away,-dumb all the while! And who with right soul but must have been speechless amidst these gentle ravings? The adulterous and incestuous only it is that speak. How now, Ophelia ?' Nay! but, Ophelia,' so minceth the Queen. How do you, pretty lady?' Pretty Ophelia !' so stuttereth the King. Faugh! the noisome and loathsome hypocrites! So that her poor lips were but mute, both would have fain seen them sealed up with the blue mould of the grave! But Laertes,-he with all his faults and sins has a noble heart,-his words are pathetic or passionate. Horatio says her speech is nothing.' It is nearly nothing. But the snatches of old songs, they are something,-as they come flowing in music from their once-hushed restingplaces far within her memory, which they had entered in her days of careless childhood, and they have a meaning now that gives them doleful utterance. It is Hamlet who is the maniac's Valentine. You are merry, my lord,' is all she said to him, as he lay with his head in her lap at the play. She would have died rather than sing to Hamlet that night the songs she sings now,-yet she had not sung them now had she not been crazed with love! Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?' She must mean Hamlet. He is dead and gone, lady,' &c. Means she her father? Perhaps, but most likely not. Hamlet? It is probable. Mayhap but the dead man of the song. Enough that it is of death, and burial. Or to that verse, as haply to others too, she may attach no meaning at all. A sad key once struck, the melancholy dirge may flow on of itself. Memory and Consciousness accompanying not one another in her insanity! They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table.' The King says, conceit upon her father.' Adulterous beast! it was no conceit on her father. The words refer to an old story often related to children to deter them from illiberal behavior to poor people. Ophelia had learnt the story in the nursery, and she who was always charitable thinks of it now,-God only knows why,—and Shake speare, who had heard such dim humanities from the living lips of the deranged,— many have done who are no Shakespeares,-gave them utterance from the lips of the sweetest phantom that ever wailed her woes in hearing of a poet's brain.

DR MAGINN (1836)

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(Shakespeare Papers, London, 1860, p. 275.)-Shakespeare has written plays, and these plays were acted; and they succeeded; and by their popularity the author achieved a competency, on which he was enabled to retire from the turmoils of a theatrical life to the enjoyment of a friendly society and his own thoughts. Yet am I well convinced it is impossible that any one of Shakespeare's dramatic works,and especially of his tragedies, touching one of which I mean to speak,—ever could be satisfactorily represented upon the stage. Laying aside all other reasons, it would be, in the first place, necessary to have a company such as was never yet assembled, and no money could at any time have procured,-a company, namely, in which every actor should be a man of mind and feeling; for in these dramas every part is a character fashioned by the touch of Genius; and therefore every part is important. But of no play is this more strictly true than it is of that strange, and subtle, and weird work, Hamlet: The heartache, And the thousand natural ills the flesh is heir to;' human infirmities, human afflictions, and supernatural agony are so blended,-questions and considerations of Melancholy, of Pathology, Metaphysics, and Demonology

are so intertangled,—the powers of man's Will, which are well-nigh almighty, and the dictates of inexorable Fate, are brought into such an appalling yet dim collision, that to wring a meaning from a work else inscrutable requires the exercise of every faculty, and renders it necessary that not an incident should escape the observation, that not a word should be passed over, without being scanned curiously.

Hamlet is, even more peculiarly than Lear, or Macbeth, or Othello, a play for the study. And not this alone; for it is, in good sooth, a work for the high student, who, through the earnestness of his Love, the intensity of his Thought, the pervading purity of his Reason, and the sweep and grasp of his Imagination, is, the while he reads, always thrilled by kindred inspirations,-sometimes visited by dreams, and not left unblessed by visions. To speak in other words, Hamlet is essentially a work for the student of Genius. And Genius, I consider with Coleridge, to be the action of Imagination and Reason,-the highest faculty of intellectual man, as contradistinguished from Understanding, that interprets for us the various phenomena of the world in which we live, giving to each its objectivity.

[Page 281.] Consider Hamlet in whatsoever light you will, it stands quite alone, most peculiarly apart, from every other play of Shakespeare's. A vast deal has been written upon the subject, and by a great number of commentators, by men born in different countries, educated after different fashions..... We might hope to see a second Shakespeare, if the world had ever produced a commentator worthy of Hamlet. The qualities and faculties such a man should possess would be, indeed, 'rare in their separate excellence, wonderful in their combination.' Such a man as Shakespeare imagined in him to whom his hero bequeathed the task of 'Reporting him and his cause aright To the unsatisfied.'

[Page 325.] For this reason, also, Hamlet stands quite alone amongst Shakespeare's plays. The Spirit of Love is weakest in Hamlet, and therefore it commands but little human sympathy. Ophelia does love, and she dies. There is a majesty in her gentleness, which you worship with a gush of feeling in her earlier scenes of the play; the painful nature of her appearances, whilst mad, makes you feel that death is a release; and that release comes in an appropriate form,-the gentle, uncomplaining, sorrow-stricken lady dies gently, and without a murmur of bitterness or reproach,—the meek lady is no more, but the tragedy proceeds.

[Page 327.] I may here observe that, for a play so bloody for the English vulgar, and in itself so morally tragic for the scholar and the gentleman, Hamlet is for both, in its performance on the stage, strangely beholden to spectacle, and to its comic scenes or snatches of scenes: the visible show of the Ghost, the processions, funeral, squabble at Ophelia's grave, fencing-match, and at the last the quarry that cries on, havoc!' have much power over the common spectator. I doubt if he could abide it without these, and without having Polonius buffooned for him, and, to no small extent, Hamlet himself; as he always was whenever I saw the part played, and as the great critic, Dr Johnson, would seem to think he ought to be. For he says, 'the pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth !!!

[Page 330.] In a word, Hamlet, to my mind, is essentially a psychological exercise and study. The hero, from whose acts and feelings everything in the drama takes its color and pursues its course, is doubtless insane. But the species of intellectual disturbance, the peculiar form of mental malady, under which he suffers, is of the subtlest character.

HALLAM (1837)

(Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. ii, p. 201, New York, 1868.)— There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare's life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience; the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature which intercourse with ill-chosen associates, by choice or circumstance, peculiarly teaches; these, as they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished serenity, and with a gayety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the Duke of Measure for Measure. In all these, however, it is merely contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet this is mingled with the impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amid feigned gayety and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy. These plays all belong to nearly the same period: As You Like It being usually referred to 1600, Hamlet, in its altered form, to about 1602, Timon to the same year, Measure for Measure to 1603, and Lear to 1604. In the later plays of Shakespeare, especially in Macbeth and The Tempest, much of moral speculation will be found, but he has never returned to this type of character in the personages.

JONES VERY (1839)

(Essays and Poems. Hamlet. Boston, 1839, p. 85.)-If Shakespeare's masterpassion then was, as we have seen it to be, the love of intellectual activity for its own sake, his continual satisfaction with the simple pleasure of existence must have made him more than commonly liable to the fear of death, or at least made that change the great point of interest in his hours of reflection. Often and often must he have thought, that to be or not to be forever was a question which must be settled; as it is the foundation, and the only foundation, upon which we feel that there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one purpose worthy of a human soul. Here lie the materials out of which this remarkable tragedy was built up. From the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy, comes that depth and mystery which startles us in Hamlet. It is to this condition that Hamlet has been reduced. . . . . He fears nothing save the loss of existence. But this thought thunders at the very base of the cliff on which, shipwrecked of every other hope, he had been thrown..... [Page 88.] This is the hinge on which his every endeavor turns. Such a thought as this might well prove more than an equal counterpoise to any incentive to what we call action. The obscurity that lies over these depths of Hamlet's character arises from this unique position in which the poet exhibits him; a position which opens to us the basis of Shakespeare's own being, and which, though dimly visible to all, is yet familiar to but few. . . . .

[Page 91.] This view will account for Hamlet's indecision. With him the next

world, by the intense action of his thoughts, had become as real as the present; and, whenever this is the case, thought must always at first take precedence of action.

[Page 93.] Even the revenge which suggests itself to Hamlet is not of this world. To others it would assume a character of the most savage enormity, and one from which, of all men, the tender and conscientious prince would soonest shrink. But with him it is as natural as his most ordinary action. He has looked through the slight afflictions of this world, and his prophetic eye is fixed on the limitless extent beyond. Here, and here alone, will the fire of the King's incestuous lust burn unquenched, and the worm of remorse never die.

[Page 98.] We need not go further to show, what will now be apparent, the tendency of Shakespeare to overact this particular part of Hamlet, and thus give it an obscurity from too close a connection with his own mind,-a state so difficult to approach. It is plain that to him the thought of death, and the condition of being to which that change might subject him, would ever be his nearest thoughts; and that, wherever there exists the strong sense of life, these ideas must follow hard upon it. In the question of Hamlet the thoughts, as well as the words, have their natural order, when To be' is followed by not to be.'

[Page 100.] The thoughts of this soliloquy are not found to belong to a particular part of this play, but to be the spirit of the whole. To be, or not to be,' is written over its every scene, from the entrance of the Ghost to the rude inscription over the gateway of the churchyard; and whenever we shall have built up in ourselves the true conception of this the greatest of the poets, To be, or not to be,' will be found to be chiselled in golden letters on the very keystone of that arch which tells us of his memory.

[Page 103.] In the height of emotion and mental conflict to which he is raised by these contemplations, he finds relief, as in the graveyard and after his first interview with the Ghost, in expressions which seem strangely at variance with each other, but which, in reality, are but natural alternations. So much does he dwell in the world of spirits, that there is a sort of ludicrous aspect upon which his mind seizes as often as it returns to this. There is something,' says Scott, 'in my deepest afflictions and most gloomy hours, that compels me to mix with my distresses strange snatches of mirth, which have no mirth in them.'

JOSEPH HUNTER (1845)

(New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, London, 1845, vol. ii, p. 205.)-Nothing in the dramatic art ever exceeded the skill with which the First Act is throughout constructed. It is in the highest style of tragic grandeur, making only this one reasonable claim upon our indulgence, that we must lay aside our modern philosophy, and look upon ourselves as belonging to a people who were firm believers in the reality of such spectral appearances. Now, even with all our skepticism, the poet has given to the scenes the spirit of reality. We have neither time nor inclination to doubt. There is the majestic spectre, and we seem to see and hear it. Had the poet proceeded continuously, according to what from this opening may be concluded to have been at first his design, as far as we have reason to believe that he had conceived a design, and shown us the young prince made acquainted with the manner of his father's death by the supernatural visitation, and at the same time engaged to avenge it on his uncle, not daring to do

so openly, and thinking that the safest means of accomplishing his object was for a time to counterfeit lunacy, then seeking the opportunity, now opposed from without, now impeded by doubts of his uncle's guilt rising in his own mind, fearful of implicating his mother in the suspicions respecting his father's mode of death, but at length, in full satisfaction of his uncle's guilt, executing the Ghost's behest in some open and solemn manner :-this, with such an under-plot as is here wrought in, of his attachment to Ophelia, the effect of his assumed madness upon her, the impediments arising out of this attachment to the execution of the main purpose, would have formed the plot of as magnificent a tragedy as hath ever been conceived from the days when first the more awful passions were represented on the stage.

It would have afforded also scope for all that diversity of character and that variety of incident which we find in the play as it now is, even, if that were thought a suitable scene for such a drama, to the introduction of the play within the play, by which Hamlet seeks to convince himself of his uncle's guilt; scope also for all those striking scenes and speeches, to which, and not to that in which lies the chief and highest excellence of dramatic writing, Hamlet owes that high popularity it has so long maintained. No one can be insensible to the power of such a composition as this; and yet, of all the greater works, may not this be considered as that which is, on the whole, least honorable to him, showing us what he could do, and showing us also what a noble promise he has left unfulfilled?

To borrow an expression from the language of criticism in a sister art, the piece is spotty. The spots are beautiful when contemplated in themselves, still they are but spots.

There is also more by which the moral sense is offended in this play than in any other; offended, I mean, not with the characters, but with the author. The idea of a human being seeking to avenge a great and unpunished crime by the assassination of the criminal, even when we see that it involves parricide, however at variance it may be with Christian feeling, does not offend, because we see it to be essential to the very existence of such a story, and to belong to the history as it is found in the old chronicles of Denmark; but to make Hamlet forbear to execute his purpose when a favorable opportunity is presented, for the reason there given, is hideous, and more the affair of the poet than the historian. But the still greater offence is the introduction of Ophelia in a state of mind which, if ever it did exist in nature, ought to be screened from every human eye, nor should the sex be profaned by the remotest suspicion of its possible existence.

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We have, also, here a pandering to the corrupt English taste in tragedy. English audience at a tragedy love a clear stage;' and certainly in Hamlet they may be gratified. We start with the ghost of a murdered king; then there die the succeeding King, the Queen, Hamlet, Polonius and his two children Laertes and Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. Of the conspicuous characters only Horatio is left alive. An acquaintance with the ancient tragedy would have taught him that this slaughter is committed under an erroneous impression of the requisites of tragedy for effect, and the true source of the pleasure we derive from it. Indeed, it is but too manifest that Shakespeare had a finer idea of comedy than of tragedy; great, however, in both.

The introduction of Osric and Fortinbras, new characters, towards the close of the play, is contrary to all rule; and though Shakespeare may be allowed to disregard the rules of dramatic art, and to be a law to himself, yet it may be submitted to the judgement of any one, whether it would not have been well for him to have