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.-VERY, Essays and Poems. MATURITY OF THE PLAY To any of the new school of Victorian Shakspereans, to any one who has a grasp of Shakspere's development, who can trace the progress of his Mind and Art from the whimsy quip and quirk, the youthful passion, the florid rhetoric, of his First-Period farces, tragedy, and histories, from these to the pathos of Constance, the grace of Portia, the humor of Falstaff, the wit of Benedick and Beatrice, the romance of Viola, the steadfastness of Helena, the wealth and brilliancy of Shakspere's delightful Second Period, and thence to the deeper Tragedies of his Third,— to any such man, no words of mine are needed to make him sure that Hamlet was no creation of the "rough enthusiasm of Shakspere's youth at Stratford.”—FURNIVALL, Hamlet in the Quarto Facsimile of Shakespeare. SUPERIORITY OF HAMLET 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 borne 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 combinations." Such a man as Shakespeare imagined in him to whom his hero bequeathed the task of: Reporting him and his cause aright to the satisfied."-MAGINN, Shakespeare Papers. Not one single alteration in the whole play can possibly have been made with a view to stage effect or to present popularity and profit; or we must suppose that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was naturally even greater as a fool. There is a class of mortals to whom this infer'ence is always grateful-to whom the fond belief that every great man must needs be a great fool would seem always to afford real comfort and support: happy, in Prior's phrase, could their inverted rule prove every great fool to be a great man. Every change in the text of Hamlet has impaired its fitness for the stage and increased its value for the closet in exact and perfect proportion. Now this is not a matter of opinion-of Mr. Pope's opinion or Mr. Carlyle's; it is a matter of fact and evidence. Even in Shakespeare's time the actors threw out his additions; they throw out these very same additions in our own. The one especial speech, if any one such especial speech there be, in which the personal genius of Shakespeare soars up to the very highest of its height and strikes down to very deepest of its depth, is passed over by modern actors; it was cut away by Hemings and Condell. We may almost assume it as certain that no boards have ever echoed—at least, more than once or twice-to the supreme soliloquy of Hamlet. Those words which combine the noblest pleading ever proffered for the rights of human reason with the loftiest vindication ever uttered of those rights, no mortal ear within our knowledge has ever heard spoken on the stage. A convocation even of all priests could not have been more unhesitatingly unanimous in its rejection than seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all actors. It could hardly have been found worthier of theological than it has been found of theatrical condemnation. Yet, + beyond all question, magnificent as is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb into a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on philosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and resolution.-SWINBURNE, A Study of Shake speare. |