As made the things more rich: their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.

Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest ?

Oph. My lord?

Ham. Are you fair?

Oph. What means your lordship?

Ham. That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

Oph. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

Ham. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

Oph. Indeed, my lord, you make me believe so.

Ham. You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.

Oph. I was the more deceived.

Ham. Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder

of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery..

Oph. O, help him, you sweet heavens !

Ham. If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a

fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. . . . I have heard of your paintings, too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another : you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages. Those that are married alreadyall but one-shall live: the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go!

Oph. O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

[Exit.

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh h;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me!

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see !

And after that-let us mark the anguish of the irony-it is Ophelia that is to know real madness and die of it as-let us mark the master-stroke-in her babblings this clean maid, of a mind unhinged, pours forth the pretty sad simple bawdry of

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day.

Who save Shakespeare could ever have wrung our ears with that?

CHAPTER X

HAMLET

III

The simple secret of the critics-Coleridge and another-" It is we who are Hamlet": the key is in every man's breast-An old play furbished and refurbished-How this explains Ophelia in Hamlet's brutality-Blank verse as a vehicle for drama-Dryden's examination examined-Milton and the cæsura-Dryden's own practice versus his theory-How blank verse helps the actor.

(1)

I HAD intended to conclude these notes on Hamlet with a discussion of the principal commentators and their theories, and to be as dull as the subject demanded. But in the process of wading through so much of their outpourings as fills 300 pages of the second volume of the late Mr. Furness's Variorum edition of the play I made, or seemed to make, a discovery warning me not to pursue an inquest foredoomed to be idle.

Indeed, the discovery had lain under my hand since, in the first few pages of this book, when dealing with Macbeth, I had insisted that the most necessary aim of a tragic poet, of a dramatist, was to make his

hero sympathetic (oμotos is Aristotle's term, and Aristotle is strenuous on this point): to present him as a man, however much higher in rank and station than we, however circumstantially exalted, still recognisable as of like passions with ourselves: so that, as the drama goes on, we enter completely into his feelings, hang upon what is happening to him, hold our breath with a sense that all this is happening to us. The reader will certainly remember this; for I have recurred to it more than once or twice. Without it, of course, we cannot understand Macbeth or Lady Macbeth, Othello or Desdemona.

(2)

Now let us listen to this from Coleridge-perhaps the richest critical genius that ever spent its powers on Shakespeare:

Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by mere accident to effect his object.

He [Shakespeare] intended to portray a person in whose view the external world, and all its incidents and objects, were comparatively dim, and of no interest in themselves, and which began to interest only when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind. . . . The poet places him in the most stimulating circumstances that a human being can be placed in. He is the heir-apparent of a throne; his father dies suspiciously; his mother excludes her son from his throne by marrying his uncle. This is not enough: but the ghost of the murdered father is intro.

duced to assure the son that he was put to death by his own brother. What is the effect upon the son?-instant action and pursuit of revenge? No; endless reasoning and hesitatingconstant urging and solicitation of the mind to act, and as constant an escape from action; ceaseless reproaches of himself for sloth and negligence, while the whole energy of his resolution evaporates in these reproaches. . .

He is full of purpose, but void of that quality of mind which accomplishes purpose. Anything finer than this conception and working out of a great character is merely impossible. Shakespeare wishes to impress on us the truth that action is the chief end of existence—that no faculties of intellect, however brilliant, can be considered valuable, or indeed otherwise than as misfortunes, if they withdraw us from, or render us repugnant to, action, and lead us to think and think of doing, until the time has elapsed when we can do anything effectually. In enforcing this moral truth Shakespeare has shown the fulness and force of his powers all that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called upon by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.

Now, with all respect to the memory of Coleridge, I call this fluffy writing. I have combed out whole paragraphs of fluff, but fluff is still the residue a continual saying of the same thing over and over again, helping nothing, elaborately beating a bush for minutes after the hare has been started. But I have omitted one sentence which, to my mind, knits up the whole rigmarole. Into the middle of his criticism Coleridge drops the artless remark, "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so."