It is by no means a paradox, nor will the reader misunderstand me, when, after what has been said, I hazard the opinion, that while of all the poet's works, and indeed of all works in the world, Hamlet appears to me to be the richest in thought and the profoundest, yet regarded in a dramatic light it is the most unsatisfactory, indeed the very worst. For through the whole piece there runs a discord most painful to the mind and feelings. Poetry has never fashioned anything grander than the beginning of this drama. From the first word on the platform before the castle the hearer, be he who he may, is riveted. The supernatural is the most popular motive which modern tragedy can employ; even our over-cultivation, even our tough rationalism, cannot resist the appeal so powerfully made in this scene to faith in the supernatural; or if there is any one who can withstand it, let him quietly turn his back upon all poetry; for him poetry is not. The mystery of the supernatural goes deepening on more and more powerfully through the whole first act. But after the Ghost appears and speaks, the piece no longer advances in interest, and with the first act ends also all effective power. It is therefore in reality the first act to an impossible drama, and if it is permitted to judge of a work piecemeal, the height of the poetry of Shakespeare is here reached. The faults, which become visible from the second act on, are the following. The tragic centre of the whole action lies behind us, and what elsewhere in Shakespeare's works is wont to affect us so irresistibly, instead of growing upon us, is here rather presupposed. The dramatic knot of the piece is the murdered father of the hero. After the Ghost has related the fearful story, nothing more remains for the stage.

[Page 8.] In Act II, as soon as Polonius produces the mad love-letter, the reader, still under the influence of Act I, feels as much puzzled about Hamlet as the latter is afterwards about himself, and we see, instead of the youthful chivalric prince, bound to avenge his father, nothing more than a hypochondriacal misanthrope,—nay, to say it boldly in one word, but yet not too strongly, nothing but a life-wearied stagemanager. For that from now on the poet entirely forgets the hero of his fable, and, with all the bitterness at his command, entertains us with his own personal trials, who can for a moment doubt? That the complete transformation and destruction of the first plan of the piece made a different and yet powerful impression upon his public is readily understood: there is nothing here but the contest of the hour against all his antagonists,-against the actors who reduced him to despair, against the poets who were jealous of him, against the public who neglected his works and ran after a troop of children and dancers,—in fine, against everything which could make such a sensitive and poetic nature miserable.

Comparing the piece as it now stands with the first Quarto, we come to the conclusion that the scheme of the work was from the beginning wrongly contrived-i. e. undramatically; but only upon repeated amplifications did the ill adjustments of the parts become really visible; the poet then indulged himself in elaborating with his rich genius single scenes, which took weight and energy from the coloring given them, standing in no relation to the lightly-planned dramatic motives of the piece; but these last he left as they were. The power with which details are carried out overpowers the hearer so entirely that he finds himself more and more caught in the magic circle of the poem, and comes at last to find pleasure in the purely impossible.

L. KLEIN (1846)

(Berliner Modenspiegel, 1846.*)-There is no drama, as all the world knows, upon which so much has been written as Shakespeare's Hamlet. Quick-witted heads (Herr Rötscher's excepted) have all had their say about it. After all sorts of fashions, lofty, profound, radical, superficial, polished, crude, desultory (Herr Rötscher's lucubrations not excepted), it has been æstheticised about, romanced about, dogmatized about, bemastered, berated, cut up, quibbled at, be-Hegeled, and beRötschered. A critical tower of Babel of amazing height and breadth has been reared, and for the same purpose as in the Scripture: to scale celestial heights, and, as people see, with the same result. The celestial heights remain unscaled. A glib little sophomore (Schulfuchs) clambering up over the shoulders of Goethe, Gans, Tieck, and others, has reached the loftiest pinnacle of the tower, and there he is waving high in the air a school-programme with the device, 'The Nothingness of Reflection,' but showing only the nothingness of his own reflection; for his motto assumes that the all-powerful imagination of Shakespeare was impregnated by a miserable scholastic abstraction that has not virility enough to engender anything. It assumes that it was Shakespeare's design to portray in Hamlet a German halfprofessor, all tongue and no hand, for ever cackling, and hatching nothing, like a dog wagging his tail at the sound of his own barking, whom one would fain help out of his dream, like Polonius, with a 'Less art and more matter!' It assumes that Shakespeare had in mind a pedant who perchance likes to scrawl flourishes and arabesque abstractions in the school-room dust, but who is found at heart to be good for nothing when summoned to action, to the business of life, instantly losing all presence of mind, darting now here and now there, bobbing now to the right and now to the left, instead of doing, trying how not to do, running from cook to tapster, from shop to shop, hoping thus, with the devil's aid, to make his hobby go,—in the end, however, bringing nothing to pass, but at the last, as at the first, hanging, silly dunce that he is, tangled in the nothingness of reflection' of his own brain. In the place of the prolific genius of the most original of poets, there is foisted upon us that dogmatic art-criticism which ignores life and history alike, the mere shell of a great system, but barren and impotent; an empty scholastic formula, a stereotyped phrase. The Fortunatus cap of the latest metaphysic is drawn so completely over Shakespeare's ears that the poet is hidden under it, and becomes invisible. His conceptions are covered all up with a web of metaphysical phrases of the Hegelian stamp, with very modern fringes and facings of the livery of the school; so furious is the rage against all modern notions of poetry. Does Aristotle's Art of Poetry wear philosophism pinned on its sleeve? Does Lessing's Dramaturgie deal in metaphysical scholastics, or in solid coin rather? But a birch-rod rider, tricked out with scrappy abstractions, fashions Hamlet right scientifically, and makes him show himself to be the schoolmaster, the turner out of formulas, befooled by phrases, a Do-nothing, a ruminating theorist, a moral weakling, whose tragic end it is to die of an undigested Hegelian catchword. It is proved also, from the Hegelian Bible, that Shakespeare was a right orthodox Hegelian, who created Hamlet in strict accordance with the orthodox doctrine of identity. It was the split between thought and action, that, according to the Hegelian idea, Shakespeare had in mind

* 1 am indebted to Mr Albert Cohn, of Berlin, for a MS copy of this extract. ED.

in Hamlet! According to a ready-made category of Hegel's stamping, Hamlet was fashioned! But let the stamp go! How about the split? How? Why, does not every word in the play speak of this split? Does not the essence of the tragic lie in this hunting down of thought and act, this hide and seek of willing and doing, self-stinging at one moment, and then limp, languishing away into lazy melancholy? O strange, strange, supremely strange! The tragic? The comic, you mean! . . . . [In thus inserting the above extract, I have broken my rule of admitting no criticism on fellow-critics. The temptation was too strong for me. The fun is too sparkling to be lost; even those against whom it is directed cannot feel hurt, I imagine, but will be ready to join the laugh. Besides, this extract is introductory to the position which is taken in the next extract, wherein is found the germ of that remarkable theory which has been lately very fully developed by WERDER. Lastly, it is with no slight pleasure that I am able to give so good a specimen of the brilliant style of a writer too little known here and in England, whose forthcoming volume on the English Drama is eagerly looked for. ED.]

The tragic root of this deepest of all tragedies is secret guilt. Over fratricide, with which history introduces its horrors, there rests here in this drama a heavier and more impenetrable veil than over the primeval crime. There the blood of a brother, murdered without any witness of the deed, visibly streaming, cries to Heaven for vengeance. Here the brother in sleep, far from all witnesses or the possible knowledge of any one, is stolen upon and murdered. And how murdered? With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, and in the porches of my ears did pour the leperous distilment.' Murder most secret, murder, as it were, in its most primitive shape, murder invisibly committed; the most refined privy murder, the most subtle regicide; a thief-like murder, such as they only commit who steal a crown. The victim himself is all unconscious. He slumbers in unsuspecting repose; upon his securest hour murder steals. And as the eye of the murdered king is for ever closed, so is the eye of discovery sunk in the sleep of death. In the ear were poured some drops of poison, and with the ear of the murdered man the ear of the world is deadened. For this deed of blood there is no human eye, no human ear. The horror of this crime is its security; the horror of this murder is that it murders discovery. This globe of earth has rolled over it. The murdered man is the grave of the murder. O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!' Over the first fratricide the blood of the slain cries for vengeance. This murdered brother, dispatched without a trace, has no blood to cry woe! over him, except his blood in the ideal sense, his son. But Oh, cruel spite!' the blood of the murdered father cries in the son, and only in the son. This Cain's deed is known to no one but the murderer, and to Him who witnesses the murderer's secret remorse. The son has no other certainty of the unwitnessed murder than the suspicion generated by his ardent filial love, the prophecy of his bleeding heart, 'O my prophetic soul !'-no other conviction but the inner psychological conviction of his acute mind; no other power of proving it but that which results from the strength of his strong, horror-struck understanding, highly and philosophically cultivated by reflection and education; no other testimony than the voice of his own soul inflamed and penetrated by his filial affection; no other light upon the black crime hidden in the bosom of the murderer than the clear insight of his own soul. Vengeance is impossible, for its aim hovers in an ideal sphere. It falters, it shrinks back from itself, and it must do so, for it lacks the sure basis, the tangible hilt; it lacks what alone can justify it before God and the world, material proof. The act being unprovable has shattered the power to

act. In this tragedy the centre of gravity in the conscience is displaced. It lies in the soul of him who is to punish the crime, not, as in the other tragedies of Shakespeare, in the soul of him who has committed the deed. This change of the 'spectrum' is the ghostly point of the tragedy, and one of the most terrible consequences of the assassination, indeed the most terrible; the all-ruinous crime destroys even the punishment; like the sword of Pyrrhus in the speech of the player, it seemed i' the air to stick, And like a neutral,' between power and will, it does nothing. The nature of the crime has, as it were, paralyzed vengeance, which grows not to execution, because, in collision with the unprovable deed of blood, it is shattered to pieces, -its wings are broken. The soundless, silent deed has blasted vengeance itself and struck it dumb. The vengeance of the son,-O horrible !-must thus be the seal of the murder of the father. His power to act festers in contact with the secret ulcer of the crime, and the poison, which with sudden effect wrought upon the pure blood of the father, works on in the son, and corrodes the sinews of his resolution.

But how then? Is the subjective, moral conviction which, for the popular sense, is reflected from without by the poet in the Ghost,-is not this motive sufficient to give wings to the revenge of the son? Is not this inner conviction the catchword, the cue to passion,' which must spur him on to take public vengeance upon a crime which no one suspects but himself? No! if Hamlet is not to be pronounced by all the world to be what he feigns, stark mad. No! if he is not to appear to all Denmark, with all its dignitaries and nobles at its head, otherwise than a crazy homicide; not though he appeals ten times over to the Ghost' that appears to him; not unless he would appear to be that which he undertakes to punish, a parricide! No! if he would not appear in his own eyes as a black-hearted John-a-dreams, as a visionary, a crazy ghost-seer; he the free-thinking, knightly prince, with his powerful understanding. In the nature of the crime, I repeat, the solution of the riddle is to be sought. The assassination, for which there is no evidence to satisfy the popular mind, is the veil of the tragedy. The quality of the deed necessitates the apparent inaction of Hamlet and his subtle self-tormenting; they come not from cowardice nor any native weakness of character, not from an idle fondness for reflection.

It is the only one of all Shakespeare's tragedies in which the crime to be avenged lies outside of or beyond its sphere. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has illustrated his great historical theorem by modes of proof different from those employed in his other tragedies that punishment is only guilt developed, the necessary consequence of a guilt voluntarily incurred. As the genius possessing the profoundest insight into human history, it was incumbent on him to set the truth of this dogma above all doubt in a case in which no outward sensible sign appeared against a deed of blood. The dogma, that Foul deeds will rise though all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes,' is proved here with fearful import. By this fundamental idea is Hamlet to be explained. This it is that renders the portraiture clear. The tragic action is here the hot conflict of the divining mind with an invisible fact. Hamlet's apparent inaction is a prodigious logic (Dialektik). His supposed weakness has in reality the character of the heroic pathos of the antique tragedies, for here as there this weakness is a stormy struggle against the overwhelming pressure of an imposed expiation; the athleticism of a bitter agony every moment at its utmost tension, and this is the real action, the movement in the tragedy, but which our prating critics have not learned, who are in criticism just such shovellers as the Gravedigger, and know nothing more of what action consists in than that it is action at work, action dispatching business. Argal, in Hamlet nothing less is personified than the fault

of the theorising consciousness,' which is unable to act, even were it run through with a spit (gespiesst).

HOFFMANN (1848)

(Studien zu Shakespeare's Hamlet. Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, 1848, p. 394.)—To each form of the query, whether Hamlet's madness were real or pretended, one may say yes and no. If by madness be understood the want of consciousness, Hamlet was by no means insane. His self-consciousness is rather increased and made more keen. It might be said that he had become all consciousness. The particular becomes to him the universal; while he analyzes life, he takes in view only what is peculiar, and then flings it into the abyss of despair, in which his own life perishes. But if madness be the want of freedom, the ruin or the restriction of the active powers, then may the prince be said to be insane. He himself sees that he has no power over his actions; on this ground he explains to Laertes the death of Polonius. A lie in this case would have been as mean as it was inconsistent with his whole character. All who have had occasion to observe the insane know that such a fettering of the will may easily co-exist with great uprightness and a morbid keenness of insight and judgement. Only, indeed, there is usually observable that obstruction to freedom of action which is called a fixed idea. In Hamlet there is certainly nothing of this kind. Its place is supplied by his deep melancholy, which, like a heavy veil, lies over all things, and deadens their natural colors.

[Page 412.] In the business with the players, the shattered soul of Hamlet has its longest respite from the torments which continually beset it, and the introduction of the court-play is the only thing in which, during the whole piece, Hamlet shows some degree of interest. This act alone, contradicting all the rules of prudence, appears in a moment to decide the fate which, all resistance notwithstanding, leads the royal house to destruction. It increases the remorse of the King almost to distraction.

Into the scenes with the players, Shakespeare, it seems to me, has put his whole soul. How small, how mean does the theatre in all its exterior conditions appear,—— a plaything of the great, an amusement of fops, subject to the fickle humors of the ignorant rabble! And then again, how mighty in its effects, how great in its aim, from the speech of the player, who is so deeply moved by the imaginary griefs of Hecuba that his emotion communicates itself to his whole body, and with silent reproaches punishes Hamlet for being so quiet under the greatest real injuries, to those deeply significant words upon the nature of Art!

How noble and how strong must have been the soul which, under all these exterior and apparently vulgar circumstances, kept so lofty an aim immovably in view, and, in pursuing the same, solaced himself over the riddles and contradictions of life, which, as this work especially shows, no one felt so deeply as himself.

DR G. G. GERVINUS (1849)

(Shakespeare Commentaries, 1849; trans. by Miss Bunnett, 1863, ii, 126.)—When, surprised by the tidings of Ophelia's death, Hamlet hears Laertes's ostentatious lament over her grave, a storm of passion rises within him, and finds vent in a burst of exaggerated language. By this excess of excitement Hamlet blunts the edge of