REMARKS.

IT is with no presumptuons step that we approach this, the most sublime of all tragedies-Hamlet. On the threshold, we may fancy a voice exclaiming :

"Hence, avaunt! 'tis holy ground!”

But surely a production that charmed us in our youthful days-that gave a tone and colour to our thoughts, which time and reflection have only strengthened and confirmed-that presented to our imagination the wonders of the supernatural world-that taught us the vanity and instability of human life-and opened to us sublimer views of the soul's immortality-such a production it may be no presumption to examine. Palpable beauties are visible to every mind: there may be others of a more recondite nature, that have escaped even the most acute and devoted among the admirers of Shakspeare.

The plan of this tragedy has been traced by Theobald (who, if he cannot be classed among the learned and ingenious, may certainly rank with the most indefatigable and industrious of Shakspeare's commentators) from the Danish History by Saxo Grammaticus. From this scource has Shakspeare borrowed the leading incidents of his drama; his own mighty genius supplied him with the nobler parts of imagery, sentiment, and language. It also bears some resemblance to the Electra of Sophocles: Gertrude and Clytemnestra are both queens; they had imbrned their hands in the blood of their husbands. The latter may, indeed, plead some excuse, from the provocations she had received; the former, none. Clytemnestra acknowledged the fact, and gloried in it-declaring that it was the arm of justice, not her own, that smote the guilty Agamemnon.

Of all Shakspeare's compositions, Hamlet, from its first appears ance, down to the present time, has been the most universally popular. In scenic attraction, it may possibly yield to Richard the Third, but in the closet it is infinitely superior. Gabriel Harvey, in his note on Speght's Edition of Chaucer, 1598, says, "The younger sort take much delight in Shakspeare's Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece, and his Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort." And Anthony Scoloker, in a dedication to his poem, entitled "Daiphantus," printed in. the year 1604, has this remark-that his "Epistle" should be "like Friendly Shakspeare's tragedies, where the comedian rides, when the tragedian stands on tiptoe: faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet."

That the grandeur and beauty of the sentiments should please the wiser sort, is not to be wondered at; nor could the young fail to be interested with a tale so awful and mysterious. The appearance of the ghost is so artfully contrived, and the illusion is kept up with such consummate skill, that we are obliged, for a time, to suspend our judgment and knowledge, and to deceive our understandings, and grant that to be substantial and true, which we affirm to be entirely Supernatural and impossible.

The leading feature in the character of Hamlet is melancholy, arising from a mind too exquisitely wrought, too deeply contemplative

-tremblingly alive to the finest impulses of our nature-viewing the past with fond regret, and the future with doubt and apprehension. A mind thus singularly constituted, events of the most painful excitement have barassed and disturbed. The mysterious death of a beloved father-the unseemly marriage of a mother in one "little month"his filial duty and respect for the dead-his contempt and indignation for the living, all give a deeper colour to his constitutional sadness, and produce those feelings which, if they be not madness itself, are nearly allied to it. And to this, Hamlet clearly alludes when he resolves to let the play be the test of his uncle's guilt:

"The spirit, that I have seen,

May be a devil and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me."

It has been remarked that his character is inconsistent; but the irresolution and delay that impede his progress to revenge, are the vacillations of a mind that meditates before it acts. Hamlet might have revenged his father's murder immediately after the first appear ance of the ghost; but, apprehensive that his peculiar cast of mind might be over excited by domestic misfortunes, he would fain doubt the evidence of his senses. He therefore resolves to have further proof; and it is not until after the representation of the play, when his uncle's guilt becomes fully apparent, that he would have been justified in taking that vengeance, which, though delayed, was never absent from his thoughts. That it was not carried into immediate execution after this discovery, must be attributed to that want of volition, which, an able critic remarks, Shakspeare has founded on one of those peculiar constitutions of the mental and moral faculties which have been designated by the appellation of Genius.

Of this defect in his character, Hamlet is painfully sensible, for he continually reproaches himself with weakness and irresolution:

"How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge!"

"Now, whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event,
I do not know

Why yet I live to say this thing's to do."

And in his soliloquy after his first interview with the players, he contrasts his own cause for grief, with the assumed passion of the actor, and bitterly exclaims:

But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or, ere this,

I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's 'offal !"

Anguish of mind had produced in Hamlet a desire to die. But the dread of offending the author of his being, by acting contrary to

* Dr. Drake.

the end and design for which he had been created, restrains him from ending a life he was so anxious to lose. The pale cast of thought makes him reason with himself, as to the nature and consequences of death; and, though he is aware that the miseries of this life find an end in the grave, the prospect of futurity, however obscured by clouds and darkness, still forbibs him to run the hazard of flying from lesser to greater evils. Perplexed and harassed by mental suffering, it is not strange that such an idea should have entered his thoughts-it is a weakness incidental to humanity. The Lady Constance, in her extremity of grief, thus passionately apostrophizes this last refuge of the miserable :

"Oh! amiable, lovely Death!

Arise forth from thy couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to Prosperity,

And I will kiss thy detestable bones

Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smil'st,
-Misery's love,

Come to me !".

Nothing can exceed the simplicity with which this drama opens.. It is the perfection of the dramatic art, to work upon the passions by degrees; and here it is done most effectually. The incredulity of Horatio, touching the appearance of the ghost, strongly aids the illusion. The questions and replies that pass, as to the precise time the apparition remained with them, and Hamlet's subsequent inquiries

"Arm'd, say you?
From top to toe?
Then saw you not
His face?" &c. &c.

are strokes of nature, that impress upon our minds the dreadful conviction that the relation of Marcellus and Bernado, however wonderful, is nevertheless strictly true.

Hamlet's address to the spirit is unrivalled for grandeur of thought and comprehensiveness of diction. After the first emotions of terror and amazement have subsided, he ventures to address it more familiarly :

"I'll call thee Hamlet,

King, Father."

The whole of this speech makes the apparition truly supernatural and terrible. An expression admirably characteristic of its dignity had escaped from Marcellus in the first scene:

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

It was Hamlet's intention to throw the king and queen off their guard, from prying too deeply into his designs: he therefore judiciously begins his first scene of madness with Ophelia, that it may be naturally inferred that love for her beauty had caused this aberra tion of mind. And in what choice terins is this apparent madness described !

"He took me by the wrist, and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face,
As he would draw it--

That done, he lets me go:
He seemed to find his way without his eyes;
For out of doors he went without their helps,
And, to the last, bended their light on me."

We may here remark the difference between assumed and real madness. In Hamlet and in Edgar, it is rude, overstrained, and violent; in Ophelia and in Lear, it is simple, touching, and sublime. Shakspeare has been accused of making Hamlet utter a contradiction in the following lines:

"But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns,-puzzles the will-"

when he had just received evidence to the contrary, by a super
natural visitation from the invisible world.
reasoning with himself, whether it is better to fly from the ills of life,
Hamlet has been
by an act of self-destruction, or to bear them, rather than encounter
greater evils in a future state of existence. He adopts the latter con-
clusion; for, as no traveller (and the term is not to be understood in an
incorporeal sense) ever returned from the grave, to repent of sin,
it behoved him to pause ere he committed a crime that could never
Le repented of. The ghost dwells, with particular emphasis, on the
additional cruelty of being-

"Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

No reckoning made, but sent to my account ·
With all my imperfections on my head!"

To impute any other meaning to this expression of Shakspeare would be to impute nonsense to him-and he never wrote thatwhich is more than can be said of many of his commentators :

"Were Shakspeare now to rise,

How would the poet stare with wild surprise,
And rack his brains with many a pond'rous note,
To find the meaning out of what he wrote !"*

The chamber scene is one impassioned burst of bitter remonstrance and virtuous indignation. Language sinks beneath the sentiments of affection with which the prince regards his father's memory, and his abhorrence for the guilty usurper of his bed and throne. The parallel between the two pictures is exquisitely beautiful. The ghost is here introduced for the last time; nothing can be finer than Hamlet's sudden transition from extreme rage to reverential awe, when he again behold the apparition, which still retains its sad expression, its gentle character:

"Do not look upon me;

Lest, with this piteous action, you convert

My stern effects: then what I have to do

Will want true colour; tears, perchance, for blood."

The scene with the gravediggers has been considered as beneath the dignity of tragedy; and that Shakspeare himself was aware of it, but that, in compliance with the vitiated taste of the age, he introduced this farrago of low buffoonery! In what respect, on the score of propriety, hast Shakspeare offended by the introduction of these clowns? Their rude mirth, their coarse raillery, their apathy and

"The Times, or the Prophecy;" a poem.

indifference, form ́an adıhirable contrast to the keen sensibility, the solemn grandeur, of Hamlet's character. Their ribald jests draw from him those moral reflections upon the infirmity of our nature; and, however indecorous, to a sickly imagination, the exhibition of mortality's frail remains may appear, the rude manner in which they are jowled to the ground, by these unreflecting knaves, inspires, in the pensive mind, thoughts holy and unutterable. Could the vitiated taste of the present day produce such another scene, we would fall down, and worship it!

This tragedy abounds in moral sentiments, in just and elevated views of man, and of that providence which sustains, guides, and protects him, from the cradle to the grave. Never has philosophy been more nobly employed than in enforcing those great and important truths-the existence of a supreme, and the immortality of the soul. Such was the philosophy of the sages of antiquity, of Plato and of Cicero, and of the no less glorious lights of latter days-of Bacon, of Newton, of Addison, and of Shakspeare. To authorities like these, what have we to oppose? The absurd and contradictory doctrines of Atheists, who have been the reproach of other countries and our own for it would be difficult to point out to the indignation and scorn of mankind, a race more hateful for their profligacy, or more contemptible for their ignorance, than this modern school of infidels. We have observed them in their commerce with the world in their health and prosperity:-we have visited them in their cham bers of sickness and of death; and, if we have found them, in the former state, heartless and selfish; dissatisfied with themselves, and suspicious of each other; we have invariably beheld their last moments, dark and cheerless-disturbed by doubt and aggravated by despair :

"Men may live fools-but fools they cannot die.

The grand charge that the critics have brought against Shakspeare the violation of the unities, will hardly apply to this tragedy. We may, however, notice an anachronism-Hamlet mentions the University of Wittenberg, long before its establishment.

The Catholic doctrine of Purgatory has been turned to admirable account, in the first address of the spirit. And of the arcient super stition, which represents night as unhallowed and profane, Shak peare avails himself in the following lines :→

"Tis now the very witching time of night,

When church-yards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world-"

and again, in Macbeth:

"Now o'er one half the globe

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep."

Madness never assumed a more beautiful form thau in the cha racter of Ophelia. The pathetic strains that she warbles forth in her distraction, are the fragments of ancient ballads that were highly popular in the days of Shakspeare, and of which the poet himself gives so interesting a character :

"Mark it, Cesario,-it is old and plain:

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it: it is silly, sooth,

And dallies with the innocence of love,

Like the old age."