He is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.

HAZLITT (1817)

(Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, London, 1817, p. 104.)—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' the 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 apparition 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 Shakespeare's plays that we think of 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 commonplace pedant. If Lear shows the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstance 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 upon 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 bystander in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and seen 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 that passes show.' 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 Shakespeare, 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 is itself a pure effusion of genius. 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 well can 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, when he alters the letters which Rosencrantz 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, skeptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and always finds some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For this reason he refuses to kill the King when he is at his prayers. . . . .

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 misses 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. Still, he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not for any want of attachment to his father or 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 pretence 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 Shakespeare has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-colored 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 want of punctilious exactness in his behavior either partakes of the license 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..

Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful than the Queen's apostrophe to Ophelia on throwing flowers into the grave. Shakespeare was thoroughly a master of the mixed motives of human character, and he here shows 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 Shakespeare 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. 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 sensible, and his advice to the King and Queen on the subject of Hamlet's madness is very ridiculous. But he gives the one as a father, and is sincere in it; he gives the other as a mere courtier, a busybody, and is accordingly officious, garrulous, and impertinent. In short, Shakespeare 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.

6

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 armor, 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.

T. C. [THOMAS CAMPBELL?] (1818)

(Letters on Shakespeare, Blackwood's Magazine, February, 1818, p. 505.)—Shakespeare himself, had he even been as great a critic as a poet, could not have written a regular dissertation on Hamlet. So ideal, and yet so real an existence could have been shadowed out only in the colors of poetry. When a character deals solely or

* Is not this a misprint? Should it not be the wisdom of their ideas'? ED.

chiefly with this world and its events,-when it acts, and is acted upon, by objects that have a palpable existence, we see it distinctly, as if it were cast in a material mould,- —as if it partook of the fixed and settled lineaments of the things on which it lavishes its sensibilities and its passions. We see in such cases, the vision of an individual soul, as we see the vision of an individual countenance. We can describe both, and can let a stranger into our knowledge. But how tell in words so pure, so fine, so ideal an abstraction as Hamlet? . . . .

When we know how unlike the action of Shakespeare's mind was to our own,— how deep and unboundedly various his beholdings of men's minds, and of all manifested existence,-how wonderful his celerity of thought, the dartings of his intellect, like the lightning glimpse, to all parts of his whole range of known being,— how can we tell that we have attained the purposes of his mind? We can reconcile what perhaps others cannot. How can we tell that he could not reconcile what we cannot? We build up carefully our conception of a character. He did not. He found springs of being in his man, and he unlocked them. How can we tell whither, to his conception, these flowings might tend? How can we know what he meant by so much in all Hamlet's discourse, in his madness, and everywhere else, that seems to us to have no direct meaning, no derivation from Hamlet's mind? It is most true, that they do not seem to agree with our ideal conception of Hamlet; but that is what we find in living men; and he would indeed be a sorry philosopher who should be startled by the exhibition of some feeling or passion in a character from which he had no reason to expect it, as if there were general laws unerringly to guide all the operations of that wild tumultuous thing, the heart of man.'

[Page 506.] Indeed, I have often thought that it is idle and absurd to try a poetical character on the stage, a creature existing in a Play, however like to real human nature it may be, precisely by the same rules which we apply to our living brethren of mankind in the substantial drama of life. No doubt a good Play is an imitation of life, as far as the actions, and events, and passions of a few hours can represent those of a whole lifetime. Yet, after all, it is but a segment of a circle that we can behold. Were the dramatist to confine himself to that narrow limit, how little could he achieve! He takes, therefore, for granted a knowledge, and a sympathy, and a passion in his spectators, that extends to, and permeates the existence of his characters long anterior to the short period which his art can embrace. He expects, and he expects reasonably, that we are not to look upon everything acted and said before us absolutely as it is said or acted. It is his business to make us comprehend the whole man from a part of his existence. But we are not to be passive spectators. It is our business to fill up and supply. It is our business to bring to the contemplation of an imaginary drama a knowledge of real life, and no more to cry out against apparent inconsistencies and violations of character, as we behold them in poetry, than as we every day behold them exemplified by living men. The pageants that move before us on the stage, however deeply they may interest us, are after all mere strangers. It is Shakespeare alone who can give to fleeting phantoms the definite interest of real personages. But we ought not to turn this glorious power against himself. We ought not to demand inexorably the same perfect, and universal, and embracing truth of character in an existence brought before us in a few hurried scenes (which is all a Play can be) that we sometimes may think we find in a real being, after long years of intimate knowledge, and which, did we know more, would perhaps seem to us to be truth no longer, but a chaos of the darkest and wildest inconsistencies.

[Page 408.] If there is anything disproportionate in [Hamlet's] 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 this 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 the power most present to his mind, and therefore in that, though in the denial of it, is his first thought to place his defence. So might we suppose a brave man of gigantic bodily strength counterfeiting cowardice and imbecility until there came a moment for the rousing up of vengeance..

....

Hamlet never gets farther, I believe, than one step,-that of self-protection in feigning himself mad. He sees no course clear enough to satisfy his understanding; and with all due deference to those critics in conduct who seem disposed to censure his dilatoriness, I should be glad if anybody would point out one. He is therefore by necessity irresolute; but he feels that he is letting time pass; and the consciousness of duty undone weighs down his soul. He thus comes to dread the clear knowledge of his own situation, and of the duties arising from it.

[Page 510.] Shakespeare never could have intended to represent [Hamlet's] love to Ophelia as very profound. If he did, how can we ever account for Hamlet's first exclamation, when in the churchyard he learns that he is standing by her grave, and beholds her coffin? What, the fair Ophelia!' Was this all that Hamlet would have uttered, when struck into sudden conviction by the ghastliest terrors of death, that all he loved in human life had perished? We can with difficulty reconcile such a tame ejaculation, even with extreme tenderness and sorrow. But had it been in the soul of Shakespeare to show Hamlet in the agony of hopeless despair, -and in hopeless despair he must at that moment have been, had Ophelia been all in all to him,-is there in all his writings so utter a failure in the attempt to give vent to overwhelming passion? When, afterwards, Hamlet leaps into the grave, do we see in that any power of love? I am sorry to confess that the whole of that scene is to me merely painful. It is anger with Laertes, not love for Ophelia, that makes Hamlet leap into the grave. Laertes's conduct, he afterwards tells us, puts him into a towering passion,—a state of mind which it is not easy to reconcile with almost any kind of sorrow for the dead Ophelia. Perhaps, in this, Shakespeare may have departed from nature. But had he been attempting to describe the behavior of an impassioned lover at the grave of his beloved, I should be compelled to feel that he had not merely departed from nature, but that he had offered her the most profane violation and insult.

Hamlet is afterwards made acquainted with the sad history of Ophelia,—he knows that to the death of Polonius, and his own imagined madness, is to be attributed her miserable catastrophe. Yet, after the burial-scene, he seems utterly to have forgotten that Ophelia ever existed; nor is there, as far as I recollect, a single allusion to her throughout the rest of the drama. The only way of accounting for this seems to be that Shakespeare had himself forgotten her,—that with her last rites she vanished from the world of his memory. But this of itself shows that it was not his intention to represent Ophelia as the dearest of all earthly things or thoughts to Hamlet, or surely there would have been some melancholy, some miserable hauntings of her image. But, even as it is, it seems not a little unaccountable that Hamlet should have been so slightly affected by her death.