of his uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied with this confirmation of his suspicions, and the success of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it. Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not from any want of attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretext that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous purposes.-HazLITT, Characters of Shakespear's Plays. THE MOOD OF HAMLET The mood of Hamlet is necessarily an extraordinary and an unaccountable mood. In him exceptional influences agitate an exceptional temperament. He is wayward, fitful, excited, horror-stricken. The foundations of his being are unseated. His intellect and his will are ajar and unbalanced. He has become an exception to the common forms of humanity. The poet, in his turn, struck with this strange figure, seems to have resolved on bringing its special peculiarities into special prominence, and the story which he dramatized afforded him the most ample opportunity of accomplishing this design. Hamlet is not only in reality agitated and bewildered, but he is led to adopt a disguise of feigned madness, and he is thus perpetually intensifying and distorting the peculiarities of an already over-excited imagination. It was, we think, inevitable that a composition which attempted to follow the workings of so unusual an individuality should itself seem abrupt and capricious; and this natural effect of the scene is still further deepened not only by the exceptionally large genius, but by the exceptionally negligent workmanship, of the THE PRINCIPLE OF HAMLET'S ACTION The mind of Hamlet, violently agitated and filled with displeasing and painful images, loses all sense of felicity. He even wishes for a change of being. The appearance is wonderful, and leads us to inquire into affections and opinions that could render him despondent. The death of. his father was a natural evil, and as such he endures it. That he is excluded from succeeding immediately to the royalty seems to affect him slightly; for to vehement and vain ambition he appears superior. He is moved by finer principles, by an exquisite sense of virtue, of moral beauty and turpitude. The impropriety of Gertrude's behavior, and her ingratitude to the memory of her former husband and the depravity she discovers in the choice of a successor, afflict his soul, and cast him into utter agony. Here, then, his the principle and spring of all his actions.—RICHARDSON, Essays on Some of Shakespeare's Dramatic Charac ters. THE INSANITY OF HAMLET But let it be remembered that in those days mental phenomena were by no means accurately examined or generally known. There was but little attention paid to the peculiar forms of monomania, or to its treatment, beyond restraint and often cruelty. The poor idiot was allowed, if harmless, to wander about the village or the country to drivel or gibber amidst the teasing or ill-treatment of boys or rustics. The poor maniac was chained or tied in some wretched outhouse, at the mercy of some heartless guardian, with no protector but the constable. Shakespeare could not be supposed, in the little town of Statford, nor indeed in London itself, to have had opportunities of studying the influence and the appearance of mental derangement of a high-minded and finely-cultivated prince. How then did Shakespeare contrive to point so highly-finished and yet so complex an image? Simply by the exercise of that strong sympathetic will which enabled him to transport, or rather to transmute, himself into another personality. While this character was strongly before him, he changed himself into a maniac; he felt intuitively what would be his own thought, what his feelings, were he in that situation; he played with himself the part of a madman, with his own grand mind as the basis of its action; he grasped on every side the imagery which he felt would have come into his mind, beautiful even when dislorded, sublime even when it was grovelling, brilliant even when dulled, and clothed it in words of fire and tenderness, with a varied rapidity which partakes of wildness and of sense, He needed not to look for a model out of himself, for it cost him no more effort to change the angle of his mirror, and sketch his own countenance awry. It was but little for him to pluck away the crown from reason and contemplate it dethroned.-WISEMAN, William Shakespeare. The very exhortations to secrecy, shown to be so important in Hamlet's imagination, are but illustrations of one part of his character, and must be recognizable as such by all physicians intimately acquainted with the beginnings of insanity. It is by no means unfrequent that when the disease is only incipient, and especially in men of exercised minds, that the patient has an uneasy consciousness of his own departure from a perfectly sound understanding. He becomes aware that, however he may refuse to acknowledge it, his command over his thoughts or his words is not steadily maintained, whilst at the same time he has not wholly lost control over either. He suspects that he is suspected, and anxiously and ingeniously accounts for his oddities. Sometimes he challenges inquiry, and courts various tests of his sanity, and sometimes he declares that in doing extravagant things he has only been pretending to be eccentric, in order to astonish the fools about him The The young Hamlet The curse of madto happiness,-has and who he knew were watching him. has suddenly become a changed man. ness,-ever fatal to beauty, to order, fallen upon him; deep vexation has undermined his reason, and thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul have agitated him beyond a cure. His affections are in disorder, and the disorder will increase; so that he will become by turns suspicious and malicious, impulsive and reflective, pensive and facetious, and undergo all the transformations of the most afflicting of human maladies.—CONOLLY, A Study of Hamlet. Shakespeare. recognized what none of his critics, not conversant with medical psychology in its present advanced state, seem to have any conception of; namely, that there are cases of melancholic madness of a delicate shade, in which the reasoning faculties, the intellect proper, so far from being overcome, or even disordered, may, on the other hand, be rendered more active and vigorous, while the will, the moral feelings, the sentiments and affections, are the faculties which seem alone to suffer from the stroke of disease. Such a case he has given us in the character of Hamlet, with a fidelity to nature which continues more and more to excite our wonder and astonishment as our knowledge of this intricate subject advances.—KELLOGG, Shakespeare's Delineations of Insanity, Imbecility and Suicide. The majority of readers at the present day believe that Hamlet's madness was real. A madness so skilfully feigned, and in so moderate and exact a degree as to deceive not only those whom it was intended to deceive, but also to deceive alike spectators and readers, who are always privileged to know more of the action and the real characters in a play than do the personages themselves,-such a feigned madness serves to make a plot more ingenious and interesting than it would be if the hero's men con tal aberration had been made to appear unmistakably real. -STEARNS, The Shakespeare Treasury of Wit and Knowledge. One of the probable causes of Hamlet's feigning of madness has never yet been indicated by the critics. Hamlet, it is said, played the madman to hide his thought, like Brutus. In fact, it is easy to cover a great purpose under apparent imbecility; the supposed idiot carries out his designs at his leisure. But the case of Brutus is not that of Hamlet. Hamlet plays the madman for his safety. Brutus cloaks his project; Hamlet, his person. The manners of these tragic courts being understood, from the moment that Hamlet learns from the ghost of the crime of Claudius, Hamlet is in danger. The superior historian that is in the poet is here manifest, and we perceive in Shakespeare the profound penetration into the dark shades of ancient royalty. In the Middle Ages and in the latter empire, and even more anciently, woe to him who discovered a murder or a poisoning committed by a king. Ovid, Voltaire conjectured, was exiled from Rome for having seen something shameful in the house of Augustus. To know that the king was an assassin was treason. When it pleased the prince to have no witness, one must be shrewd enough to know nothing. It was bad policy to have good eyes. A man suspected of suspicion was lost. He had only one refuge, insanity. Passing for an "innocent" he was despised, and all was said.-VICTOR HUGO, William Shakespeare. The question of Hamlet's madness has been much discussed and variously decided. High medical authority has pronounced, as usual, on both sides of the question. But the induction has been drawn from too narrow premises, being based on a mere diagnosis of the case, and not on an appreciation of the character in its completeness. We have a case of pretended madness in the Edgar of King Lear; and it is certainly true that that is a charcoal sketch, |