CHAPTER IV. HAMLET. and mysterious in the poet's delineation of this character;-something wild and irregular in the circumstances with which the character is associated;—we see that Hamlet is propelled, rather than propelling. But why is this turn given to the delineation? We cannot exactly tell. Perhaps some of the very charm of the play to the adult mind is its mysteriousness. It awakes not only thoughts of the grand and the beautiful, but of the incomprehensible. Its obscurity constitutes a portion of its sublimity. This is the stage in which most minds are content to rest, and, perhaps, advantageously so, with regard to the comprehension of 'Hamlet.' THE Comprehension of this tragedy is the | There is something altogether indefinable history of a man's own mind. In some shape or other, "Hamlet the Dane very early becomes familiar to almost every youth of tolerable education. He is sometimes presented through the medium of the stage; more frequently in some one of the manifold editions of the acted play. The sublime scenes where the ghost appears are known even to the youngest school-boy, in his 'Speakers' and 'Readers;' and so is the soliloquy, "To be, or not to be." As we in early life become acquainted with the complete acted play*, we hate the King,-we weep for Ophelia, we think Hamlet is cruel to her, we are perhaps inclined with Dr. Johnson to laugh at Hamlet's madness, ("the pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth,") we wonder that Hamlet does not kill the King earlier,—and we believe, as Garrick believed, that the catastrophe might have been greatly improved, seeing that the wicked and the virtuous ought not to fall together, as it were by accident. A few years onward, and we have become acquainted with the 'Hamlet' of Shakspere, -not the 'Hamlet' of the players. The book is now the companion of our lonely walks ;-its recollections hang about our most cherished thoughts. We think less of the dramatic movement of the play than of the glimpses which it affords of the high and solemn things that belong to our being. We see Hamlet habitually subjected to the spiritual part of his nature,-communing with thoughts that are not of this world, abstracted from the business of life, but yet exhibiting a most vigorous intellect, and an exquisite taste. But there is that about him which we cannot understand. Is he essentially "in madness," or mad "only in craft?" Where is the line to be drawn between his artificial and his real character? * A notice of the earliest edition of Hamlet' will be found in Book II., chapter III., page 57. The final appreciation of the 'Hamlet' of Shakspere belongs to the development of the critical faculty,-to the cultivation of it by reading and reflection. Without much acquaintance with the thoughts of others, many men, we have no doubt, being earnest and diligent students of Shakspere, have arrived at a tolerably adequate comprehension of his idea in this wonderful play. In passing through the stage of admiration, they have utterly rejected the trash which the commentators have heaped upon it, under the name of criticism, the solemn commonplaces of Johnson, the flippant and insolent attacks of Steevens. When the one says, " "the apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose," and the other talks of the "absurdities which deform the piece, and "the immoral character of Hamlet,"the love for Shakspere tells them, that remarks such as these belong to the same class of prejudices as Voltaire's "monstruosités et fossoyeurs." But, after they have rejected all that belongs to criticism without love, the very depth of the reverence of another school of critics may tend to perplex them. This is somewhat our own position. The quantity alone that has been written in illustration of 'Hamlet' is embarrassing. Y Goethe, Coleridge, Schlegel, Lamb, Hazlitt, | But their incredulity is at once subdued ; and we may add Mrs. Jameson, besides anonymous writers out of number, and some of the very highest order of excellence,have brought to the illustration of this play 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," 66 66 "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?" "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 "I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student." cesses. 66 "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 "The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, The modes in which Hamlet thinks aloud, after the spirit has faded away, suggests this be- 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 Coleridge calls the next scene, that tween Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius, one 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, "He took me by the wrist, and held me hard; As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so; 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 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 "I should have fatted all the region kites 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, Let us recollect-"I is not without nerve. will watch to-night,"—and, 'My fate cries out, And makes each petty artery in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve." He is not without nerve. But his will is subject to higher faculties. He would have been greater had he been less great. We are scarcely yet cognizant of the depths of Hamlet's meditations. Under the first pressure of his wounded sensibilities we have heard him exclaim "Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt;' but he has since communed with unearthly things, and he now fearlessly approaches the great questions that have reference to the |
