enough. Guldenstern and Rosencranz were the mere tools of the king, and probably knew nothing of the object of their journey to England. Hamlet sends them to the fate which the king had destined for him—a wild sort of justice. He adds, "They are not on my conscience." This idea that a meditative man is unfit for action-belongs more to the nineteenth century than it did to Shakespeare's time. He wrote at a time when the weakness of confirmed irresolution would hardly have been excused on the plea that the strength of the man had gone forth in thinking. He wrote in the times of Bacon and of Raleigh, when men were rather familiarised with the union of the contemplative and the active in life. Raleigh had a good deal of Hamlet in him; he could muse over the history of the world, and touch pathetically on human life and the usual themes of moral ists, and he nevertheless had the bold spirit of the adventurer, the warrior, the discoverer. So far from Hamlet being the delicate and introspective spirit which a Coleridge or a Shelley would in their own poetry have been tempted to portray, he unites with his profound melancholy a most ferocious spirit of revenge. He lets pass the only opportunity which, so far as we know, is presented to him of killing the king-why? Because the king is at his prayers, and he will have a more terrible and complete revenge "Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent! When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage, about some act That has no relish of salvation in it." This is so utterly revolting in its simple, straightforward meaning, that our more refined age has willingly followed Coleridge in his gloss upon the passage. According to our subtle critic, Hamlet, in this terrible speech, is in reality only deluding himself; he has not this motive of almost diabolical revenge; but in this soliloquy he says and thinks he has it, in order to frame for himself an excuse for his "reluctance and procrastination." So willingly has this gloss been received, that Mr Knight, in his edition of Shakespeare, speaks quite contemptuously of any one who could possibly understand the speech in its direct natural meaning. Of course, some such gloss must be accepted if we are to hold to Goethe's view-"a lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinking beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away.” Have we any new reading to offer of the character of Hamlet? None whatever. We are not blind, we hope, to the many exquisite and subtle observations to which the study of this play has given occasion. But to us it seems that a critic who should sit down to portray a character of Hamlet, which shall be in keeping with all Hamlet says and does in the play, will find that he has undertaken an impossible task. Shakespeare took up of Denmark to whom his father's a well-known story of some prince ghost had appeared. Some commentators think it clear that the subject had already been dramatised, and that there was an older play which Shakespeare used as a sort of skeleton; others refer us to an English translation of the story extracted from Saxo Grammaticus, as the direct source of Shakespeare's plot. However that may be, Shakespeare finds the story ready made to his hand, and proceeds to fashion it, or re-fashion it, for the stage. In doing this he throws his own meditative spirit into the part of Hamlet. He thus constructs a Hamlet quite his own, who has to move about and act in scenes already prescribed for him. What wonder that the melancholy, reflective Hamlet, that has grown up half out of the story and half out of the brooding thoughts of the poet, should be a somewhat incongruous result? The character is distorted by the necessity to accommodate it to the already determined plot, or by the necessity to retain much of the dialogue that belonged to the Hamlet of the story. The incongruities are there, and cannot be effaced. Shakespeare does not here work from "within to without," as it is said from the character to the conduct; but the conduct is given, and the character on which he continues to refine must accommodate itself to the prescribed course of action how it can. Bear in mind the exigencies of the theatre. They were never, we may be sure, out of the mind of Shakespeare. The ghost appears in the first act; the execution of the ghost's revenge is to be accomplished at the end of the fifth. How is the interval to be filled up? One expedient, and a very successful one, was the production of a play within the play-a play to be acted before the king, of such a nature that the king, in witnessing it, should betray his own guilt. But how could Hamlet, who had seen and heard his father's ghost, need any such expedient? How could it confirm his belief in the king's guilt? Besides, although the expedient did answer, it could not have been expected to answer. A man of any nerve would have quietly sat out the play, let the players have delivered their speeches with what pathos they might, without any selfbetrayal. But the play was wanted; and Hamlet is made, after his solemn vows to his father's ghost, to suspect that ghost of being possibly a devil in disguise, coming "out of my weakness and my melancholy to damn me." Now we, in this age, are willing to believe Hamlet undecided and procrastinating, but we are not willing to attribute to him this vulgar superstition. We make the same sort of interpretation as on the occasion when Hamlet desires not only the death but the damnation of his uncle. The accepted gloss is, that Hamlet does not really think the ghost might have been the devil, but he says this to himself to give himself an excuse for his indecision and delay. Hamlet is not an amiable man if we judge him by his conduct. His cruelty to Ophelia, after all the eloquent excuses that have been made for it, is felt to have been unnecessary. In fact, it did not grow out of Hamlet's character, it was there in the story. The story told "how Hamlet counterfeited the madman to escape the tyranny of his uncle, and how he was tempted by a woman (through his uncle's procurement), who thereby thought to undermine the prince, and by that means to find out whether he counterfeited madness or not." The "woman who tempted him" grew up, under the tender imagination of Shakespeare, into the lovely and loving Ophelia, whom her father Polonius and the king do make, in some way, subservient to their policy. She herself has no other policy but simply to love Hamlet. But Hamlet is still made, in his intercourse with Ophelia, to have no other object or anxiety than to sustain his counterfeit of madness. For he not only wipes out his love for Ophelia with other "fond records," but in her presence he is always the madman; acting, by the way, in this case, with decision enough. The poet again contrives, out of this desertion of Ophelia, to obtain the most touching episode in the piece. The plot prospers, but at some expense to the character of Hamlet. This counterfeited madness is adopted from the story, and most skilfully used to keep up an interest in the piece, and more especially to vary the dialogue by the introduction of a most captivating wildness of speech; but no attempt is made to give it a rational place in Hamlet's designs. Dr Johnson long ago observed that he does nothing throughout the play which he might not have done as well with the reputation of sanity. Against this it has been urged, that it was not as part of any plan for the assassination of his uncle that he feigned madness; it was a measure of self-protection. tion to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild translation to the ludicrous, a sort of cunning bravado bordering on the flights of delirium." How beautiful a dramatic poem we have in 'Hamlet' it is superfluous to say; but no ingenuity in the world can reconcile all its parts The king had murdered his father, and might proceed to murder him as next heir to the throne. He might also think himself in danger from Hamlet, if he suspected that the prince knew of his guilt. By pretending lunacy Hamlet might allay all such fears. In the play the feigned insanity seems rather to have excited than to have calmed the suspicion of the king. Neverthe--what the poet received, and what less, we may suppose him reasoning after this fashion; though, according to our notions, this feint of insanity would have thrown him at once into the power of the king, who would have been justified in the eyes of all Denmark in taking measures for his restraint and confinement. It would have doomed him to the keeper and the cell. But of all this Shakespeare takes very little heed. This feigned madness was in the story. He does not consider himself responsible for it. Being there, he uses it to introduce, as we have said, a wild, pungent, half-rational, half-irrational dialogue, which has added incalculably to the charm of the play. So completely has he liberated himself from all responsibility to explain the rationale of this affected madness that no one knows precisely where it begins or where it ends. There is no trace of it at the time when the fencingmatch is made with Laertes; in some unexplained way it has left the scene altogether. And where does it commence? Every one remembers those strange grotesque utterances which the poet has given to Hamlet immediately after the appearance of the ghost; "You hear this fellow in the cellarage," and the like. Here some commentators think that Hamlet already puts on a show of insanity; others have thought that his wish to avoid any further discourse with his friends about the awful apparition which they all had witnessed, is sufficient to explain this assumed levity. Coleridge, with his accustomed subtlety, sees in these wild and whirling words "the disposi he brought so as to make a complete consistent representation of Hamlet's character. Each reader satisfies himself by taking what he pleases, and leaving what displeases, or by putting on the latter some fanciful interpretation. A sort of religious veneration steals over great poets as over great philosophers or great prophets: we no longer read all the text, or the text only; we read more and we read less; we read with preconceptions and predilections that disguise the literal meaning from us. Of course Victor Hugo has his word to say on the character of Hamlet, and it is an eloquent word, it being understood always that the eloquence of Victor Hugo throughout this book is of a very fitful order-flashes of lightning, with much cloud and darkness. starts well He "The characteristic of men of genius of the first order, is to produce each a peculiar model of man. All bestow on humanity its portrait; some laughing, some weeping, others pensive. These last are the greatest. Plautus laughs, and gives and gives to man Gargantua; Cervantes to man Amphitryon; Rabelais laughs, laughs, and gives to man Don Quixote; Beaumarchais laughs, and gives to man Figaro; Molière weeps, and gives to man Alceste; Shakespeare dreams, and gives to man Hamlet; Eschylus meditates, and gives to man Prometheus. The others are great; Eschylus and Shakespeare are immense." We thought all men of great geBut let that pass. nius were equal. It would be idle to reason against what we never received as a proposition addressed to the reason. "Let us continue," as Victor Hugo says. "So, each of the men of genius tries on in his turn this immense human mask; and such is the strength of the soul which they cause to pass through the mysterious aperture of the eyes, that this look changes the mask, and from terrible makes it comic, then pensive; and it is Job, Ajax, Priam, &c. &c. . "Two marvellous Adams, we have just said, are the man of Eschylus, Prometheus, and the man of Shakespeare, Hamlet. "Prometheus is action, Hamlet is hesitation. "In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior; in Hamlet it is interior. "In Prometheus the will is securely nailed down by nails of brass, and cannot get loose; besides, it has by its side two watchers, Force and Power. In Hamlet the will is more tied down yet; it is bound by previous meditation, the endless chain of the undecided. Try to get out of yourself if you can! What a Gordian knot is our reverie! Slavery from within, that is slavery indeed. Scale this enclosure to dream!' Escape, if you can, from this prison to love! The only dungeon is that which walls conscience in. Prometheus, in order to be free, has but a bronze collar to break and a god to conquer. Hamlet must break and conquer himself. Prometheus can raise himself upright if he only lifts a mountain; to raise himself up, Hamlet must lift his own thoughts. If Prometheus plucks the vulture from his breast, all is said; Hamlet must tear Hamlet from his breast." It will be seen at once that it is the dreamy, undecided, meditative Hamlet, sketched by Coleridge and Goethe, that Victor Hugo adopts and exaggerates. "Hamlet, appalling, unaccountable being, complete in the incomplete. All, in order to be nothing. He is prince and demagogue, sagacious and extravagant, profound and frivolous, man and neuter. He has but little faith in the sceptre, rails at the throne, has a student for his comrade, converses with any one passing by, argues with the first comer, understands the people, despises the mob, hates strength, suspects success, questions obscurity, and says 'thou' to mystery. Hamlet, ever full of life, is not sure of his existence. In this tragedy, which is at the same time a philosophy, everything floats, hesitates, delays, staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters, and is dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapour, resolution is a crepuscule; the action blows each moment in an inverse direction, man is governed by the winds. "Doubt counselled by a ghost, that is Hamlet. Hamlet has seen his dead father, and has spoken to him. Is he convinced? No, he shakes his head. What shall he do? He does not know. His hands clench, then fall by his side. Livid hesitation is in his mind. "Nevertheless, at least one half of Hamlet is anger, transport, outrage, hurricane, sarcasm to Ophelia, malediction on his mother, insult to himself. He talks with the grave-diggers, nearly laughs, then clutches Laertes by the hair in the very grave of Ophelia, and stamps furiously upon the coffin. Swordthrusts at Polonius, sword-thrusts at Laertes, sword-thrusts at Claudius. From time to time his inaction is torn in twain, and from the rent comes forth thunder. "He is tormented by that possible life, intermixed with reality and chimera, the anxiety of which is shared by all of us. There is in all his actions an expanded somnambulism. One might almost consider his brain as a formation; there is a layer of suffering, a layer of thought, then a layer of dreaminess. It is through this layer of dreaminess that he feels, comprehends, learns, perceives, drinks, eats, frets, mocks, weeps, and reasons. There is between life and him a transparency; it is the wall of dreams; one sees beyond, but one cannot step over it. A kind of cloudy obstacle everywhere surrounds Hamlet. Hamlet is not upon the spot where his life is. He has ever the appearance of a man who talks to you from the other side of a stream. He is at a distance from the catastrophe in which he takes part, from the passerby whom he interrogates, from the thought that he carries, from the action that he performs. It is isolation in its highest degree. It is as if your own self was absent and had left you there," We have selected the most intelligible parts of this elaborate description, and if our quotation is "garbled," it is the quite obscure or quite grotesque that we have omitted. Victor Hugo selects one phase of the character of Hamlet, and dwells upon it, in his exaggerating manner, till he has produced something not only unlike Shakespeare, but unlike anything in nature. Hamlet is a somnambulist, living in a perpetual nightmare; indeed, in a passage which space did not permit us to quote, he expressly compares Hamlet's habitual state of mind to the incapacity for movement we feel in a nightmare. As we have already said, Shakespeare makes the indecision or the delay of Hamlet one of the causes that postpone the act of revenge. Hamlet speaks of himself as hampered by doubts, and as sometimes shrinking from his purpose; but Shakespeare does not represent a morbid individual, generally incapable of action. Placed in Hamlet's position, who would not pause and hesitate? After all, it was the wild justice of revenge he was prosecuting. It was a deathblow he had to inflict. Who would not have paused? Macbeth pauses, and Othello hesitates. There are situations in which every rational, every reflective man, feels the torture of conflicting motives. When Victor Hugo describes this torture, as he does most forcibly in the hero of 'Les Misérables' (on an occasion which every one who has read the novel will remember), he does not therefore imply that Valjean is an undecided man. The indecision of Hamlet does in part belong to the man and in part to the situation; but Shakespeare assuredly never meant to portray a sort of Prince Athanase, a man in whom the nerve of action had been destroyed, a weak and morbid individual. Victor Hugo's Hamlet is a favourable specimen of his manner of delineating the characters of Shakespeare. Macbeth, Othello, Lear, all sit for their portraits; but it is not so much as if they were drawn on the cloud, as if the cloud itself were the pencil that drew them, so vague is the outline presented to us. What could be more awfully indefinite than this of Othello, and more grotesque withal? "What is Othello? He is Night. An immense fatal figure. Night is amorous of Day. Darkness loves the Dawn. The African adores the white woman. Desdemona is Othello's brightness and frenzy! And then how easy to him is jealousy! How speedily has night beckoned to death! "Sound this profound thing. Othello is the night, and, being night, and wishing to kill, what does he take to slay with? Poison? The club? The axe? The knife? No, the pillow. To kill is to lull to sleep. Shakespeare himself perhaps did not take this into account. The creator sometimes, almost unknown to himself, yields to his type, so much is that type a power. And it is thus that Desdemona, spouse of the man Night, dies stifled by the pillow, which has had the first kiss, and which has the last sigh." We can well believe that Shakespeare himself had not taken this into account. Othello-NightPillow-this association of ideas had probably never occurred to any one before. We suspect there is very little in any of these delineations of Victor Hugo that Shakespeare had taken into account. Our author succeeds better when he discourses in general terms of the genius of Shakespeare, commends its riotous fertility, rejoices in its untameable exuberance, its amazing prodigality:— "Othello, Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, Shylock, Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona, Juliet, Titania-men, women, witches, fairies, souls-Shakespeare is all of you! Do you want more? Here the grand distributor; take, take, take, is Ariel, Parolles, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda, Caliban. More yet? Here is Jessica, Cordelia, Portia, Polonius, Horatio, Mercutio, Imogene, Pandarus of Troy, Bottom, Theseus. Ecce Deus, it is the poet: he offers himself; who will have me? He gives, scatters, squanders himself; he is never empty. Why? He cannot be. Exhaustion with him is impossible. There is in him something of the fathomless." "What then?" he says farther on, in a strain that, at all events, suits the present occasion. "No criticising? No. No blame? No. You explain everything? Yes. Genius is an entity like nature, and requires, like nature, to be accepted purely and simply. A mountain must be accepted as such, or left alone. There are men who would make a criticism on the Himalayas, pebble by pebble. Mount Etna blazes and slavers, throws out its glare, its wrath, its lava, and its ashes; these men take scales and weigh those ashes, pinch by pinch. Meanwhile genius continues its eruption. Everything in it has its reason for exist |