Chapter 57

“_Mar._ Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch,” &c.

How delightfully natural is the transition, to the retrospective narrative! And observe, upon the Ghost’s reappearance, how much Horatio’s courage is increased by having translated the late individual spectator into general thought and past experience,—and the sympathy of Marcellus and Bernardo with his patriotic surmises in daring to strike at the Ghost; whilst in a moment, upon its vanishing, the former solemn awe-stricken feeling returns upon them:—

“We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of violence.”

_Ib._ Horatio’s speech:—

... “I have heard, The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day,” &c.

No Addison could be more careful to be poetical in diction than Shakespeare in providing the grounds and sources of its propriety. But how to elevate a thing almost mean by its familiarity, young poets may learn in this treatment of the cock-crow.

_Ib._ Horatio’s speech:—

... “And, by my advice, Let us impart what we have seen to-night Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, The spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.”

Note the inobtrusive and yet fully adequate mode of introducing the main character, “young Hamlet,” upon whom it transferred all the interest excited for the acts and concerns of the king his father.

_Ib._ sc. 2. The audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the royal court, in order that Hamlet may not have to take up the leavings of exhaustion. In the king’s speech, observe the set and pedantically antithetic form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels of conscience,—the strain of undignified rhetoric,—and yet in what follows concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he not a royal brother?—

_Ib._ King’s speech:—

“And now, Laertes, what’s the news with you?” &c.

Thus with great art Shakespeare introduces a most important, but still subordinate character first, Laertes, who is yet thus graciously treated in consequence of the assistance given to the election of the late king’s brother instead of his son by Polonius.

_Ib._—

“_Ham._ A little more than kin, and less than kind.

_King._ How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

_Ham._ Not so, my lord, I am too much i’ the sun.”

Hamlet opens his mouth with a playing on words, the complete absence of which throughout characterises Macbeth. This playing on words may be attributed to many causes or motives, as either to an exuberant activity of mind, as in the higher comedy of Shakespeare generally;—or to an imitation of it as a mere fashion, as if it were said—“Is not this better than groaning?”—or to a contemptuous exultation in minds vulgarised and overset by their success, as in the poetic instance of Milton’s Devils in the battle;—or it is the language of resentment, as is familiar to every one who has witnessed the quarrels of the lower orders, where there is invariably a profusion of punning invective, whence, perhaps, nicknames have in a considerable degree sprung up;—or it is the language of suppressed passion, and especially of a hardly smothered personal dislike. The first and last of these combine in Hamlet’s case; and I have little doubt that Farmer is right in supposing the equivocation carried on in the expression “too much i’ the sun,” or son.

_Ib._—

“_Ham._ Ay, madam, it is common.”

Here observe Hamlet’s delicacy to his mother, and how the suppression prepares him for the overflow in the next speech, in which his character is more developed by bringing forward his aversion to externals, and which betrays his habit of brooding over the world within him, coupled with a prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half embodyings of thought, and are more than thought, and have an outness, a reality _sui generis_, and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and movements within. Note also Hamlet’s silence to the long speech of the king which follows, and his respectful, but general, answer to his mother.

_Ib._ Hamlet’s first soliloquy:—

“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” &c.

This _tædium vitæ_ is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result; but where the former is deficient, and the mind’s appetency of the ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmoving. In such cases, passion combines itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his mind the relation of the appearance of his father’s spirit in arms is made all at once to Hamlet:—it is—Horatio’s speech in particular—a perfect model of the true style of dramatic narrative;—the purest poetry, and yet in the most natural language, equally remote from the ink-horn and the plough.

_Ib._ sc. 3. This scene must be regarded as one of Shakespeare’s lyric movements in the play, and the skill with which it is interwoven with the dramatic parts is peculiarly an excellence of our poet. You experience the sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop. You will observe in Ophelia’s short and general answer to the long speech of Laertes the natural carelessness of innocence, which cannot think such a code of cautions and prudences necessary to its own preservation.

_Ib._ Speech of Polonius (in Stockdale’s edition):—

“Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase), Wronging it thus, you’ll tender me a fool.”

I suspect this “wronging” is here used much in the same sense as “wringing” or “wrenching,” and that the parenthesis should be extended to “thus.”

_Ib._ Speech of Polonius:—

... “How prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows:—these blazes, daughter,” &c.

A spondee has, I doubt not, dropped out of the text. Either insert “Go to” after “vows”;—

“Lends the tongue vows: Go to, these blazes, daughter”—

or read—

“Lends the tongue vows:—These blazes, daughter, mark you”—

Shakespeare never introduces a catalectic line without intending an equivalent to the foot omitted in the pauses, or the dwelling emphasis, or the diffused retardation. I do not, however, deny that a good actor might, by employing the last mentioned means—namely, the retardation, or solemn knowing drawl—supply the missing spondee with good effect. But I do not believe that in this or any other of the foregoing speeches of Polonius, Shakespeare meant to bring out the senility or weakness of that personage’s mind. In the great ever-recurring dangers and duties of life, where to distinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims collected by the experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact, as in the admonitions to his son and daughter, Polonius is uniformly made respectable. But if an actor were even capable of catching these shades in the character, the pit and the gallery would be malcontent at their exhibition. It is to Hamlet that Polonius is, and is meant to be, contemptible, because in inwardness and uncontrollable activity of movement, Hamlet’s mind is the logical contrary to that of Polonius; and besides, as I have observed before, Hamlet dislikes the man as false to his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the crown.

_Ib._ sc. 4. The unimportant conversation with which this scene opens is a proof of Shakespeare’s minute knowledge of human nature. It is a well established fact, that on the brink of any serious enterprise, or event of moment, men almost invariably endeavour to elude the pressure of their own thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances: thus this dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of the air, and inquiries, obliquely connected, indeed, with the expected hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as to the striking of the clock and so forth. The same desire to escape from the impending thought is carried on in Hamlet’s account of, and moralizing on, the Danish custom of wassailing: he runs off from the particular to the universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns, escapes, as it were, from himself in generalisations, and smothers the impatience and uneasy feelings of the moment in abstract reasoning. Besides this, another purpose is answered;—for by thus entangling the attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical sentences of this speech of Hamlet’s, Shakespeare takes them completely by surprise on the appearance of the Ghost, which comes upon them in all the suddenness of its visionary character. Indeed, no modern writer would have dared, like Shakespeare, to have preceded this last visitation by two distinct appearances,—or could have contrived that the third should rise upon the former two in impressiveness and solemnity of interest.

But in addition to all the other excellences of Hamlet’s speech concerning the wassail-music—so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the ratiocinative meditativeness, of his character—it has the advantage of giving nature and probability to the impassioned continuity of the speech instantly directed to the Ghost. The _momentum_ had been given to his mental activity; the full current of the thoughts and words had set in, and the very forgetfulness, in the fervour of his argumentation, of the purpose for which he was there, aided in preventing the appearance from benumbing the mind. Consequently, it acted as a new impulse,—a sudden stroke which increased the velocity of the body already in motion, whilst it altered the direction. The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo is most judiciously contrived; for it renders the courage of Hamlet, and his impetuous eloquence, perfectly intelligible. The knowledge,—the unthought of consciousness,—the sensation of human auditors—of flesh and blood sympathists—acts as a support and a stimulation _a tergo_, while the front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed, by the apparition. Add too, that the apparition itself has, by its previous appearances, been brought nearer to a thing of this world. This accrescence of objectivity in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes and fearful subjectivity, is truly wonderful.

_Ib._ sc. 5. Hamlet’s speech:—

“O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell?”

I remember nothing equal to this burst, unless it be the first speech of Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites. But Shakespeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths, that “observation had copied there,”—followed immediately by the speaker noting down the generalised fact,—

“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”

_Ib._—

“_Mar._ Hillo, ho, ho, my lord!

_Ham._ Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come bird, come,” &c.

This part of the scene, after Hamlet’s interview with the Ghost, has been charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus well known, that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing grotesque terms, and a certain technical phraseology, to disguise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of the common order of things—something, in fact, out of its place; and if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone remain, and the sense of the ridiculous be excited. The close alliance of these opposites—they are not contraries—appears from the circumstance, that laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous,—a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet’s wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really being what he acts.

The subterraneous speeches of the Ghost are hardly defensible;—but I would call your attention to the characteristic difference between this Ghost, as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of revealed religion,—and Shakespeare’s consequent reverence in his treatment of it,—and the foul earthly witcheries and wild language in _Macbeth_.