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

purpose and action, which the habitual tardiness of his nature renders dull; he alternately touches the chords of the two different moral themes of the drama : namely, that intentions, conceived in passion, vanish with the emotion; and that human will changes, and is influenced and enfeebled by delays.

[Page 134.] We become acquainted with Hamlet as the friend and judge of acting, as a poet and a player. He has seen the players before, and has had closer intercourse with them; he inserts a passage in the piece they are playing; he declaims before them; he gives them instructions. His praise of the fragment of Pyrrhus, sustained in the old Seneca-like style, is perfectly serious; it distinguishes him from Polonius, whom a jig pleases better. This, as well as his instructions to the players, exhibits him as a man of cultivated mind and taste, as the judge whose single appreciation is worth more than that of all the rest of the theatre. It is, therefore, natural that the idea should occur to him of catching' the King's conscience in a play; he seeks, as it were, an ingenious revenge, and to accomplish this under the touching effect of the presence of his conscience-stricken mother had evidently a kind of theatrical charm for him. When this trial of the King by means of the play succeeds, it is extremely characteristic that it is not the fearful evidence of the crime which occupies him at first, but the pleasure in his skill as actor or poet; not the result so much, as his art which has effected it. are his first words, 'get me a fellowship in any cry of players?' still more than the performance itself, would certainly appear to mark his aptitude for the position. It is from this same inclination of Hamlet's, as much as from his character, that he adopts the strangely indirect course of feigning himself mad; and that he is able to sustain his part naturally and ingeniously. He had the power of disguising himself artfully and artistically, and of skilfully remaining his own master behind the mask, averse as he is to dissimulation in life.

Would not this,'
This question,

Immediately after the departure of the Ghost, still agitated by the apparition, he receives his friends with a falcon-call, as if in the most joyful mood, and knows how to conceal his emotion at first as well as his secret at last. To imagine himself in the position of the player, and on all occasions to study the word,' is a natural trait, resulting from his intellectual life and pursuits. He goes with a kind of joyful preparation to rouse his mother's conscience by a moral lecture and a flood of impressive eloquence, to speak daggers rather than to use them, whilst he neglects the deed of vengeance, which would of itself have gained his object. When Laertes bursts forth in the bombastic outpouring of his brotherly grief, he receives it as a challenge for a war of words. Hamlet is aware of the fault in himself; he recog· nizes it as a hindrance to his active emotion, and blames it in himself with the same vehemence as he declaims against the conscientiousness of his cowardice and the cowardice of his conscience.

[Page 144.] He appears to us as an idealist, unequal to the real world, who, repelled by it, not only laments in elegiac strains over its deficiencies and defects, but grows embittered and sickly about it, even to the injury of his naturally noble character. If Hamlet on the side of his sensibility is an anticipation of the feeble generation of the former century, on the side of this bitterness of feeling he is a type of our German race at the present day. And this it is which has made Hamlet the most known of all Shakespeare's plays, and the most discussed among us for now nearly a hundred years; because the conditions of the soul, which are here depicted, seem to us the most expressive and the most living. We feel and see our own selves in him, and, in love with our own deficiencies, we have long seen only

the bright side of this character, until of late we have had a glimpse of its shadows also. We look upon the mirror of our present state as if this work had first been written in our own day; the poet, like a living man, works for us and in us in the same way as he intended to do for his own age.

[Page 151.] The conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia, in III, i, affords the actor scope sufficient to intimate indirectly the nature of Hamlet's feelings for Ophelia. It is the farewell of an unhappy heart to a connection broken by fate; it is the serious advice of a self-interested lover, who sends his beloved to a convent because he grudges her to another, and sees the path of his own future lie in hopeless darkness.

[Page 152.] At Hamlet's first advances, Ophelia, inexperienced and unsuspicious, has given him her heart; she has been free in her audience with him, so that neighbors perceiving it have warned the family, and the family have warned her; his conversation with her is equivocal, and not as either Romeo, Bassanio, or even Proteus, have spoken with their beloved ones. This has affected her imagination with sensual images, and inspired her in her quiet modesty with amorous passions; this is seen in the songs which she sings in her madness, and in the significant flowers which she distributes, as clearly as anything so hidden in its nature can and may be unveiled.

DR L. ECKARDT (1853)

(Vorlesungen über Shakespeare's Ilamlet. Aarau, 1853, p. 8.)—Faust is the great poem upon the opposition and reconciliation of the divine and human natures.

Hamlet is the great poem upon the opposition and reconciliation of necessity and human freedom.

Thus Faust and Hamlet are the modern Titans, who, at war with the Christian heaven, pile up each his colossus of thought, and at last perish on the ruins of these presumptuous structures. They teach humanity, renunciation.

[Page 41.] Hamlet is a character of the North, where all life is more earnest and intense; where man has to rise out of a deeper soul, in order to get into contact with the outer world; where, consequently, the danger is far more imminent of sinking one's self in the objects one sees around him, and all the more, as in scant sunlight and under cloudy skies all things are perceived in a gloomier aërial perspective. The South leads us out of ourselves; the North fosters subjectivity, separates us more from Nature, withdraws us from external impressions, causes us to grow up in a one-sided way, too much engrossed with ourselves. The flute is an instrument of the North, which in sweet solitude breathes its soul into it; it therefore does not surprise us to find the flute in the hands of Hamlet. He certainly knew how to make it speak. He who prefers this instrument shows a thoughtful spirit and a self-contented imagination. It is not pain which the flute expresses, but a sigh for love, a sweet earthly desire, a longing such as may steal over the happiest. But a happy, inner life it was that blest the young Hamlet [&c. &c.].

DR EDUARD VEHSE (1854)

(Shakespeare als Protestant, Politiker, Psycholog. Hamburg, 1854, vol. i, p. 293.) -Hamlet is the poesy and tragedy of the melancholic temperament just as Lear is of the choleric. Hamlet is the drama that utters the most startling, the most touch