hero to speak out his (the poet's) opinion of him too decisively and too early, as it has been objected to Shakespeare, with or without reason, that he does with his villains. He lets the prince perpetrate such sillinesses, but elsewhere only among and towards others. The actual writing in his note-book had not, to the taste of those days, the singularity which it has for us. Elsewhere Shakespeare makes use of an outward action, when a poet now-a-days would content himself with words. Thus, Richard II upon his dethronement asks for a looking-glass, to see what a countenance he has when deprived of majesty; Bolingbroke directs one to be brought,―certainly not in ridicule, but to gratify the king who makes use of it. But a little littleness the poet intends to delineate in both cases, and in the case before us it is to be considered, in connection with the disturbed state of Hamlet's mind at the time, as a dim, colorless counterfeit of the previous frenzy, and even as such is it to be justified. At the same time the poet designs, by the odd form which he gives to this folly, to intimate beforehand, in a very intelligible way, that his hero is a man with whom memory will occasionally take the place of action, and wear the appearance of a mere memorandum.

DR AUGUST DOERING (1865)

(Shakespeare's Hamlet seinem Grundgedanken und Inhalte nach erläutert. Hamm, 1865, p. 34.)—In this first soliloquy we undoubtedly have the germ of Hamlet's fault (Verschuldung), which may be termed the perversion of an undeceived idealism into an embittered and passionate pessimism. The first inciting cause of this perversion was the marriage of the Queen, the second was Ophelia's treatment of him.

[Page 49.] When Hamlet comes before Ophelia, as she was sewing in her closet, there is no attempt on his part to feign insanity. He comes in fearful excitement, forced by his anguish to assure himself whether or not her exquisitely chiselled features proclaim a noble, free soul, and in her dumb embarrassment, unrelieved by a single heart-throb of sympathy, he reads the confirmation of his fears. With that sigh that seemed to shatter all his bulk he parted from his love, and thereafter felt for Ophelia only bitter scorn.

ment.

[Page 64.] Hamlet's call for music and the recorders, after the King has fled discomfited from the court-play, is the joy which every habitual pessimist feels over a fresh confirmation that the world is really as bad and that men are really as depraved as he maintains. This perverted idealism has its origin not so much in the objective side of human nature, in the intellect, as in the subjective side of excessive sentiHis pessimism is not a conviction, but a mood; it is not the result of a universal observation, but only of a few lively impressions. Nevertheless, this mood places him in antagonism to all human kind; he shares none of their interests, but is separated by a high barrier from all their ends and aims. His sole interest is to find food for this scornful feeling, and to live in this perverted world only as long as he absolutely must. And can he mingle in the affairs of this world, where everything is bad? Can he feel tempted to avenge outwitted virtue, when there is no such thing as virtue? Shall he feel impelled to restore an interrupted moral order, when he does not recognize the continuance of any such?

[Page 68.] When Hamlet finds Claudius at prayer, his passion knows no bounds, and he longs not for a human, but for a devilish, revenge. While the most ruthless criminal code of past ages always treated its victims with tenderest reference to their

Hereafter, Hamlet wished to make his revenge eternal. In order to perceive how naturally this train of thought springs from Hamlet's disposition, we need but remember how prominent was the share that the Hereafter took in all his reflections, and furthermore, that death itself was far from being abhorrent to him, but on the contrary was vehemently longed for.

[Page 70.] His passion leads him to reproach his mother with killing her husband, a reproach which could have been meant as only so far true as, by her yielding to the seducer, she had, without her wish or will, inspired his impulse to commit the murder... . . . . The appearance of the Ghost in the midst of the interview is to be explained by the fact that the midnight hour was past, during which the spirit, freed from purgatorial fires, hovers around the appointed executor of revenge. He had seen how Hamlet had suffered the praying King to escape, and he comes to whet his almost blunted purpose.

[Page 72.] The Queen remains true to her promise, and gives a distorted account to the King of Hamlet's killing Polonius. She says that he was mad as the raging sea (against her better knowledge she here implies genuine insanity); and then that he heard not a human voice, but something stir behind the arras; so that, according to her report, Hamlet might readily be supposed to have made a pass at a rat. She naturally keeps back that Hamlet had supposed that he had killed the King, and she further adds, falsely, that he weeps for what he has done, &c. But the King is not deceived: 'It had been so with us had we been there.'

[Page 87.] The faith in Providence, with which Hamlet dared to comfort himself in recounting to Horatio his treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is by no means a symptom of a healthy tone of mind; in the whole tragedy there is no trace in Hamlet of any want of faith in the fundamental truths of religion. Rather is the appeal to this faith in this connection a proof of weakness, which finds comfort in the belief of a wonderful interposition of a higher power in cases where daring is required, and where the issue is uncertain, and where, therefore, the interposition of Providence, so far as it can be affirmed to exist at all, may just as well favor the opposite party. . . . . Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the only persons in this tragedy who die an innocent death.

[Page 91.] The change of rapiers is to be thus explained. The same thrust with which Laertes gives Hamlet his mortal wound also disarms him, that is, jerks Hamlet's weapon out of his hand. The courtesy of a contest merely for exercise, or as a trial of skill, obliges him who disarms his opponent to pick up the fallen weapon, and then offer both weapons to his antagonist to take which he pleases. Through this accident, on which Laertes had not counted, he was caught in his own springe, for the semblance of a trial of skill had still to be kept up. Hamlet chooses the envenomed rapier, and in the following fourth bout Nemesis overtakes Laertes.

DR E. W. SIEVERS (1866)

(William Shakespeare. Sein Leiben und Dichten. Gotha, 1866, p. 441.)-Goethe did not, in his later years, rest satisfied with his explanation. When, in the year 1828, he was looking over Retsch's Gallery of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works,' and came to Hamlet: After all is said,' he remarked, that weighs upon one's soul as a gloomy problem.' And it must be confessed that Goethe did not solve the gloomy problem,' although he came nearer to the solution than any one else.

The gift of

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poetic intuition which he carried with him into this domain of criticism, at first foreign to him, enabled him to apprehend correctly the ground-tone of Hamlet's character, and thus the beautiful figure by which he illustrates it may, with a slight change, be retained. Hamlet is indeed a costly vase full of lovely flowers, for he is a pure human being, penetrated by enthusiasm for the Great and the Beautiful, living wholly in the Ideal, and, above all things, full of faith in man; and the vase is shivered into atoms from within,—this and just this Goethe truly felt,—but what causes the ruin of the vase is not that the great deed of avenging a father's murder exceeds its strength, but it is the discovery of the falseness of man, the discovery of the contradiction between the ideal world and the actual, which suddenly confronts him as a picture of man: it is, in fact, what he gradually finds in himself as the true portrait of the human nature which he once deified,-in short, Hamlet perishes because the gloomy background of life is suddenly unrolled before him, because the sight of this robs him of his faith in life and in good, and because he now cannot act. Only that man can act, act for others and for all, who is inwardly sound; and Hamlet's mind is out of joint,' after he has been robbed of his earlier faith. This it is that Goethe correctly felt, and it is just this ruin of the costly vase' which more recent critics have entirely disregarded, giving their attention to that point alone, where Goethe's idea of Hamlet is erroneous or inadequate,-namely, to the 'great deed,' to which Hamlet is alleged to be unequal. The drama is emptied of all its rich, purely human contents, if Hamlet be reduced to a bloodless shadow, 'the hero of reflection,' who, from mere abstract reflection upon the deed, never arrives at the deed.

[Page 442.] Let us first look a little more closely at Hamlet's way of viewing things, at his ideal nature. While Romeo and Juliet find their ideal, each in the other, and keep the world with all that it morally imports at a distance, Hamlet's aspirations, on the other hand, are intimately connected with the world; he seeks the ideal directly in life, in the moral relations of man to man, in the supremacy of the spirit, and, above all, in the moral sense of individuals. He goes directly to the world, and demands that it shall show him his ideal actualized. He would find in the world a warrant for his deepest consciousness, for his faith in man and in goodness; there must be harmony between spirit and life, and such a necessity of his nature is it that it is the very condition of his existence. In short, Hamlet is the representative of the spirit in man, conscious of its divine capacity. In this consciousness he dares to set himself above the world, and apply to it his subjective standard; he is the champion of the highest moral demands which the human mind makes upon life, and is far removed from everything weak, sentimental, sickly; he is through and through a brave, truehearted man, and by the preponderance of the spiritual element he is a radically energetic person, and the declaration which Shakespeare at the close puts into the mouth of Fortinbras, who stood outside the circle of the opposing parties: He was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally,'—this declaration gives us Shakespeare's own opinion, and is confirmed by Hamlet's tragic end. Indeed, we Germans have a special interest in not admitting the representation of Hamlet as a person originally of a morbid character, defective at the core; for, turn and twist as we may, we must confess that it is the German mind that presents itself to us in Hamlet; the saying of Freiligrath, Germany is Hamlet,' which, in reference to Hamlet's dread of action, is repeated ad nauseam, and is yet only half true, is wholly true in respect of the intellectual principle represented in Hamlet, the self-conscious, subjective intellect, which here, for the

first time, independently opposes the world, and subjects it to its own standard. That Shakespeare makes his Hamlet study in Wittenberg has often been attributed to the fact that the Reformation originated there, and we ourselves trust in the sequel to prove that this drama is intended to represent the peculiar, fundamental principle of Protestantism,—although we are of opinion that Shakespeare, when he placed his hero in connection with the city of Luther, was influenced rather by Marlowe's Faust than by the historical significance of Wittenberg; he meant, we think, to set in contrast with Marlowe's Faust another purely intellectual Faust. But be this as it may, it is certain that Shakespeare's Hamlet, like no other of his characters in this first period of the poet's genius, is created in a thoroughly German spirit; he is a spiritual brother of Werther and, most emphatically, of Goethe's Faust.

[Page 445.] When Hamlet first appears, before he has seen, or even heard of the Ghost, he stands on the brink of despair. We note this fact particularly, because it alone suffices to show how inadequate is the common representation of Hamlet, according to which it is the great deed' that lies heavy upon his soul. Shakespeare here most explicitly assigns the marriage of Hamlet's mother as the one cause of the melancholy of his hero, which drives him to wish that the Eternal had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter.' And how it is that the marriage of his mother has affected him so deeply plainly appears: it has destroyed his faith in his mother; he perceives what it is that has impelled her to a second marriage,—that it was not love, nor any pure motive, but base sensual desire; and now the world is to him an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.' He cries fie! fie! upon it: it is the first look into the actual world of men which Hamlet takes, and what a spectacle is it that is presented before him! He stands before nothing less than an utter contradiction in the being of man, before an abortion, by which his whole previous view of things is inverted, and it is rendered impossible for him ever after to have faith in the moral nature of man.

[Page 454.] The solution of the riddle of this powerful tragedy, which may be described as the peculiarly classic work expressive of the Protestant aspect of the world (Weltanschauung), is as follows: What the poet here represents is the torture and weakness of a nature that has fallen out with the world, and lost its hold; it is the break of the consciousness which robs the soul of faith, and renders it incapable of all self-forgetting devotion, of all elevation above self. The great Protestant idea of man's need of faith, of faith as the condition of his peace, and of the fulfilment of his mission as a moral being,-this it is to which this profoundest and most moving of all the works of Shakespeare's genius owes its origin. Hamlet is the human being who seeks his hold, his resting-place, in the interior nature of man. Shakespeare lets him go to destruction because he has nothing to hold to after his purely idealistic faith in man is shivered into atoms. This is the vivifying motive

in Shakespeare, which has passed from his soul into his work, and thus is it clear what is the idea upon which is based his representation of humanity, as he unfolds it in the King and Queen: against the idealistic way of looking at things and the deification of man, he has sought to set the sinfulness of the human being, which first appears in history in Protestantism; accordingly, out of the rude Hamlet of the legend, he has fashioned a being who represents, in fact, the Incarnation of Idealism, and for the same purpose he contrasts him with the characters which, in the King and Queen, are the actual personifications of the essential corruption of human

nature. But in the foreground is represented the internal instability of the soul when not rooted in God as the only sure source of life, and the weakness and suffering to which it is in consequence given over.

GUSTAV RÜMELIN (1866)

(Shakespearestudien. Stuttgart, 1866, p. 75.)—The truth of the matter is this: Hamlet's conduct is confused, and his actions are inadequate to the end proposed; he chooses strange and unintelligible means to gain his point. But the reason is not that the poet intended so to represent him; conduct of this sort belongs only to comedy, not to tragedy. The unmistakable inadequacy of Hamlet's practical methods is characteristic, not so much of Hamlet as of Shakespeare. It could not possibly have been the design of the poet to depict a mere incapacity of rightly and intelligently carrying out a purpose. Aristotle long ago mentioned among the examples of dramatic action those, as the most useless for the poet, in which the tragic hero has an object in view which he never attains.

But if Shakespeare ever had attempted this problem, he would have been compelled to solve it in a very different fashion. Shakespeare is by no means one of those poets who draw in lines all too fine and uncertain; his faults are rather on the side of excess than of deficiency. But where are we to find the clear proofs of Hamlet's irresolution? Retarding moments are as indispensable in a tragedy as the escapement in a watch. Had Hamlet, immediately after the appearance of the Ghost, executed the act of vengeance, the drama would have ended with the second scene. But, in fact, Hamlet is acting uninterruptedly throughout; his feigned madness is an act, and a very strong and intensive act, too. That he repeatedly reproaches himself, that he finds examples that condemn him,—in the player who weeps for Hecuba, and in young Fortinbras,-only shows how completely he is filled with the thought of his task. . . . . With how much plainer colors would Shakespeare have painted, had he intended to depict an incapacity for decisive action made morbid by too much thinking!

May it be permitted briefly to contribute to the numerous interpretations of Hamlet yet another, which appears to elucidate much, although not all, but which cannot, however, be acceptable to the æsthetic ideologists ?

In the old legend of Hamlet, which directly calls to mind Livy's story of the elder Brutus, one thing appears as the essential and specific point. In order to lull the usurper and murderer of his father into security, and to draw upon himself no suspicion, Hamlet feigns to be insane, but in this pretended insanity there is evidence of great intelligence, which, according to the northern legend, is shown by an uncommon acuteness of mind, by an instinctive suspicion of the concealed connections of events. To put deep sense and hidden wisdom into speeches and actions, which are apparently insane, was for him who sought to treat this subject dramatically the one special task, and while it was difficult enough to deter all mediocre talent from attempting it, it would naturally charm and attract a great and highly gifted poet.

But for Shakespeare this problem had something more than the charm of affording him an opportunity to let his light shine, and his mind and wit disport themselves in new forms. Before he undertook it, he had grown from youth to manhood, and through manifold errors and conflicts without and within gathered a treasure of