[Page 278.] Shakespeare is inconsequent in the delineation of character, and in Hamlet more than anywhere else. This inconsequence often appears strange enough, but as people do not venture to pronounce their idol inconsequent, they call his inconsequence, profundity. But let me mention some instances.

There is, in the first place, Hamlet's behavior to Ophelia. He has truly, ardently loved the maiden, but in his feigned madness he treats her shamefully. Here the poet has allowed himself to make a blunder. In the story from which this drama is fashioned, there is an intriguing lady of the court who endeavors, at the instance of the King, to act the spy upon Hamlet. This person is probably the prototype of Ophelia. The poet has added the incident of Hamlet's being in love with Ophelia, and thus comes the false stroke in the drawing. Hamlet's behavior would have been perfectly justifiable towards that court lady, but it was not justifiable towards Ophelia.

The second false stroke is Hamlet's rage at the way in which the courtiers treat him. The Shakespearomaniacs have not failed to find this rage very fine, and to applaud the poet for the surpassing skill with which he has delineated the pitiable behavior of the court people. But how is it? Hamlet represents himself as crazy, and they treat him accordingly. They do not contradict him, they flatter him, give in to his wildest conceits. But does not every sensible person do the same when he has to deal with a madman? Who would excite an insane person, and drive him to acts of violence by contradiction?* This groundless rage is most fully spoken out when he has killed Polonius. . . . . So is it also with Laertes. He first appears before us as a true and noble knight. In his demand of vengeance for his murdered father, he is seen in the finest light. And yet this noble person enters into a plot to allow, in a sham fight, the point of his rapier to be secretly sharpened, and even poisons the point. Horrible baseness! Here is the greatest inconsequence in character-drawing that can passibly be. The delineation of character is certainly not the strong side of the piece. There is not a person in it, save Hamlet, who knows how to awaken in us any interest. The King is an unmitigated rascal, and we can find no passion in him that renders his rascality intelligible.

The Queen is one of the-well, least agreeable of women. Polonius, with his pedantic garrulity, is one of the prettiest figures that the poet has drawn. Only his verbosity is somewhat wearisome. Ophelia is a maiden not so very agreeable, but her madness has made the rôle a favorite one. In representing insanity, an actress can make use of all the tones which she has in her power; she can utter any trifles, and draw upon all the registers. Thus some impression may be made, and it is not particularly difficult. Horatio is a thoroughly agreeable, graceful person, one of the best of Shakespeare's characters. Here we have done. The remaining persons of the piece belong to the supernumeraries, and are mostly very dull rôles. In them the actor must be every inch an artist, if he would awaken in us the slightest interest.

[Page 282.] I will grant that the death of Polonius serves a dramatic purpose, inasmuch as it is the cause of Ophelia's madness, although it is not a sufficient cause. No girl ever becomes insane because her father dies, least of all Ophelia, whose relation to her father we know was rather formal, lacking all heartiness. Besides, insanity

*The writer is unconsciously showing how well Shakespeare delineates the people about Hamlet, and how naturally they treated him.-TRANS.

is a physical evil. If we are to believe that it is due to psychological causes, they must be very strong and manifest. We can see how Gretchen, in Faust, becomes insane upon psychological grounds; but not Ophelia. Yet granting that it is so, why, I ask, does she become crazy and die? She is wholly guiltless. I ask still further, why does Hamlet die? What conceivable guilt has he incurred? The Shakespearomaniacs say, indeed, his weakness of will, his irresolution, was his fault, and he atones for it by dying. Without regard to the fact that weakness of will is a quality and no sin, I have shown that this is not in the character of Hamlet. In letting Hamlet perish, Shakespeare departs from the story upon which he constructed his drama. In that story Hamlet is a bold, energetic man, who comes back victorious from England, conquers the king and his party, and gains the throne. It is from this deviation from the original legend that the uncertainty, the inconsequence in Hamlet's character comes. It is one half the good, substantial hero of the old story, and the other half the creation of the poet. Shakespeare was not perfect master of his materials. That he lets Hamlet die without any necessity is simply unintelligible. No, there is not a syllable of poetic justice here. Fortinbras says

at the conclusion: O proud Death! What feast is toward,' &c. This is the solution of the riddle. A banquet for death it was, suited to the steeled nerves of a public delighting in blood.

Notwithstanding all I have said, there is still much good in the piece. But as the Shakespearomaniacs seek out the good, and even endeavor to turn the bad into good, I seek, on the contrary, to set forth the bad. Of the poor economy of time, of the inconsequence of the characters, of the tediously long episodes, I have now spoken. But, apart from all these, the piece is badly constructed. The Ghost appears twice in the first act. Why? Once were enough. It has to speak to Hamlet only, therefore the first appearance of it, as it is described at length in the second scene, is all the more superfluous.

[Page 284.] Hamlet appears with the actors, and delivers a long lecture to them upon the art of speaking and acting. In this lecture Shakespeare, at all events, sets forth his own principles in regard to the player's art. But does this belong to a deep tragedy? And these very respectable principles Shakespeare has, as a poet, by his bombast and verbosity directly contradicted, for these characteristics of his must needs produce the very manner of delivery which he blames. . . .

In Act IV, the King and the Queen, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are on the stage. The Queen says at the beginning to the two latter: Bestow this place on us a little while,' whereupon they retire. After eight-and-twenty verses they are again called in, receive a commission, and go off again without speaking a word. This is clumsy. Are the actors puppets, drawn hither and thither by wires?

[Page 287.] The result of the fight between Hamlet and Laertes is brought about in the strangest manner. In the heat of the fight the combatants exchange weapons. Is this a conceivable possibility? When a man knows how to handle a weapon, he never in a fight lets it go. And had it been possible, would not Laertes have stopped the fight under one pretext or another, since he knew that the slightest wound from the poisoned rapier in the hand of Hamlet would be certain death?

[Page 288.] After Hamlet is dead, there are fifty more lines spoken; persons altogether unknown appear. I find this conclusion as clumsy as that of Romeo and Juliet. What do we care, after Hamlet's death, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? What, for English ambassadors? for Fortinbras? What is to us the succession to the throne in Denmark? We have concerned ourselves only with Hamlet. With his VOL. II.-23

death our interest is at an end, entirely at an end. thing more.

We do not want to know any.

[Page 289.] It is true this drama has been a stock-piece on the German stage for a century. Its influence is easily explained. In the first place, the subject of it is very interesting. It had already been used by others before Shakespeare. In the second place, the chief character is a rôle unusually telling. Hamlet feigns madness, and so makes many striking and acute speeches, which are the chief charm of the piece, and have always given especial pleasure. This part pleases all the more, because the poet has so portrayed the other parts, the court people particularly, that they furnish food for Hamlet's satire. Furthermore, the piece has considerable dramatic effects. I reckon Hamlet's feigned madness among them, although it is too much spun out; Ophelia's insanity, on the other hand, is a mere theatrical effect. Such purely theatrical effects are numerous in the piece, and have always charmed play-goers. Among these effects belong the three appearances of a ghost with the necessary, imposing accidents, a play upon the stage, a churchyard with graves and a burial, a fight and half a dozen corpses, and an abundance of fustian phrases withal.

That it is not the piece itself particularly which impresses the public is evident from the fact, that for several decades the play has been given in different places in different shapes. Every one who has undertaken to alter the piece has picked out such parts as he considered especially effective, and left out other portions. . . . The fact that a piece has admitted of so many alterations shows how very loosely it is constructed.

[Page 290.] The tragic issue of a drama must be in the drama itself, in its essential necessity; there must be no other possible. Richard III and Macbeth must needs end tragically,—a reconciliation is in them not possible. In Hamlet no tragic issue is necessary.

KARL WERDER (1875)

(Vorlesungen über Shakespeare's Hamlet. Berlin, 1875, p. 32.)-The critics one and all, (with two exceptions,) Goethe at their head, have taken up the idea that, personally from the beginning, throughout the piece, Hamlet is at fault, on account of some subjective deficiency, failing or ill desert. Were he not unfortunately for his work and for himself just what he happens to be,-had he been by nature fitted for what he had to do, then all would instantly, from the outset, have taken another, and indeed, according to its nature and its spirit, a more direct course. Thus he is the obstacle; he it is, who, through his natural disposition, drags everything out of place, and gets everything in confusion by giving it a direction wrong in itself and ruinous to himself and others.

Now from all this I must, for my part, utterly dissent.

One thing, I deny, first of all, the one point upon which all the rest depends, and with which it all stands or falls, this one point, namely, that it is possible for Hamlet to dare to do what all the critics, notwithstanding their nuances, almost unanimously require of him. Whether or not he were naturally capable of doing it is a question altogether impertinent. For it simply was not possible, and this for reasons entirely objective. The situation of things, the force of circumstances, the nature of his task, directly forbid it, and so imperatively, that he was compelled to respect the prohibi

tion, if he were to keep his reason; above all, his poetic and dramatic, aye, and his human, reason. The critics have been so absorbed in the study of his character, that the task imposed upon him has been lost sight of. Here is the fundamental mistake.

What is it they require of him?

Why, that he should assault the King immediately, directly,-make short work with him, nay, the shorter the better; such has been the loudest and most unanimous demand. He is not to feign to be crazy. He is to draw out, not his tablets, but his dagger; not to cry, 'Farewell! remember me!' but, Death to the murderer!' He is to go right in and slay the King at once. That he can do the very first time he catches sight of him, in the very next hour; the opportunity is always at hand; there is nothing easier than this procedure. But after the dagger stroke, what then? Why, then he is to call the court and the people together, and justify his deed, and take possession of the throne which belonged to him alone. But how is he to go to work to justify his deed? By telling what the ghost of his father had communicated to him? One must have a strange idea of Hamlet's public, of the community before which he was to conduct his case, of the people and nobility of Denmark, if one supposes that the people are going to believe him, that they will suffer themselves to be convinced, by evidence of this sort, of the justice of his action.

The critics are pleased to assume that he was the born sovereign judge in the land, and the legitimate heir to the throne, his right to which had been wrested from him by a usurper. But where stands it so written? Not in Shakespeare! It is a pure fiction. Hamlet himself breathes not a syllable of complaint [ Who stole the diadem?' ED.] of any wrong that he had suffered. But of that wrong, if such wrong there were, had there been a usurpation, Hamlet must needs have spoken, and not only he, and not only Horatio, but the King and others also. The courtiers, for example, when they were seeking to explain his madness, would certainly have hit upon this as the cause of it. And in the very first scene of the piece, where matters of State are mentioned in connection with the appearance of the Ghost, this fact, if it existed, would not have gone unnoticed.

[Professor WERDER here goes on at some length to prove that none of Hamlet's rights to the throne were infringed, and, misled through the translation of imperial jointress,' by the German word Erbin, asserts that the Queen was the legitimate heiress and successor to the crown, and that the most that Hamlet could hope for would have been his election as co-regent. And in a footnote the learned Professor proposes the following astonishing parallel: Suppose Queen Elizabeth had had a son, thirty years of age, by a former marriage, and had then taken a second husband, it never would have occurred either to her or to her subjects that her son must be King, and that she must descend from the throne.' To an English student, anxious to admire German criticism, few things are more discouraging than to note how frequently it ignores the labors of English scholars. Had Professor WERDER looked into any good annotated English edition of Hamlet, he would have found that, nigh a hundred years ago, STEEVENS called attention to the fact that Denmark was an elective monarchy, and he would have found, also, that a great legal authority, Mr Justice BLACKSTONE, had disproved the supposition that Claudius was a usurper. I should not have called attention to this slip of Professor WERDER'S were it not that his volume on Hamlet is one of the most noteworthy that has appeared in Germany, although its main idea is to be found in KLEIN, and in several minor details he has been anticipated. Since the foregoing sentences were written, and while these pages

are going through the press, the news reaches us of the death of KLEIN. His History of the Drama must unfortunately remain a fragment. In the thirteenth volume, just published, the course is traced of the English Drama down to the time of Shakespeare. Whatever may be the estimate, by those most competent to judge, of the preceding volumes, no one who has read the last but will regret the loss of remarks keen and original which we had a right to expect from a writer whose style is never drowsy. ED.]

[Page 38.] But the mass of the people! Would they believe the prince's story? Perhaps; but perhaps not. Hamlet then,—this, too, has been suggested,—if it seemed to him the thing to be done, instantly to fall upon the King, should have employed the time, which he wasted in pretending to be crazy, in winning over the people. How? He should have spread among them a report of the communication made by the Ghost. For this proceeding he should have made use of Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo; they, too, had seen the Ghost,-they could, indeed, swear to that. But if after that the common people should ask further about what the Ghost disclosed, there was no one but Hamlet to answer, he alone had received the disclosure from the mouth of the Ghost. His friends can only swear that they had seen the Ghost, and heard a voice from under the earth admonishing them to take the oath which Hamlet desired of them, not to blab about what they had seen, except, of course, with Hamlet's consent. So the hope of gaining the people is very doubtful; for they must be supposed to have enough sense to say to themselves: Hamlet, the only one personally interested, is party and judge at the same time,-judge in his own cause. It is an absolute impossibility, if he kills the King, that upon his testimony alone, for no other existed, the people could have a conviction, or the shadow of a conviction, of the justice of his act.

And now as to the rest, the nobility, the court, the collective dignitaries of the realm,—would they not all have risen at once against Hamlet as the most shameful and impudent of liars and criminals, who, to gratify his own ambition, had, wholly without proof, charged another, the King, with the worst of crimes, that he might commit the same crime himself? A man who sought to possess himself of power after such a fashion, they are to be ready to acknowledge as their king,—a notorious regicide! The shame alone that he put upon them, in holding them to be such fools as to believe his story, must have stirred up their wrath against him. As a worthless wretch must he appear to them, murdering the King, and covering his victim at the same time with a charge most shameful and incapable of being proved. The least they could do in the case would be to pronounce him a madman, and put him in confinement and in chains.

[Page 39.] His own position Shakespeare's Hamlet understands very well, and accordingly takes better care of his fame than the critics, by not stabbing the King; had he done that, such heroism would have proved him a most egregious simpleton.

Even the ghost of his father understands the state of things better than the critics. He requires his son to avenge his murder, but he by no means requires it with their hot bloodthirstiness. He is in no such haste, and manner and time he leaves to his son: 'Howsoever thou pursuest this act,' says he. That merely the thrust of a dagger will suffice, the Ghost does not intimate; the Ghost is quite too judicious for that. Even when he comes the second time, his visit is only to whet the blunted purpose; but he does not blame his son, nor read him a lecture because he has done