FRANÇOIS-VICTOR HUGO (1873) (Introduction to Trans. Paris, 1873, p. 77.)-Erudite critics, while acknowledging the fine wisdom of Hamlet's counsels to the players, have nevertheless stoutly denied the dramatic propriety of introducing these counsels at all. The two scenes, in which Hamlet makes the actors rehearse, have been regarded by these critics as hors-d'œuvre, very magnificent, it is true, but none the less as hors-d'œuvre. Herein lies, in my opinion, a very grave error. Hamlet wishes to have a piece acted, the sight of which will force the guilty King to reveal his crime. It is readily perceived that the manner in which this piece is to be interpreted is of great importance to him. Hamlet has before him mere strolling players, buffoons addicted to low clap-trap or grotesque contortions, decked out in ridiculous costume. Wherefore, if the scene to be acted before Claudius has not due decorum, if one of the actors mouths it like a town crier, if another has his periwig befrouzled, if the clown, just at the most important point, cuts some of the wretched jokes that clowns are so fond of, why then, forsooth, the whole effect that Hamlet is aiming at is ruined. The terrible tragedy, whereof the last scene is to be acted off the stage, will end like a farce in a market-place amid peals of laughter. But if, on the other hand, the acting proceeds smoothly, the result is sure. The more natural the actor, the deeper will be Claudius's emotion; the truer the acting of the fictitious murderer, the more manifest will be the panic of the real one. It is, therefore, essential that Hamlet should have the piece rehearsed with the greatest care before it is performed in public. [Page 97.] Hamlet is not, in my view, a courtier, he is a misanthrope; he is not a prince, he is more than a prince, he is a thinker. What occupies his thoughts are no beggarly matters, but eternal problems. To be or not to be, that is the question.' In his ceaseless dreaming, Hamlet has lost sight of the finite, and sees only the infinite. He is forever contemplating this boundless Force which governs nature, and which men sometimes call Providence, and sometimes Chance; and before this Force he feels himself crushed,—he renounces his individuality, he abjures his will, and declares himself a fatalist. . . . . Whenever he acts, he obeys an impulse which drives him not from within, but from without. .... [Page 98.] Hamlet believes himself to be no more master of his fate than is a sparrow. And it is on this passive creature that the mission has devolved of over'throwing a tyrant. Hence all this wavering that we see, this uncertainty, these inner struggles. Hamlet looks upon himself as powerless, he has to overthrow a Power; he does not look upon himself as free, he has to make a whole nation free; he has no faith in his own strength, and he has to force punishment on a royal assassin. Sublime idea! Shakespeare has made Hamlet a fatalist avenger! This struggle between Will and Fate belongs not alone to the history of Hamlet,-it belongs to the history of us all. It is your life,-it is mine. It was that of our fathers,-it will be that of our sons. And hence the work of Shakespeare is eternal. PROF. DR HEINRICH VON STRUVE (1876) (Hamlet, Eine Charakterstudie, Weimar, 1876, p. 52): How are we to regard the Ghost? It is self-evident that it can be regarded in no other light than as an hallucination. Through the sudden death of his father, and its attendant circumstances, Hamlet was thrown into a state of excitement so intense, and dwelt upon his father's memory so tenderly, that it could not be but that his imagination, forever searching for the causes of the shocking event, should be in the highest degree liable to visions and hallucinations. At all events, it is much more natural to assume that the young Prince, excited and mentally tortured as he was, should have been the victim of an hallucination, at night, and in a retired spot, in which he saw his father's ghost, than that the canonized bones of his parent, hearsed in death, should really burst their cerements, and that the sepulchre in which they were quietly inurn'd should have oped his ponderous and marble jaws to permit them to visit the pale glimpses of the Before the appearance of the Ghost, Hamlet had seen his father in imagination, and it needed but the trifling incitement from some superstitious soldiers to transform the figment of his fancy into the lively colors and plastic outline of reality. moon. We see, therefore, in the apparition of his father, nothing but the reflection of Hamlet's own mental exaltation, and the words addressed to him by the Ghost are merely the words which Hamlet, in the name of his father, says to himself. Hamlet's talk with his father is merely a soliloquy. If it were necessary, this could be proved down to the smallest particular, for everything that Hamlet's father says corresponds to a hair with the known traits of Hamlet's character; it contains nothing individual, nothing novel, nothing peculiar to a character of a different mould, but everything bears the stamp of Hamlet's inmost nature, is the mere reflection of himself. Many an observation, made by chance and lost to memory, of his uncle's and his mother's conduct after his father's death; many a piece of gossip, which here and there reached his ears, and which by itself was insufficient to give his suspicions shape; many a significant shaking of the head by one or another of his father's faithful servants; many a fleeting observation which he had made unconsciously in connection with the numberless reports concerning the details of this mysterious event,—had worked night and day in Hamlet's mind, and struggled into shape not less effectively because unknown, or only half known, to himself; until at last all these separate items, insignificant in isolation, suddenly took consistent shape in Hamlet's mind, and stood out before his consciousness as an external image, unmodified by any conscious mental exertion. And thus it follows that the apparition of Hamlet's father, with its precise and distinct accusation of Claudius and the Queen, is nothing else than the objective and personified result of a mental process in Hamlet, long antecedent and unconsciously carried on. The Ghost appears. How does Hamlet act in its presence? Is he drawn by love to his father? is he rejoiced once more to behold the long-lost one? does he incline himself to him as a loving son assuredly would who actually saw his father bodily [sic, leibhaftig] before him? No, nothing of the kind! For all Hamlet was concerned, the apparition came to answer a flood of questions which have long agitated the son, and which he has long sought to answer for himself in vain. He seeks from the Ghost nothing else but that it inform him why it appears, what it requires of him, what he must do to allay its tormenting disquiet. At first he does not even know who it is; he himself first makes it his father, addresses it by this name to obtain more readily the answers to all his questions. [Page 148.] Hamlet enters into life with the most beautiful ideals. The bitter experiences of life have shattered his ideals. He saw evil, murder, treason, falsehood, where he hoped to find good, self-sacrifice, love, and truth. He came upon meanness, where he sought nobleness; cunning hypocrisy and hidden treachery affronted him, where he looked to meet friendship and open-heartedness. This disillusion has taught him to regard life and mankind as of little worth. But his moral nature would not suffer him to be crushed by his experience. He lost not faith in the moral order of the world. He did not allow the germs which stirred down deep in his breast to be choked. With moral energy he devoted himself to a high mission, to the restoration of the disturbed order of the moral world, to the punishment of the bad, to the vindication and victory of the right. In firm faith in his mission, in the faith that he has to fulfil it in the name of Providence, he finds strength to engage in the conflict with evil, and he seeks above all things to keep himself pure. In the wild storm of passion his strong purpose is to keep firm hold of the helm, and keep his course straight towards the bright goal of his life. DR H. BAUMGART (1877)* (Die Hamlet-Tragödie und ihre Kritik. Königsberg i. Pr. 1877.) [The subject of this volume of 165 pages is a critique of the criticisms that have been passed on Hamlet by German Shakespeare scholars, but mainly of Werder, whose idea, as we have already seen, is that the tragic interest of the Play lies not in the character of Hamlet so much as in the nature of his task, which is, not to dispatch the King, but to unmask him, that justice and truth may be brought to light. Should he kill the King without doing this, he would strike like a simpleton, and kill his own cause. Such is the point affirmed by Werder. Thus Dr Baumgart:] But what is the thought or purpose of an avenger, who by a monstrous act of violence has been wounded in his dearest, most sacred interests? If he be of a quick, fiery temper, disposed to revenge, he does not wait even for full proof of the wrong. He is often carried away to deeds of blood only upon strong suspicion. Is he of a cooler, more deliberate character, he waits, even if the strongest evidence lies before him, until he has an irresistible conviction of the injury. Then he acts with an energy only the more reckless, according to the force of his aroused will, whether others justify him or not, heedless even of his own destruction. When has a man, deeply wronged and thirsting for revenge, ever waited till he could lay his case before the great public? No, he keeps it hidden rather. Revenge is a strictly personal affair, having nothing in common with punishment, which satisfies the simple sense of justice. And where does the Ghost or Hamlet speak of punishment merely, and of the necessity of a previous unmasking? It is *This and the preceding volume, Dr STRUVE'S, come to hand while these pages are going through the press. The printers are upon me, and I cannot stop to read the volumes through. From the former I have selected the most striking passage that has caught my eye; of the latter I have not had time even to cut the leaves. The few pages, however, that I have read here and there, give promise of an essay of unusual power, and of forebodings to the soundness of WERDER'S theory. Probably under any circumstances but few extracts could have been made from Dr BAUMGART'S volume, so much of it is, professedly, criticism on criticism, which, as is stated in the Preface to Vol. I, has been excluded in the selection of extracts. ED. revenge alone that the Ghost calls for, and swift revenge that Hamlet promises. There is not a word about handing the King over to punishment, nor of punishment at all, but the first word with which Hamlet again recalls the warning of the Ghost, is a call upon himself, his own passion, that it may drive him at last to the vengeance which he has postponed. Everything impels him to vengeance, his father's ghost, his own boundless excitement, and yet there is something in him which checks him, in him, not out of him, --something that drives him to despair, to the bitterest self reproaches, but, in spite of all, not to action. Thus, as he only thinks of what has befallen him, his soul rises in a storm, venting itself in the most violent expressions, and then immediately, aware of this empty rage, the more unsparing is his condemnation of himself for being so made as, in spite of all, to be unable to proceed to action. He should hold his tongue and act. He is not equal to the deed, and yet his sensibility, responsive to the slightest touch, breaks out into the wildest expressions, but yet he scolds himself for unpacking his heart with words, and then he resolves. But what does he resolve? To what does his thinking lead him? Does he seek how he shall discover the murder to the world, that at last, without another moment's delay, he may sweep to the act? Nothing of this sort! To secure certainty for himself, he resolves upon the court-play. What his 'prophetic soul' has told him from the very beginning, what the nightly apparition has stamped in fearful characters on his soul, that he will confirm by proof; which, indeed, is all very well for a cool, deliberate judge, but which would never be done in such a situation by one in any degree disposed to revenge. But then, when he has laid the last doubt, will he, without hesitation, proceed to act? That the conviction wrought by the play is to lead to any measure looking to the public arraignment of the King, there is not a word to intimate. There is nothing in the whole piece which hints at any plan of Hamlet's, or at any intention to form one. His talk is of nothing but of taking immediate revenge, to which, however, he never makes up his mind until the hour of his death. |