. It is a well
established fact, that on the brink of any serious enterprise, or event of
moment, men almost invariably endeavour to elude the pressure of their own
thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances:
thus this dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of
the air, and inquiries, obliquely connected, indeed, with the expected
hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as
to the striking of the clock and so forth. The same desire to escape from
the impending thought is carried on in Hamlet’s account of, and moralizing
on, the Danish custom of wassailing: he runs off from the particular to
the universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns,
escapes, as it were, from himself in generalisations, and smothers the
impatience and uneasy feelings of the moment in abstract reasoning.
Besides this, another purpose is answered;—for by thus entangling the
attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical
sentences of this speech of Hamlet’s, Shakespeare takes them completely by
surprise on the appearance of the Ghost, which comes upon them in all the
suddenness of its visionary character. Indeed, no modern writer would have
dared, like Shakespeare, to have preceded this last visitation by two
distinct appearances,—or could have contrived that the third should rise
upon the former two in impressiveness and solemnity of interest.
But in addition to all the other excellences of Hamlet’s speech concerning
the wassail-music—so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the
ratiocinative meditativeness, of his character—it has the advantage of
giving nature and probability to the impassioned continuity of the speech
instantly directed to the Ghost. The _momentum_ had been given to his
mental activity; the full current of the thoughts and words had set in,
and the very forgetfulness, in the fervour of his argumentation, of the
purpose for which he was there, aided in preventing the appearance from
benumbing the mind. Consequently, it acted as a new impulse,—a sudden
stroke which increased the velocity of the body already in motion, whilst
it altered the direction. The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus, and
Bernardo is most judiciously contrived; for it renders the courage of
Hamlet, and his impetuous eloquence, perfectly intelligible. The
knowledge,—the unthought of consciousness,—the sensation of human
auditors—of flesh and blood sympathists—acts as a support and a
stimulation _a tergo_, while the front of the mind, the whole
consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed, by the apparition.
Add too, that the apparition itself has, by its previous appearances, been
brought nearer to a thing of this world. This accrescence of objectivity
in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes and fearful
subjectivity, is truly wonderful.
_Ib._ sc. 5. Hamlet’s speech:—
“O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell?”
I remember nothing equal to this burst, unless it be the first speech of
Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two
Afrites. But Shakespeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to
make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths, that
“observation had copied there,”—followed immediately by the speaker noting
down the generalised fact,—
“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”
_Ib._—
“_Mar._ Hillo, ho, ho, my lord!
_Ham._ Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come bird, come,” &c.
This part of the scene, after Hamlet’s interview with the Ghost, has been
charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the
mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either
sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus
well known, that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape
from conscience by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by
inventing grotesque terms, and a certain technical phraseology, to
disguise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may
appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the
verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of
the common order of things—something, in fact, out of its place; and if
from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone remain, and
the sense of the ridiculous be excited. The close alliance of these
opposites—they are not contraries—appears from the circumstance, that
laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of
joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of
terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will naturally have
produced in 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. For you
may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet’s wildness is but half false; he plays
that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really
being what he acts.
The subterraneous speeches of the Ghost are hardly defensible;—but I would
call your attention to the characteristic difference between this Ghost,
as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of revealed
religion,—and Shakespeare’s consequent reverence in his treatment of
it,—and the foul earthly witcheries and wild language in _Macbeth_.
Act ii. sc. 1. Polonius and Reynaldo.
In all things dependent on, or rather made up of, fine address, the manner
is no more or otherwise rememberable than the light notions, steps, and
gestures of youth and health. But this is almost everything:—no wonder,
therefore, if that which can be put down by rule in the memory should
appear to us as mere poring, maudlin, cunning,—slyness blinking through
the watery eye of superannuation. So in this admirable scene, Polonius,
who is throughout the skeleton of his own former skill and statecraft,
hunts the trail of policy at a dead scent, supplied by the weak
fever-smell in his own nostrils.
_Ib._ sc. 2. Speech of Polonius:—
“My liege, and madam, to expostulate,” &c.
Warburton’s note.
“Then as to the jingles, and play on words, let us but look into
the sermons of Dr. Donne (the wittiest man of that age), and we
shall find them full of this vein.”
I have, and that most carefully, read Dr. Donne’s sermons, and find none
of these jingles. The great art of an orator—to make whatever he talks of
appear of importance—this, indeed, Donne has effected with consummate
skill.
_Ib._—
“_Ham._ Excellent well;
You are a fishmonger.”
That is, you are sent to fish out this secret. This is Hamlet’s own
meaning.
_Ib._—
“_Ham._ For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog,
Being a god, kissing carrion.”
These purposely obscure lines, I rather think, refer to some thought in
Hamlet’s mind, contrasting the lovely daughter with such a tedious old
fool, her father, as he, Hamlet, represents Polonius to himself:—“Why,
fool as he is, he is some degrees in rank above a dead dog’s carcase; and
if the sun, being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead
dog,—why may not good fortune, that favours fools, have raised a lovely
girl out of this dead-alive old fool?” Warburton is often led astray, in
his interpretations, by his attention to general positions without the due
Shakespearian reference to what is probably passing in the mind of his
speaker, characteristic, and expository of his particular character and
present mood. The subsequent passage,—
“O Jephthah, judge of Israel! what a treasure hadst thou!”
is confirmatory of my view of these lines.
_Ib._—
“_Ham._ You cannot, Sir, take from me any thing that I will
more willingly part withal; except my life, except my life, except
my life.”
This repetition strikes me as most admirable.
_Ib._—
“_Ham._ Then are our beggars, bodies; and our monarchs, and
out-stretched heroes, the beggars’ shadows?”
I do not understand this; and Shakespeare seems to have intended the
meaning not to be more than snatched at:—“By my fay, I cannot reason!”
_Ib._—
“The rugged Pyrrhus—he whose sable arms,” &c.
This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a
reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakespeare’s own dialogue,
and authorised too, by the actual style of the tragedies before his time
(_Porrex and Ferrex_, _Titus Andronicus_, &c.)—is well worthy of notice.
The fancy, that a burlesque was intended, sinks below criticism: the
lines, as epic narrative, are superb.
In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this
description is highly poetical: in truth, taken by itself, that is its
fault that it is too poetical!—the language of lyric vehemence and epic
pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakespeare had made the diction truly
dramatic, where would have been the contrast between Hamlet and the play
in _Hamlet_?
_Ib._—
... “Had seen the _mobled_ queen,” &c.
A mob-cap is still a word in common use for a morning cap, which conceals
the whole head of hair, and passes under the chin. It is nearly the same
as the night-cap, that is, it is an imitation of it, so as to answer the
purpose (“I am not drest for company”), and yet reconciling it with
neatness and perfect purity.
_Ib._ Hamlet’s soliloquy:—
“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” &c.
This is Shakespeare’s own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet
which I have before put forth.
_Ib._—
“The spirit that I have seen,
May be a 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.”