HAMLET.

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APPENDIX.

I. THE CHARACTER OF HAMLET.

AMLET is a poetic ideal. He is not an ancient Dane, fair, blueeyed, yellow-haired, stout, and lymphatic; but he is the sombre, dreamy, mysterious hero of a melancholy poem. The actor who would represent him aright must not go behind the tragedy in which he occurs, in quest of historic realities, but, dealing with an ideal subject, must treat it in an ideal manner, as far removed as possible from the plane of actual life. Interest in the Prince of Denmark is not, to a very considerable extent, inspired by the circumstances that surround him, or by his proceedings: it depends upon the quality of the man,— the interior spirit and fragrance of his character,—and upon the words in which that spirit is expressed. There is an element in Hamlet, no less elusive than beautiful, which lifts the mind to a sublime height, fills the heart with a nameless grief, and haunts the soul as with remembered music of a gentle voice that will speak no more. It might be called sorrowful grandeur, sad majesty, ineffable mournfulness, grief-stricken isolation, or patient spiritual anguish. Whatever called, the name might prove inapt and inadequate; but the magical force of this attribute can never fail to be felt. Hamlet fascinates by his personality; and the actor can only succeed in presenting him, who possesses, in himself, this peculiar quality of fascination. It is something that cannot be drawn from the library, nor poured from the flagon, nor bought in the shops. Hamlet is, essentially, spiritual. It is not enough, therefore, in the presentation of this part, that the actor should make it known that Hamlet's soul is haunted by supernatural powers: he must also make it felt that Hamlet possesses a soul such as it is possible for supernatural powers to haunt. At the beginning, and before his mind has been shocked and unsettled by the awful apparition of his father's spirit in arms, he is found deeply prone to sombre thought upon the nothingness of this world and the solemn mystery of the world beyond the grave. This mental drift does not flow from his student fancy, but is the spontaneous, passionate tendency of his nature: for in the first self-commun

ing monologue that he utters he is revealed as having brooded on the expediency of suicide; and not long afterward he avows belief that the powers of hell have great control over spirits, like his own, which are melancholy and weak. The soul of Hamlet, then, must be felt to have been-in its original essence and condition, before grief, shame and terror arrived to burden and distract it-intensely sensitive to the miseries that are in this world; to the fact that all the pomp of human life is nothing but an evanescent pageant, passing, on a thin tissue, over what Shakespeare himself has so finely called "the blind cave of eternal night"; and to all the strange, vague influences, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible, that seem wafted out of the great unknown. Out of this high sensibility, coupled with the conditions into which he is born and with the miserable state into which he is forced by the crimes of his mother and his uncle and the visitation of his father's ghost, the whole man may be deduced. He is a compound of spiritualized intellect, masculine strength, feminine softness, over-imaginative reason, lassitude of thought, autumnal gloom, lovable temperament, piteous, tear-freighted humor, princely grace of condition, brooding melancholy, the philosophic mind, and the deep heart. His nature is everything noble. He is placed upon a pinnacle of earthly greatness. He is afflicted with a grief that breaks his heart, and thereupon with a shock that disorders his mind. He is charged with a solemn and dreadful duty, to the fulfilment of which his will is wholly inadequate. He sees so widely and understands so dubiously the nature of things, in the universe of God, that his sense of moral responsibility is overwhelmed and his power of action completely arrested. He thinks greatly, but to no purpose. He wanders darkly in the border land betwixt reason and madness-haunted now with sweet strains and majestic images of heaven, and now with terrific, uncertain shapes of hell. And so he drifts aimlessly, on a sea of misery, into the oblivion of death. This man is a type of a class of beings upon the earth to whom life is a dream, all its surroundings too vast and awful for endurance, all its facts sad, action impossible or fitful and fruitless, and of whom it never can be said that they are happy till the grass is growing upon their graves. W. W.

II. FACTS ABOUT HAMLET.

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The story upon which the tragedy of Hamlet" is founded is, probably, fabulous. It first occurs in the History of Denmark ["Historica Danica"], written by Saxo Grammaticus, and first printed in 1514. It was retold about the middle of the sixteenth century [1570], under the name of the Hystorie of Hamblet," in Belleforest's "Histoire Tra

giques," a work that was translated from French into English, and became popular in England. A perfect copy of the translation exists in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge; is dated 1608; and is the earliest edition known to be extant. Shakespeare is supposed to have known this work; but, as his tragedy of "Hamlet" was first published in 1603, he must have known it either in the original French, or in an earlier translation. It is possible that he did not know it at all, but that he based his Hamlet" on an old play on the same subject. Such a play-though, perhaps, he was himself the author of it—was in existence. It is referred to, in 1589, by Thomas Nash, and, in 1596, by Lodge— authors and actors contemporary with Shakespeare. The theory has been broached that Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet" early in his life, and, many years afterward, revised and perfected it. No one contends, though, that he invented the subject. His colossal genius was shown in his wonderful treatment of it. "Hamlet" was five times- if not oftener -published in quarto, at London, during its author's life. It had been acted, and by the company to which Shakespeare belonged, prior to the summer of 1602. There is a legend-dubious but grateful - - that the poet himself was the representative of the Ghost. The first quarto [1603] is supposed to have been surreptitiously published, by an unscrupulous printer of the period, and it is not considered authentic. Much stress, in that version, is laid upon Hamlet's madness; the Queen is made distinctly to disclaim complicity with Claudius in her first husband's murder; direction is given that, in the Closet Scene,-Act Third, the Ghost shall enter "in his nightgown;" and Polonius figures as Corambis, while his servant, Reynaldo, is called Montano. The second quarto, published in 1604, exhibits great improvements on the first. The subsequent quartos are dated 1605, 1607,-conjecturally,— and 1611. Then came the folio of 1623, in which Hamlet" occupies 31 pages. The text of the tragedy has been much discussed; but a careful comparison of the old quartos with the first folio, made by many scholars, has finally settled it in a satisfactory manner. The substance of the tragedy, as Shakespeare wrote it, seems to have been obtained by taking the folio of 1623 as a basis, and amplifying it by large additions from the quarto of 1604. The reprint of "Hamlet" in the former is thought to have been made from a manuscript of the piece, that Heminge and Condell obtained from Shakespeare's theatre. The quarto version may have been authorized by Shakespeare himself. The poet's final draught of the tragedy was, doubtless, made in 1601. He had, four years previously, established his family in New Place, at Stratford-on-Avon; but it does not appear that he had relinquished the

residence he is known to have occupied in 1596, at Southwark.

"Hamlet," therefore, probably, was written in the old Borough. The first representative of Hamlet is declared to have been Richard Burbage; chiefly on the authority of a manuscript Elegy upon that actor (1619), which mentions that he was fat and scant of breath" in the fencing scene. The honor of having been the original Hamlet is also ascribed [Tallis's Dramatic. Magazine, June, 1851] to John Lowin; and it is, furthermore, said that to him Shakespeare himself gave many suggestions. W. W.

III. THE ORIGINAL STORY OF HAMLET.

"Fengon, having secretly assembled certain men, and perceiving himself strong enough to execute his enterprise,- Horvendile, his brother, being at a banquet with his friends,- suddenly set upon him, where he slew him as traitorously as cunningly he purged himself of so detestable a murder to his subjects; for that before he had any violent or bloody hands, or once committed parricide upon his brother, he had incestuously abused his wife, whose honour he ought to have sought and procured, as traitorously he pursued and effected his destruction.

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"Boldened and encouraged by his impunity, Fengon ventured to couple himself in marriage with her and the unfortunate and wicked woman, that had received the honour to be the wife of one of the valiantest and wisest princes of the North, imbased herself in such vile sort as to falsify her faith unto him, and, which is worse, to marry him that had been the tyrannous murderer of her lawful husband.

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"Geruth having so much forgotten herself, the prince Hamblet, perceiving himself to be in danger of his life, as being abandoned of his own mother, to beguile the tyrant into his subtleties, counterfeited the madman with such craft and subtle practices that he made show as if he had utterly lost his wits; and under that vail he covered his pretense, and defended his life from the treasons and practices of the tyrant, his uncle. For, every day being in the queen's palace (who as then was more careful to please her paramour, than ready to revenge the cruel death of her husband, or to restore her son to his inheritance), he rent and tore his clothes, wallowing and lying in the dirt and mire, running through the streets like a man distraught, not speaking one word but such as seemed to proceed of madness and mere frenzy; all his actions and gestures being no other than the right countenances of a man wholly deprived of all reason and understanding, in such sort, that as