HAMLET

This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we

may be said 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 Rosencrans 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 Shakspeare.

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 a 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.

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 Shakspeare's plays

that we think of the 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_ is distinguished by

the greatest depth of passion, HAMLET is the most remarkable for the

ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakspeare

had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shewn more of it in

this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest:

everything is left for 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 witnessed 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 Shakspeare, together with his own comments,

gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a

very great advantage.

The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. 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 Rosencrans 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

finds out 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 a more fatal

opportunity, when he shall be engaged in some act "that has no relish of

salvation in it."

"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 scann'd_.

He kill'd 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."

He is the prince of philosophical speculators; and because he cannot have

his revenge perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish can form,

he declines 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.

"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 exhort 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 kill'd, 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?--O, from this time forth,

My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth."

Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only

affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not from any want of

attachment to his father or of 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 pretext that flatters this propensity

instantly diverts him from his previous purposes.

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 Shakspeare 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 neglect of punctilious exactness in his behaviour either partakes of

the "licence 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 much

otherwise than he did. His conduct does not contradict what he says when

he sees her funeral,

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers

Could not with all their quantity of love

Make up my sum."

Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful than the Queen's apostrophe to

Ophelia on throwing the flowers into the grave.

----"Sweets to the sweet, farewell.

I hop'd thou should'st have been my Hamlet's wife:

I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid,

And not have strew'd thy grave."

Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare 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.[127] Her

brother, Laertes, is a character we do not like so well: he is too hot and

choleric, and somewhat rhodomontade. 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 excellent, 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, Shakspeare 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.

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.