their part, delay at all.-Claudius, for example, and Laertes also, and Fortinbras? By what right is he alone, in the piece, the representative of his race? And what, in fine, was there in the legend that could suggest to Shakespeare the idea of attrib uting these delays to him, in order to make him a type of his nation? If other personages created by the poet appear to reproduce the spirit of their respective countries; if Iago and Juliet, for example, resemble Italians, it is not because the poet was scientifically engrossed with the character of races, but it is simply because he drew his plot from an Italian novel, and because he restricted himself to raising to the third or fourth power the qualities and defects which the Italian story-teller has given to his personages. To talk of historical truth in Shakespeare, after Cymbeline, after the Winter's Tale, after King Lear, is to be very complaisant. If historical truth is found in Shakespeare, it is to be accounted for by his fidelity to the legend; it is merely an accident, and nothing else. The German GERVINUS, rebuking the torpor of his compatriots, may be permitted to cry out to them: Hamlet is you!' but to believe that the poet intended this resemblance, is to go contrary to all the facts.

Neither is it the interpretation which has prevailed in France. People here are more inclined to make a Werther out of Hamlet. And what a fine field is thus opened for moral amplifications! What a magnificent occasion to read young folks a lesson upon the seriousness of life, which has been given us for action, not dreaming! and what superb reproaches for effeminacy and idleness have been eloquently addressed to the poor Hamlet!

[Page 313.] Exactly so,' it is said, 'it is elasticity that Hamlet lacks; the courage is wanting in him to discharge his duty; he has not sufficient daring to strike Claudius; it is faint-heartedness that renders him unequal to the heroic act required of him. If any one deserves to be believed in regard to him, it is assuredly himself; just listen how he reproaches himself with cowardice after his interview with the players, and in the long soliloquy after meeting with the army of Fortinbras,-a soliloquy which is not in the First Quarto, and which the poet added in the Second, for the better elucidation of Hamlet's character.' But why, we reply, is Hamlet to have the privilege of being the best judge of himself? Why shall he have the gift, which no one else has, of appreciating himself exactly upon the impulse of the moment, without being deceived as to the good or the evil in himself? Hamlet is in a state of great excitement when he thus accuses himself of weakness and cowardice. After having learned of the murder of his father, there are in him two opposing cur rents, equally honorable to his nature: the filial sentiment, prompting him to strike Claudius, and repugnance to a murder. He speaks differently, as one or the other rules him. At a distance from the act to be done, it is the filial sentiment that is uppermost; he swears then to punish, and he thinks that, were the criminal there, he would kill him without hesitation. When the opportunity occurs, it is the repugnance to strike that overpowers him; he lets the chance go; when it is gone, then the filial sentiment again predominates, and he is vexed that he has not acted, he reproaches himself bitterly, he accuses himself of weakness and faint-heartedness, so culpable does he regard himself at that moment, but at the same moment also, he is deceived about himself: he sees himself with the eyes of passion, and he sees wrongly. We must not bring up his own words against him; we must not take him to the letter against himself; he must be judged by the rest of his conduct, and by what those say of him who have known him for a long time. Now does there fall from the lips of any one whomsoever, saving from his own, a word that accuses him of a

want of courage? Observe how, in Q2, Ophelia speaks of him when she no longer had any doubt of his madness: O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword; The expectancy and rose of the fair state, . . . . quite, quite down!' In Q, she restricts herself to saying: 'Great God of heaven, what a quicke change is this? The courtier, scholler, souldier, all in him, All dasht and splintered thence.'

What a difference between these two eulogies! And how does that in Q, show the settled purpose of the poet to exalt Hamlet!

[Page 315.] And what is there so noble in an assassination in cold blood, even though thereby a father's death is to be avenged, that it should be styled an heroic action, to which Hamlet, in default of courage, was not equal? No, it is not that, as is too often said, and as Goethe himself has wrongfully said,—it is not an heroic task, which Hamlet is not strong enough to accomplish: it is a horrible obligation for which he is not made, which is something very different, and against which, without his taking account of it, the honesty of his conscience, the instincts of his nature, all the habitudes of his education, all that, in other situations, would be his strength, revolt. A delicate soul, that education has still more refined,-it was utterly repugnant to him to devise an assassination long beforehand, and still worse to strike in cold blood. It is not the fear of danger that arrests him, and no personal self-concern enters into his delays; but at the moment of throwing himself upon his victim, his arm, already raised, refuses to descend; for a murder deliberately planned, the steel remains suspended in his hand. Where is the cowardice here?

[Page 320.] To speak of the natural indecision of Hamlet and of the general inconstancy of his resolution may seem at first sight a convenient expedient, but it is an expedient that does not hold good in the presence of facts, any more than the alleged cowardice of our hero. Nowhere, it is true, does Hamlet say a word of this repugnance to strike in cold blood, by which we explain his hesitation and his delays. At first, he wishes to be sure that Claudius is really guilty. Afterwards, he will not strike him at prayer lest he should send his soul to heaven. On each occasion he gives no other motive for deferring action. There is a difficulty here, according to our way of understanding Hamlet, which we are the first to acknowledge. But no one takes in earnest the motive with which he satisfies himself when he sees Claudius at prayer; every one sees that it is a mere pretext which he hastily accepts to dispense with acting at that moment, and every one is right, since among the new reproaches which he heaps upon himself immediately after, he makes not the slightest allusion to this excuse. At that moment there certainly passes in his inmost soul something of which he takes no account; an influence makes itself felt there, which he does not analyze nor distinguish, but to which he submits none the less. But it is not faint-heartedness, nor a natural inconstancy of will, since everything else, both in himself and in those around him, is opposed to these two interpretations. Why then may it not be what we suggest, namely, the secret voice of conscience, and the shrinking of a delicate soul from an assassination in cold blood?

Seek, outside of this explanation, one that explains everything, and you will seek in vain. The character of Hamlet must be accepted as we have represented it, or we have here only a work of bits and pieces, to which the poet contributed a scrap here and a scrap there, without troubling himself to fit together so many pieces of different manufacture, and to make of them a whole. Either our explanation is the

true one, or the rôle which has engrossed the attention of mankind for three centuries is a work of chance and an indecipherable enigma. For ourselves the choice is not difficult.

[Page 323.] If Shakespeare were to return to life, and hear all the discussions to which the character of his hero has given rise, he could not suppress a smile, and he would say to us:

To what purpose do you dispute thus to ascribe to me a profundity of thought which I never had? I am, perhaps, a great poet and an admirable arranger of tales for the stage, but I never was the profound philosopher that you make me out. Witness my life as an actor and the insufficiency of my early education. As to the subject which particularly occupies you, I found in the Chronicles of Belleforest a story which struck me as dramatic, and I endeavored to turn it to account for the theatre, just as I have done with so many others. As the public would not have tolerated the hero of my Chronicle, I had to modify him. In place of the savage, half sorcerer, with which the legend furnished me, I began by making out of Hamlet a gentleman of my own time, the flower of the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth, with all the intellectual culture of the sixteenth century; then, by a process sufficiently familiar to poets, I gave to this intelligent being, refined by education, sentiments which I myself entertained both by nature and by circumstances. Suffering from men and things, I have taken advantage of the situation of my hero to put into his mouth the troubles and disenchantments of my own heart, and feeling how I should recoil from a murder to be committed in cold blood, however obliged to enact it I might have felt myself, I have ascribed to him the hesitation which would have been mine in his case. Should I have been therefore a coward, or possessed of a mind fatally undecided? No more, I think, than I should have been a sick dreamer, fit only for suicide, because, at certain moments of my life, I have had the bitter sentiments which I ascribe to Hamlet.'

So, we believe, Shakespeare would speak. It is his life, in fact, which is the final explanation of the character of Hamlet, as it is that of the character of Timon, which was conceived at the same epoch.

[Page 326.] The drama of Timon was for a long time a problem, and for many of the critics at this day it is still a mere chaos, without cohesion or moral unity,— something resembling the dreams of a drunken man. But all this ceases, and the drama of Timon recovers its signification and its unity, if you understand it as the outburst of all the bitterness and disgust at life which had accumulated in the soul of Shakespeare. . . . . Between Timon and Hamlet there is only a difference in shading. Timon hates life; Hamlet finds it burthensome. Timon execrates society; Hamlet regards it with aversion and contempt. In Timon the misanthropy of the poet has reached its apogee; in Hamlet it has not yet gone so far. The former says Raca! to the world; the latter confines himself to Alas! The latter finds more echoes than the former, because the sentiment which he expresses, being less extreme, is in accord with the disposition of a much larger number. But both these two are of the same family, branches of the same trunk; both were born of the same sadness and of the same weariness of life from which Shakespeare appears to have suffered for some two-thirds of his career.

FRANÇOIS-VICTOR HUGO (1873)

(Introduction to Trans. Paris, 1873, p. 77.)-Erudite critics, while acknow. ledging the fine wisdom of Hamlet's counsels to the players, have nevertheless stoutly denied the dramatic propriety of introducing these counsels at all. The two scenes, in which Hamlet makes the actors rehearse, have been regarded by these critics as hors-d'œuvre, very magnificent, it is true, but none the less as hors-d'œuvre. Herein lies, in my opinion, a very grave error. Hamlet wishes to have a piece acted, the sight of which will force the guilty King to reveal his crime. It is readily perceived that the manner in which this piece is to be interpreted is of great importance to him. Hamlet has before him mere strolling players, buffoons addicted to low clap-trap or grotesque contortions, decked out in ridiculous costume. Wherefore, if the scene to be acted before Claudius has not due decorum, if one of the actors mouths it like a town crier, if another has his periwig befrouzled, if the clown, just at the most important point, cuts some of the wretched jokes that clowns are so fond of, why then, forsooth, the whole effect that Hamlet is aiming at is ruined. The terrible tragedy, whereof the last scene is to be acted off the stage, will end like a farce in a market-place amid peals of laughter. But if, on the other hand, the acting proceeds smoothly, the result is sure. The more natural the actor, the deeper will be Claudius's emotion; the truer the acting of the fictitious murderer, the more manifest will be the panic of the real one. It is, therefore, essential that Hamlet should have the piece rehearsed with the greatest care before it is performed in public.

[Page 97.] Hamlet is not, in my view, a courtier, he is a misanthrope; he is not a prince, he is more than a prince, he is a thinker. What occupies his thoughts are no beggarly matters, but eternal problems. To be or not to be, that is the question.' In his ceaseless dreaming, Hamlet has lost sight of the finite, and sees only the infinite. He is forever contemplating this boundless Force which governs nature, and which men sometimes call Providence, and sometimes Chance; and before this Force he feels himself crushed,—he renounces his individuality, he abjures his will, and declares himself a fatalist. . . . . Whenever he acts, he obeys an impulse which drives him not from within, but from without.

....

[Page 98.] Hamlet believes himself to be no more master of his fate than is a sparrow. And it is on this passive creature that the mission has devolved of overthrowing a tyrant. Hence all this wavering that we see, this uncertainty, these inner struggles. Hamlet looks upon himself as powerless, he has to overthrow a Power; he does not look upon himself as free,-he has to make a whole nation free; he has no faith in his own strength, and he has to force punishment on a royal assassin. Sublime idea! Shakespeare has made Hamlet a fatalist avenger! This struggle between Will and Fate belongs not alone to the history of Hamlet,—it belongs to the history of us all. It is your life, it is mine. It was that of our fathers,-it will be that of our sons. And hence the work of Shakespeare is eternal.

PROF. DR HEINRICH VON STRUVE (1876)

(Hamlet, Eine Charakterstudie, Weimar, 1876, p. 52): How are we to regard the Ghost? It is self-evident that it can be regarded in no other light than as an hallucination.

Through the sudden death of his father, and its attendant circumstances, Hamlet was thrown into a state of excitement so intense, and dwelt upon his father's memory so tenderly, that it could not be but that his imagination, forever searching for the causes of the shocking event, should be in the highest degree liable to visions and hallucinations. At all events, it is much more natural to assume that the young Prince, excited and mentally tortured as he was, should have been the victim of an hallucination, at night, and in a retired spot, in which he saw his father's ghost, than that the canonized bones of his parent, hearsed in death, should really burst their cerements, and that the sepulchre in which they were quietly inurn'd should have oped his ponderous and marble jaws to permit them to visit the pale glimpses of the Before the appearance of the Ghost, Hamlet had seen his father in imagination, and it needed but the trifling incitement from some superstitious soldiers to transform the figment of his fancy into the lively colors and plastic outline of reality.

moon.

We see, therefore, in the apparition of his father, nothing but the reflection of Hamlet's own mental exaltation, and the words addressed to him by the Ghost are merely the words which Hamlet, in the name of his father, says to himself. Hamlet's talk with his father is merely a soliloquy. If it were necessary, this could be proved down to the smallest particular, for everything that Hamlet's father says corresponds to a hair with the known traits of Hamlet's character; it contains nothing individual, nothing novel, nothing peculiar to a character of a different mould, but everything bears the stamp of Hamlet's inmost nature, is the mere reflection of himself. Many an observation, made by chance and lost to memory, of his uncle's and his mother's conduct after his father's death; many a piece of gossip, which here and there reached his ears, and which by itself was insufficient to give his suspicions shape; many a significant shaking of the head by one or another of his father's faithful servants; many a fleeting observation which he had made unconsciously in connection with the numberless reports concerning the details of this mysterious event,—had worked night and day in Hamlet's mind, and struggled into shape not less effectively because unknown, or only half known, to himself; until at last all these separate items, insignificant in isolation, suddenly took consistent shape in Hamlet's mind, and stood out before his consciousness as an external image, unmodified by any conscious mental exertion. And thus it follows that the apparition of Hamlet's father, with its precise and distinct accusation of Claudius and the Queen, is nothing else than the objective and personified result of a mental process in Hamlet, long antecedent and unconsciously carried on.

The Ghost appears. How does Hamlet act in its presence? Is he drawn by love to his father? is he rejoiced once more to behold the long-lost one? does he incline himself to him as a loving son assuredly would who actually saw his father bodily [sic, leibhaftig] before him? No, nothing of the kind! For all Hamlet was concerned, the apparition came to answer a flood of questions which have long agitated the son, and which he has long sought to answer for himself in vain. He seeks from the Ghost nothing else but that it inform him why it appears, what it requires of him, what he must do to allay its tormenting disquiet. At first he does not even know