53>3> 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 FROM THE 
 
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 BENNO LOEWY 
 
 1854-1919 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 PR 2807.R96 
 
 Irving as Hamlet. 
 
 3 1924 013 138 460 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 31 38460 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
Preparing. 
 
 SHAKSPERE : 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY OF HIS MIND AND ART. 
 Bt PuoPEssbR Edwaed D0"WDBN. 
 
 The chief design of this work is to discover the man— Shakspere— 
 through his works, and to ascertain his course of mental and moral de« 
 velopment as far as this is possible. This thread running through the 
 work will make it a continuous study, written for such intelligent 
 readers of Shakspere who are not , specialists in Shakspere scholarship, 
 and intended to be an introduction to the study of Shakspere, popular in 
 the sense of being attractive to all intelligent lovers of literature, but 
 founded upon the most recent and accurate Shakspere scholarships, 
 English, German, and American. 
 
 Crown Svo. Price Gs. 
 THE SHAKSPERE AEGOST: 
 
 CONTAINING MUCH OF THE WEALTH OF SHAKSPEEE'S 
 
 WISDOM AND WIT, ALPHAS ETICAILT AEEANOED 
 
 AND CLASSIFIED. 
 
 By Capt. a. F. p. Habcoukt. 
 
 HENET S. KING & Co., LONDON. 
 
IRVING 
 AS HAMLET. 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD E. RUSSELL. 
 
 " Now I AM AIONE." — Act II., Scene 2. 
 
 Henry S. Kimch (fciCo., 
 
 65 COKNHILL, & lb' l^il^liNdSTferi RMw, LONDOH. 
 
 1875. A.KY 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 Among the commonest examples of that cant of 
 criticism which Sterne found so o£Fensive, is the asser- 
 tion that Shakspeare is for the closet rather than 
 the stage. If a dramatic reporter has no other 
 exordium ready, he always begins with that. If, 
 incapable of giving an idea of the performance 
 he should describe, he desires to convey to his 
 readers an impression of himself as a "superior 
 person," he adheres throughout his article to the 
 notion that Shakspeare is unactable, or at least is 
 better understood when only read, and probably im- 
 poses upon many. For a, lazy age, going to the theatre 
 is too tiresome ; for a gaudy and frivolous generation 
 anything better than opera bouffe is too slow. It 
 is an easy escape to say that there is no acting now- 
 a-days, and that if there were it would be wasted 
 on a dramatist too grand to be acted. But this is 
 never said or believed by those who have studied 
 Shakspeare both in the library and in the theatre. 
 And least of aU can it be said or believed of " Hamlet." 
 
2 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 Mystery is, no doubt, one of "Hamlet's" greatest 
 charms, but tbe play has a mystery as potent for the 
 vulgar as that which fascinates the educated and 
 thinking. Moreover, its mystery is never suffered to 
 be dull or to override the dramatic interest. And 
 while by its supernatural element it awes all who con- 
 template the passage of its incidents, by its homely 
 and simple human nature it stimulates the mind to 
 pierce whatever in it is hard of comprehension. 
 Here, if anywhere, is a great stage play, in which 
 the emotions and bewilderments of gentle and simple 
 may sympathetically commingle. Even the excisions 
 of the common acting versions, though some of the 
 passages are material and others suppress certain 
 subtle but important points, have probably tended to 
 define, and to truly define, the conception which here 
 and there the poet too exuberantly and ramblingly 
 pursued. And if that conception owes something to 
 the pruning of the stage manager, how much does it 
 owe to the study and enthusiasm of great actors ! 
 Actual performance is magically enlightening, and 
 the recent success of Henry Irving shows that 
 original reflection is still marvellously fruitful. One 
 may be able to quote Goethe and Hazlitt — one may 
 have little pet theories of Hamlet comfortably settled 
 and docketed in one's mind; but after all, the true 
 interpreter is the actor in whom we see Hamlet live. 
 
 Nor is it necessary that he should live before us 
 with faultless graces of aspect or of elocution. A 
 writer, who like many others mistakes cjmicism for 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 3 
 
 criticism, has said with a sneer, that if previous 
 Hamlets were inferior in some parts to Irving, per- 
 haps a beautiful voice and a graceful person went far 
 to reconcile the public to their deficiencies. Probably 
 so. Perhaps in the days when the Kembles and 
 others held their own almost as much by physique as 
 by intellect, very magnificent Hamlets were seen with 
 whom no one could associate the idea of deficiency 
 at all, although a too ornate conventionalism pre- 
 vented their piercing, as later actors have done, 
 towards the heart of Hamlet's mystery. But, after 
 aU, it is no new thing for actors of the magnificent 
 order to be pushed aside by others of a more ner- 
 vous and sensitive temperament. Garrick was 
 neither tail, nor grand, nor a declaimer, but he 
 distanced, and justly distanced, his contemporaries. 
 Edmund Kean was small and mean in aspect, and 
 violated the canons of elocution received in his time, 
 but he shook the dynasty of the Kembles, and the 
 great John Phillip himself silenced the sycophant 
 sneerers around him by generously admitting that 
 the little man roared in the right place. 
 
 It is indeed argued that Ophelia's description of 
 Hamlet implies his possession of a very ingratiating 
 exterior and very courtly qualities. But since when 
 have the ecstatic epithets of a young lady in love 
 been recognised as literally descriptive ? And why 
 are we to suppose that Hamlet was so much nobler 
 to look at than other princes, because like almost aU. 
 princes he was esteemed the "glass of fashion and the 
 
4 • IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 mould of form"? Besides, much to her honour, the 
 greater part of Ophelia's commendation refers to gifts 
 of mind and manner, which are entirely independent 
 of figure, of physical deportment, and of vocal and 
 articulatory perfection. While believing that Hamlet 
 may be successfully played with almost any physique 
 which is not obnoxiously unromantic, we avow 
 the opinion that such a physique as Irving's — 
 nervous, excitable, and pliant, suggestive of much 
 thought and dreamy intellect, yet agile and natural 
 and individual in its movements — comes nearer the 
 normal English preconception of such a character 
 than one more characterised by physical beauty and 
 gesticulatory and elocutionary grace. In moments 
 of high excitement Irving rapidly plods across 
 and across the stage with a gait peculiar to him — a 
 walk somewhat resembling that of a fretful man 
 trying to get very quickly over a ploughed field. 
 In certain passages his voice has a querulous, piping 
 impatience which cannot be reconciled with stage 
 elegance. But there is no reason why Hamlet should 
 not have -had these peculiarities; and if we are to 
 see him really living in the midst of what has come 
 upon him, the genius of the actor who accomplishes 
 this all-important feat as only genius can, wiU be 
 distinctly helped by any little inefiaceable peculiari- 
 ties which, whUe not inconsistent with the character, 
 give the representation of it a stamp of personal in- 
 dividuality. This, though a minor characteristic, has 
 greatly distinguished Irving's acting in all his 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 5 
 
 noted parts, although the merit has not been much 
 recognised in the surface criticism of the day. In each 
 case — ^in Digby Grant, Mathias, Eugene Aram, Philip, 
 even in the necessarily stilted King Charles, and, in 
 spite of too young-looking a countenance, most pre- 
 eminently in Richelieu — play-goers have felt that 
 they have come to know a new and distinct and, 
 actual person, just as really and with just as true 
 a sensation of novelty and kindled curiosity as when 
 an interesting acquaintance is made at a dinner-table 
 or in travelling. The secret lies in a bold combination 
 of tragedy with character acting, which Irving has 
 been the first to essay. He shows the nicest instiuct 
 in the degree to which he pushes it. Those who 
 should expect his Hamlet to be as minutely individual 
 as his Eichelieu would show almost as much coarseness 
 of perception as the queer critics who praised him for 
 avoiding the temptation to make the death of Hamlet 
 as horribly realistic as the death in the " Bells." But 
 even in his Hamlet there is a strongly marked and 
 courageously preserved individuality, which is more 
 helpful to the due efiect of the play than any amount 
 of insipid personal beauty and grace. 
 
 When plain incongruities have been avoided, and 
 an impression of living personality instead of mere 
 stage assumption has been created, there is little more 
 that manner and idiosyncrasy can do to illuminate 
 Hamlet. The rest must be acting — thought, con- 
 ception, imagination, finding expression through the 
 various chaimels of technical skill. And in this great 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 undertaking Irving has succeeded, mainly because 
 of the simp\eness and singleness of mind "with 
 whicli he has addressed to it his -weU-disciplined 
 powers. The chief vice of Hamlets is deliberate 
 point-making. Now an actor, calculating on making 
 this or that point teU with an audience as it has 
 never told before, or racking his brains to find 
 new points with which to make new hits, is on the 
 wrong tack. He may achieve a fine dramatic display, 
 but it will not be Hamlet. Hamlet is nature ; nature, 
 indeed, of a peculiar mould — nature refined by scholar- 
 ship, hj thought, and by princely polish — nature 
 set on edge by the bitterness of a ghastly suspicion — 
 nature disturbed by the supernatural — ^nature keenly 
 and fretfully self-examining : but still nature. To play 
 Hamlet conventionally, and to make it a succession of 
 sure and resounding hits — as has often been done, and 
 by no one more daringly and effectively than by Miss 
 Marriott when she used to play the character, giving 
 a sort of pasticcio of every Hamlet's best points — ^is 
 really not to play Hamlet at aU. You may behold 
 the performance with pleasure because each episode 
 stands out boldly and comes off well. But through- 
 out it there is hardly a glimpse of the thoughtful but 
 unaffected yoimg prince of Shakspeare. The poet 
 invites us to imagine him ere the action begins, living 
 at ease in the court of an idolised father. He makes 
 friends of all the courtiers, never losing his natural 
 dignity, because he never thinks of it, but lets good- 
 nature have play. He loves his studies much, his 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 7 
 
 thoughts more, and a beautiful and appreciating girl 
 most of all. He watches with the unmixed enjoy- 
 ment of a chaste and filial adolescence the conjugal 
 happiness of his parents. Suddenly he is confronted 
 with the death of his father under doubtful circum- 
 stances. He himself is displaced from the succession. 
 His mother shamelessly marries an abhorred uncle, 
 with whom he associates the whole avalanche of his 
 troubles. And finally his father's spirit in arms 
 incenses him with an unwelcome fire of revenge, and 
 instigates him to a deed which is at once acceptable 
 to his convictions of right and foreign to his tempera- 
 ment. Such a prince, so shocked and tried and 
 tasked, is the character Hamlet ought to present to us. 
 Eemembering past Hamlets — good and great as 
 many have been — it seems to us that there remained 
 yet one new though obvious conception to be realised. 
 Every great actor has been anxious to show how he 
 could play Hamlet ; no one has quite succeeded in 
 showing how Hamlet would have played it. And 
 this is what Irving does. It is some years since 
 Edwin Booth, who most nearly approached this 
 natural and touching conception, was in England, and 
 the impressions under which we name him are there- 
 fore not fresh. That he is the best or at least the 
 truest Hamlet, except Irving, we have, however, no 
 doubt. He is so unequal an actor that his other 
 performances give no indication of the grace, the 
 intellect, the poignant nature of his Hamlet ; and 
 the highest praise that can be accorded to Irving is 
 
IRVINa AS HAMLET. 
 
 that to the princeliness, the ease, the gravity, the 
 intellect, and the naturalness of Booth — all of which 
 he possesses, though a little more deeply stamped 
 with personal manner — ^he adds these tw;o remarkably 
 contrasted qualities: a sort of domestic sensibility of the 
 calamities and perplexities by which Hamlet is inun- 
 dated, and a wild poetry of aspect and of speech which 
 till now — ^unless indeed by the old actors before our 
 time — has not been even hinted except by painters. 
 The root of it all, as we divine, is a simple, steady 
 resolution on Irving's part to be what Hamlet- must 
 have been, and to let the rest take care of itself. If 
 being Hamlet should lead to good points, they would be 
 welcome, and the applause evoked by them would be 
 as delicious to Irving as to another; but to make 
 points by ceasing to be Hamlet was to him an im- 
 possible profanation. When certain critics tell him 
 he stUl lacks the characteristics of the great French 
 actors, they little appreciate his avoidance of all that 
 is worst in French tragedy, and have failed to perceive 
 how deeply he has drunk of the spring of aU that is 
 best in French comedy — finding in it a tra^c inspir- 
 ation which it might least have been expected to yield. 
 An eminent comedian of the present day, being asked 
 by a junior in his art how he should sit at a certain 
 table in the course of a play, replied very wisely, 
 •" Should is not the word. It is not a question of how 
 you should sit, but of how you would sit. If you sit 
 as you would in real life, you cannot be far wrong." 
 Those who have seen Lafont and Eegnier know that 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 9 
 
 this is the principle of the by-play in French comedy. 
 It is also the secret of Irving's vivid success as Hamlet. 
 Given natural acting, and the power to be natural in 
 the more passionate and poetical as well as in the more 
 level passages, and you cannot but have a Hamlet 
 infinitely more affecting and impressive, in its general 
 scope, than can be produced under the old system of 
 objective dramatic eflfect. 
 
 Shakspeare ended most of his plays badly, and 
 the well-contrived terminations now familiar on the* 
 stage are usually the result of managerial prunings, 
 long sanctioned by the well-satisfied instincts of the 
 public. But as collateral reading on the subject of 
 the play, the excised passages are often very valuable. 
 This is the case in "Hamlet." The last act of the 
 dying prince is to obtain, from Horatio a promise that 
 he wUl publicly clear the wounded name which, 
 " things standing thus," Hamlet would leave behind 
 him. No sooner is he dead than Horatio fulfils his 
 behest. " Give order," he says, 
 
 " that these bodies 
 High on a stage be placed to the view ; 
 And let me speak, to the yet unknowing world, 
 How these things came about : So shall you hear 
 Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts ; 
 Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters ; 
 Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause ; 
 And in this upshot, purposes mistook, 
 FaUen on the inventors' heads : all this can I 
 Truly deliver." 
 
 His offer is accepted, and the curtain falls as th^ 
 
to IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 bodies slain ia that terrible last scene, are borne to tbe 
 public place where Horatio is to speak. Surely this 
 scene has been overlooked by painters. Hamlets 
 corpse borne by four captains like a soldier's to the 
 stage, amid soldiers' music and the rites of war, 
 followed by the other bodies on less honoured biers, 
 while the brave young Wittenberg student, who alone 
 knows the whole story, faces a vast mob surging 
 with every sort of excitement, grave in the presence 
 •of so terrible a tragedy, eager before those to whom he 
 bums to explain it; while, by a permissible license, 
 the too well-avenged spirit of Hamlet's father might 
 be imagined hoveriag near the spectacle: all this 
 ia good hands would make a great picture. And 
 dramatically the essence of its iiiterest pervades the 
 play. It is amidst the strange occurrences Horatio 
 recites that Hamlet's character as we see it is formed. 
 The truest Hamlet, therefore, is he who most clearly 
 realizes in the earliest scenes what the young prince 
 was before the mystery, suspicion, and calamity began, 
 and who most consistently sustains and exhibits the 
 impressions which his unexampled sad experience 
 brings upon him. There is something positively 
 repulsive in the cool way ia which even great critics 
 have " reckoned up " Hamlet's character as a mere 
 exhibition of iadecision. Even Goethe's beautiful 
 simile, of the growing oak ia a costly vase, has a tone 
 of half contempt, not quite consistent with a sufficient 
 apprehension of the exceptional pressure of circum- 
 stances and of his own unmanageable reflections on 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET, 11 
 
 Hamlet's nature. A little common-sense is worth a 
 good deal of subtlety here; and to appreciate what 
 Hamlet goes through, without preconceptions — ^which 
 is what we imagine Irving to have done — is the best 
 way of raising to the highest point the human in- 
 terest of the character. In reading much of the 
 criticism on* Hamlet, one feels that it is written in 
 an artificial manner by persons who have never reaUy 
 conceived what has happened to the hero, and are not 
 properly impressed with the difficulty of his extri- 
 cating himself from the circumstances in which he is 
 placed. It is positively laughable to hear Hamlet 
 sneered at for infirmity of purpose by writers who 
 probably never in their lives had a more serious ques- 
 tion to settle than whether they should give up a 
 house at the Midsummer or Christmas quarter. Nor 
 is it much less ludicrous to read in an ambitious 
 critique, that Irving as Hamlet shows an unmanly 
 degree of dejection. As if having to kUl your 
 mother's second husband within a few months of your 
 father's murder, upon the injunction of your father's 
 ghost, were a quite ordinary piece of work by which 
 no well-regulated mind would suffer itself to be 
 disturbed ! 
 
 The tone and spirit of the whole play, and of 
 Irving's impersonation, and ef the Lyceum represen- 
 tation, is at antipodes with such ideas. The mounting, 
 of the play has been studiously kept from being too 
 splendid. It is regal, but eminently domestic. The 
 scenes without, where the ghost is first encountered, are 
 
13 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 as wild as the text suggests they should be, but the 
 apartments of the palace all look habitable. They are 
 not brand new. They are not mere audience cham- 
 bers- They are usable and used. The hahituSs move 
 about as if they were at home, and at night they light 
 themselves about with torches. It is complained that 
 Irving leaves one apartment torch in hand, and 
 immediately enters his mother's chamber with a 
 bedroom lamp. What taore natural ? The lamp is 
 no doubt left without the chamber on a slab, to be 
 lit at the torch which is carried through the dark 
 stone passages, and put out by knocking it against the 
 wall or on the foot when the lamp is taken in hand. 
 Such details are not of the first consequence, but they 
 are important when the chief actor has seized the 
 idea that, to sustain the imagination in the direction 
 Shakspeare indicates, an air of castle domesticity must 
 be kept up, so that the conception of a house bhghted 
 by the occurrences set forth in the action, and finally 
 enumerated in the speech of Horatio which we have 
 quoted above, may be the background of aU Hamlet's 
 dramatic effects. Even the melodious but primitive 
 harps which sound at the entrance of the King 
 and Queen in their comparatively simple state^ 
 serve the general purpose which the new Hamlet has 
 kept steadily in view. 
 
 That purpose has, however, been most brilliantly 
 served by a new and clear reading of a hitherto 
 obscure aspect of Hamlet's character. 
 
 Irving is no mature dreamer, long accustomed to 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 13 
 
 metaphysical problems, and fond of putting them into 
 fine language. He is not a precocious and priggish 
 young philosopher airing his cleverness. Nor is he a 
 mere master of theatrical devices, flooding the stage 
 ■with tears perhaps at the very moment when Hamlet 
 complains that he cannot weep, or exemplifying that 
 common form of strenuous but imperfect absorption 
 in a character which practically amounts to making 
 its different phases inconsistent with each other. He 
 is what Hamlet was. His mind has been enlarged 
 and refined by much vagrant contemplation, but has 
 never lost its exquisite simplicity, its fresh suscepti- 
 bility. He is extremely self-observant, not in vanity 
 or complacency, but because self-study is to him 
 a fascinating avenue through which to approach 
 all other knowledge of life and character. And from 
 this point Irving has advanced to a detail absolutely 
 new, and positively regenerating to some passages, if 
 not to the general scope of the play. He has noticed 
 that Hamlet not merely is simple-miuded, frankly 
 susceptible, and naturally self-contemplative, but has 
 a trick — not at all uncommon in persons whose most 
 real life is an inner one — of fostering and aggravating 
 his own excitements. This discovery of Irving is a 
 stroke of high genius, and will identify his Hamlet 
 as long as the memory of it endures. The idea 
 win be handed down, and the mechanical execu- 
 tion of it will probably be imitated ; but the vivid, 
 flashing, half-foolish, half-inspired hysterical power of 
 Irving in the passages where it is developed is a 
 
14 lEVING AS HAMLET, 
 
 triumpli of idiosyncrasy, which, even with the help of 
 the traditions he is founding, is not very likely to be 
 achieved by any other actor. Critics who carry 
 about their own standards as other artisans carry 
 pocket foot-rules, may pronounce this feature of 
 Irving's Hamlet unmanly ; but it is the business of 
 a great actor to play Hamlet, not to improve him. If 
 he was partly hysterical, and aggravated half-con- 
 sciously his own excitements, the actor who plays 
 him, and sees this, must not hide it ; and if he show 
 it to us, we shall see in his performance the truth, and 
 probably the beauty, of a phase of Shakspeare's crea- 
 tion which has hitherto been neglected. 
 
 To whom, then, is it that we are introduced when 
 Hamlet enters iu the second scene of the tragedy in 
 the train of his uncle-father and aunt-mother ? It is 
 to an ingenuous though highly cultivated young 
 prince, overwhelmed by an unconquerable grief for the 
 death of an idolised father, and with horror at the 
 events which have succeeded it. Kevenge has even in 
 his. uncertainty become a nascent instinct under the 
 goadings of his misery. What follows is at once 
 simple and terrible. To the vague promptings of 
 grief and revenge are soon added the sublime force of 
 ghostly injunctions. There is so little in all this that 
 is mysterious, that we ought to be very grateful to an 
 actor who brings it from the gloomy grandeur of a 
 conventional atmosphere within the range of domestic 
 feeling and strongly marked human character. Let 
 us try and remember, as we are encouraged to do by 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 15 
 
 Shakspeare, and almost compelled to do by Irving, 
 that the ghost is the only supernatural character in 
 the play — ^that Hamlet is one of ourselves, though 
 cleverer than we are, more eloquent, more imaginative, 
 and — shall we say it to please the common-form 
 critics ? — ^less manly and decided. For factitious 
 mystery, Irving substitutes natural susceptibilities, 
 and makes his audience share them. Few of us have 
 Hamlet's sensitive constitution. Still fewer have his 
 strong provocations to crime. None of us are agitated 
 by supernatural visitations. But we can all under- 
 stand, as we watch Irving, how such a man as Hamlet 
 would be affected by such influences. With' Irving 
 the tragedy is as little a show-piece as it would have 
 been to a real Hamlet. It is life and death you are 
 gazing at while he is on the stage. The xoyal house 
 of Denmark has a black shadow over it, and a bright, 
 fresh, young prince, " the rose and expectancy of the 
 fair state," is doomed to peer amidst the gloom, now 
 peopled with his own imaginings, and anon disturbed 
 by a lurid and fitful supernatural light, for the truth 
 of its origin, and the means of dissipating it by ven- 
 geance. Faithful in this pursuit, Irving defies alike 
 the temptations of tradition and the allurements of 
 a text which, invites declamation. He wiU not be 
 drawn out of the character. And the character lives 
 in him as it probably never lived before. 
 
 Upon one point we differ from, or at least cannot 
 wholly agree with, the first dramatic critic of the day, 
 who, writing in the Times, has picked out, as the lead- 
 
16 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 ing characteristic of Irving's Hamlet, a repugnance to 
 cruelty. He says: — 
 
 If we rightly interpret Mr. Irving's performance, his reply- 
 to this question is to the effect that "the nature of Hamlet is 
 essentially tender, loving, and merciful. He is not a weak 
 man called upon to do something beyond his powers, but he 
 is a kindly man urged to do a deed, which, according to the 
 lex talionis, may be righteous, but which is yet cruel. In 
 Mr. Henry Taylor's PMlip van Artevelde, one of the personages 
 asks Philip, in order to ascertain his fitness to become a ruler 
 in very stormy times, " Can you be cruel ? " thereby implying 
 that without something like an element of cruelty in his nature 
 his appointed work cannot be effectually done. According to 
 Mr. Irving — as we suppose — ^it is to the utter lack of cruelty 
 in his nature that Hamlet's shortcomings are to be attributed. 
 He is a judge to whom the black cap is so abhorrent that he can 
 never persuade himself to put it on. Mercy will always usurp 
 the seat of Justice when her usurpation is least desirable. He 
 is capable of any amount of sorrow — sorrow for his dead father, 
 sorrow for Ophelia. An unjiercurrent of tearfulness runs 
 through all his discourse, but of unmitigated hate he is un- 
 susceptible, if we answer in the negative Shylock's question, 
 " Hates any man the thing he would not kill ? " — mota un- 
 susceptible than he himself suspects. The hideous crime 
 revealed by the ghost may cause him to " fall a-cursing hke 
 a drab," and bestow upon his uncle a large number of ugly 
 adjectives ; but for all that he does . not like to kiU him. 
 
 Now of the tenderness and loviagness of Hamlet's 
 disposition we are as well persuaded as the writer of 
 this passage. That Hamlet could not possibly have 
 been cruel without just provocation is certain ; and 
 it is not less so that gratuitous cruelty is a quality 
 impossible to be associated with the character as im- 
 personated by Irving. But of any conscious revulsion 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 17 
 
 against cruel vengeance upon his uncle there is no 
 sign in the play, and we observed none in the player. 
 If it is to the " utter lack of cruelty in his nature" 
 that Hamlet's shortcomings are to be attributed, 
 "according to Irving," how shall we account for 
 the restoration of the rarely played scene, in which 
 Hamlet abstains from killing Claudius at his prayers, 
 because that would send him straight to heaven, 
 whereas his victim, Hamlet's father, was suddenly 
 slain, with all his imperfections on his head? Only 
 by a forced and untenable supposition that, in 
 reciting the speech in a tone of vehement savagery, 
 Irving means to convey the idea that Hamlet is 
 playing a part to himself, and humouring his mer- 
 cifulness behind a show of refined cruelty. " Why 
 this is hire and salary," he exclaims, 
 
 " not revenge. 
 He took my father grossly, full of bread : 
 With all his crimes broad blown, as flash as May ; 
 And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven P 
 But, in oar circamstance and coarse of thought, 
 'Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged, 
 To take him in the purging of his soul, 
 When he is fit and season'd for his passage P 
 No! 
 
 Up, sword, and know thoa a more horrid lient : 
 Wlien he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, 
 Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed ; 
 At game, a-swearing, or about some act 
 That has no relish of salvation in't ; 
 Then trip him, that his heels inay kick at heaven, 
 And that his soul may be as damned and black 
 As hell, whereto it goes." 
 
 C 
 
l8' IRVING A3 HAMLET. 
 
 Tlie actor who can recite these lines with energy 
 and passion, may yet have and be faithful to a tender 
 conception of Hamlet's natural character, but he can- 
 not possibly, it seems to us, with all deference, have 
 intended to make a lack of cruelty in Hamlet, the 
 " physic which prolongs " his uncle's " sickly days." 
 Hamlet is hindered, first by a dread lest he is being 
 seduced by diabolical influence, under the shape of 
 his father, into an act of sanguinary injustice, and 
 afterwards by a sort of moral paralysis, which strikes 
 through his whole being when he realises, in the light 
 of his own habitual contemplations, the solemnity and 
 sublime responsibility of a fatal vengeance. But 
 against the mere cruelty of anything he can do to 
 his uncle, any revolting there may be in his nature 
 is unconscious, and only makes a small part of the 
 supreme tension and excitement into which he is 
 thrown by the behest supernaturaUy conveyed to 
 him. In the mere matter of cruelty, Hamlet is not 
 in advance of his time, of the barbarity of -whose 
 spirit the play gives fuU evidence. The speeqh we 
 have quoted is so brutal and " so cracks the wind " 
 of a coarse "conceit, that one is tempted to regard it 
 as a dark blot upon the play. But ther^ are other 
 things in Shakspeare, and many passages in his 
 contemporaries, quite as indecently remorseless ; and 
 whether we regard "Hamlet" as a picture of Shak- 
 speare's age, or of its own mythical period, we shall 
 find that none of its characters show any sign of 
 recoiling from the cruelty, or questioning the rightness 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 19 
 
 of vengeance upon wicked offenders. A very im- 
 portant speech as bearing upon this point, and upon 
 the roots of Hamlet's indecision, though otherwise 
 much below the level of- the play, is always omitted 
 in representation. Hamlet, after killing Polonius, 
 encounters a Norwegian army, proceeding to fight 
 the I'oles for a patch of ground not worth five ducats. 
 A philosophic prince, or indeed any reasonable being 
 of our day, would be struck at such a prospect, by the 
 wicked waste of life and treasure for such a cause 
 Not so Hamlet. He sees in this encounter an occasion 
 to spur his dull revenge. He even brings the Deity 
 into the debate, and argues that " He that made us 
 with such large discourse, looking before and after," 
 did not intend man to be merely comfortable, but is 
 best pleased when His creatures are sacrificing life 
 and everything desirable on points of honour. Then 
 he proceeds : — 
 
 " Now, whether it be 
 Bestial oblivion, or some craven scrapie 
 Of thinking too precisely on the event, — 
 A thought,, which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom. 
 And ever three parts coward,^! do not know 
 Why yet I live to say ' This thing's to do,' 
 Sith I have cause and will and strength and means 
 To do't. Examples, gross as earth, exhort me : 
 Witness this army of such mass and charge. 
 Led by a delicate and tender prince, 
 Whose spirit, with divine ambition pufEed, 
 Makes mouths at the invisible event : 
 Exposing what is mortal and unsure 
 To all that fortune, death, and danger dare. 
 Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be gre^t 
 
20 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 Is, not to stir without great argament, 
 
 Bat greatly to find qnarrel in a straw 
 
 When honour's at the stake. How stand I then, 
 
 That have a father killed, a mother stain 'd, 
 
 Excitements of my reason and my blood. 
 
 And let all sleep? While, to my shame, I see 
 
 The imminent death of twenty thousand men, 
 
 That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, 
 
 Go to their graves like beds ; fight for a plot 
 
 Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, 
 
 Which is not tomb enough and continent 
 
 To hide the slain. ! from this time forth 
 
 My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth ! 
 
 In arriving at this conclusion, Hamlet, it is plain, 
 has to overcome, not any aversion to the cruelty of a 
 just vengeance, hut the general irresolution and in- 
 disposition for a vast and terrible and gross enterprise 
 which, even in rude times, might naturally be created 
 in a gentle nature by culture and habits of metaphy- 
 sical contemplation. How indifferent to aU scruples 
 in matters of just revenge his compeers were, may be 
 judged from the conversation of Laertes and the King. 
 When the son of the slain Polonius says he is ready 
 to cut Hamlet's throat in the church, Claudius cant- 
 ingly replies : "No place, indeed, should murder 
 sanctuarize ; " and casual listeners sometimes fancy he 
 is mildly reprobating the language of Laertes, though 
 not deprecating his design. But these are the words 
 which follow : " Revenge should have no bounds." 
 "With Claudius, even when talking moral cant, there 
 is no limitation to the obligation of vengeance which 
 we now call Corsican ; and not a character, good, bad. 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 21 
 
 or indifferent, in the play expresses the faintest doubt 
 of the propriety of retaliation. The shop-boys of a 
 later age stand morally above the level of the Hamlets 
 of half-barbaric eras. The hesitations of such a nature 
 as Hamlet's are unconscious prophetic cerebrations of 
 better times to come — ^times of order, of law, of mercy, 
 of suppressed personal passions. But it is a mistake 
 in philosophy, as well as in criticism, to see in the 
 purblind motions of Hamlet towards a more advanced 
 moral atmosphere, a clear and conscious aversion to a 
 cruelty which by him, and all the men of his day, was 
 deemed righteous and unexceptionable.* And especially 
 is it a mistake to read thus the performance of an 
 actor who, by restoring and acting very powerfully 
 the most savage scene in which Hamlet appears, shows 
 that he is bent on facing all the seeming incongruities 
 of the character, and means to succeed, not by pre- 
 senting a sweet and elegant Hamlet of his own, but 
 by a true representation of the much harassed and 
 almost distraught young prince, whom Shakspeare's 
 searching eye saw as he would have been, anaidst the 
 trouble and conflict into which he was plunged. 
 
 Let us now proceed to notice some of the details 
 by which Irving's conception is wrought out, 
 
 * It is remarkable that Shakspeare here continues a previous 
 conception of his in Henry V. — ^who on the contemplative side of 
 his character bears some comparison with Hamlet — by putting 
 into his mouth reflections on the slaughter of armies vrhich, 
 though much behind the sentiments we now cherish (when we 
 do not wish to make war), are far in advance of the humanity 
 and civilization of any of the other characters in the play. 
 
22 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 Without undue anticipation, but -with, tlie vividness 
 of a fine picture, the story is to a great extent told at 
 the Lyceum in the very aspect of Hamlet as he enters 
 in the suite of the King and Queen, His face is 
 pale and melancholy. His black hair is tumbled in 
 masses, gracefully, but without any appearance of 
 pre-arrangement. Indeed, it is impossible, at this 
 moment at any rate, to associate with Irving's poetic 
 figure any action that a man might play. He sits 
 whUe the others stand, not apart, however, in isolation, 
 but in the midst, in semi-distraction. There is no 
 obtrusion of himself. Yet if you unveiled the picture 
 to one who had never seen " Hamlet," he would know 
 that the hero of the play must be this dark-haired, 
 mournfully garbed youth, leaning on his elbow, motion- 
 less, unaffectedly sad, making no show of grief, but 
 gazing, it would seem, half pensively, half cynically, 
 not so much into vacancy as into the heart of some 
 oppressing mystery of sorrow. Never was a truer 
 conception more strikingly and simply embodied. 
 Many a, classic sonnet, many an academic patating, 
 has won immortality by poetry less true and striking 
 than has been thrown into this simple, unforced 
 attitude, which is as mortal as a young actor's life. 
 When Gertrude the Queen, later in the play,* is 
 invited to believe that other causes have made her 
 Hamlet mad, her instinct prompts the sober reflection : 
 
 " I doubt it is no other but the main, 
 His father's death and our o'er-hasty marriage." 
 
 * The passage is not acted. 
 
IKVING AS HAMLET. 23 
 
 And this ia the one subject of his gloomy thoughts 
 aa he sits in the royal presence. He has not yet been 
 tried with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul. 
 He has only connected, in some vague yet uncertain 
 manner, his two sorrows. A mind always habituated, 
 as some of the unspoken soliloquies show,* to the 
 analysis of character and moral problems, is suddenly 
 jarred by having this favourite pursuit thrust upon 
 himas a necessity of his daily Hfe. It is no longer a 
 hobby or a pastime. It grips him as a duty in the 
 midst of an untempered grief, growing out of it and 
 being part of it. In any case he must have mourned 
 his worshipped father. In any case he must have 
 loathed his uncle. In any case he must have been hor- 
 rified at his mother'a marriage. In any caae he must 
 have resented the loss of his placid succession to 
 the throne. In the case as it stands, with a root of 
 suspicion growing rankly in this bitter soil, well may 
 the young dilettante moralist feel as Irving looks. 
 As yet he is dazed with grief and horror. His 
 perplexity has not become frenzied, and is only 
 a part of his melancholy. And so, in negative as 
 well as positive expression, is it written in the actor'si. 
 expressive face and attitude. We have here the 
 simplest form in which Hamlet is revealed to us by 
 the poet, except in. such chance retrospective allusions 
 as teU us what he was in his father's life ; and to 
 Irving we owe it that we see how touching, how 
 
 * See for example the speech on defects of character — 
 "TiPMJUS moles of nature."-r-iii the Fourth Scene of- the First Act/ 
 
24 IRVING A3 HAMLET. 
 
 profound in its simplicity, and how natural a basis 
 for subsequent , complexities, is the earliest stage of 
 Hamlet's character which Shakspeare dramatically 
 
 The dejection of Irving's first speech, absolutely 
 without affectation or whine, or what people call 
 "acting" — ^and this, be it understood once for all, 
 is a uniform characteristic of the performance through- 
 out — ^is quite in the key of the picture; and then 
 we pass to the first soliloquy: *'0h! that this 
 too, too solid flesh would melt." In this there are 
 two especial beauties — ^the heart-broken delivery of 
 the repeated exclamation, " God!" and Hamlet's 
 attitude against the pUlar, as he exclaims : " Heaven 
 and earth! Must I remember?" The concluding 
 line, however, "But break my heart, for I must hold 
 my tongue," seemed to us to be delivered, needlessly 
 and wrongly, without point. While other things are 
 better than point-making, it may be as well for even 
 realistic genius to remember that Shakspeare was 
 an actor, and wrote the pet passages of Hamlet 
 as speeches, which ought to be made effective as such, 
 unless some higher object has to be attained. Upon 
 the entrance of Horatio with Bernardo and Marcellus, 
 it is at once seen that Irving has chosen the right 
 tone for his intercourse with the courtiers. This is 
 of immense importance. There are still those who 
 think it unprincely to be firank and pleasant, and 
 there have even been " critics" whp have objected 
 to this Hamlet's bourgeois familiarity. If these 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 25. 
 
 severe judges of manners think that a. prince should 
 never unbend, even to those gentlemen " to whom he 
 most adheres," more than a Lombard Street banker 
 does to a dissenting minister, we can only say that that 
 is not our opinion. If they mean to say that Irving's 
 feimiliarity is vulgar, we can but reply that criticism 
 is to a large extent a matter of testinaony, and that 
 "when we saw it," this actor's friendly intimacy 
 with those about him, while entirely devoid both of 
 stifi&iess and of too evident condescension, was prei- 
 eminently 'princely. It was especially so, because it 
 rested on a natural consciousness of the deference 
 due to Hamlet's rank, and had in it not a shade of 
 excess on which a too bold companion could presume. 
 It is rather difficult to hit the medium between the 
 beetle-browed "distance" of the ordinary leading 
 tragedian, and the back-slapping, rib-poking sort of 
 familiarity of Mr. Fechter; but Irving, like Edwin 
 Booth, has accomplished the feat to a nicety, to a 
 glance, to a tone, to a gesture, with incalculable 
 benefit to the reality and domestic interest of the play. 
 In this scene occurs a passage which will always be. 
 a subject of difference amongst critics. Mr. Irving 
 has been both praised and blamed for reciting the 
 words — 
 
 " Would I had met my dearest foe in hearen 
 Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio," 
 
 in a pathetic tone. The objectors say the sentiment 
 is a cruel one, and should be uttered in a bitter, angry, 
 
26 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 liard-hearted way. The point is not without dif- 
 ficulty, but we incline to the opposite opinion. The 
 remarks we have made above on the mistaken theory, 
 that a conscious aversion to cruelty is the key to 
 Irving'a Hamlet, will have shown that we are not 
 likely to be alarmed by an instance of barbarity in 
 his sentiments. Nevertheless, in deciding what is the 
 spirit in which a passage should be delivered, it is often 
 of more importance to remember the dominant tone 
 than to dwell on the details, or even on the ideas of 
 the language. The late Sheridan Knowles was one 
 of the worst, though one of the most confident, of 
 elocutionists, because he would persist in bringing 
 into full blaze every detail of the text. In this case 
 a pathetic, tone is probably well chosen, because 
 Hamlet's mind is more possessed by his grief at what 
 has happened than by the horrid significance of the 
 image he uses to express it. That image was, no 
 doiibt, a common one ia his day, and Hamlet— who, 
 with all his questioning, never questioned the pro- 
 priety of just and remorseless enmity- — adopted it as 
 a customary phrase. His heart was not in the savage 
 figure, but in the utter misery which he used it to 
 portray. 
 
 Great discrimination is shown by Irving in the first 
 conversation he holds respecting the ghost. Unless 
 there is a just purpose to be served, he never meets 
 things half way, and in this instance he does not 
 invite the supernatural. When Horatio teUs him that 
 he thinks he saw his father yesternight, Hamlet does 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 27 
 
 not start. He has enough to think of, and cannot 
 quite keep his mind on chit-chat. " Saw ! who ? " he 
 says, almost casually, barely following the discourse. 
 Then, with a perfect and most, artistic truth to nature, 
 he hears the story of the apparition. He has not 
 anticipated it, but the misgivings of his mind and the 
 intensity of his distress have prepared him for any- 
 thing. "It would have very much amazed him." 
 " Very like, very like." He is ready to be amazed. 
 He foresees that much will follow on the heels of this 
 amazement. He wiU watch to-night, not announcing 
 his resolve in a thunderous voice with the practised 
 aplomb of a veteran tragedian, but in tones full of 
 rapt, nervous excitement. " Would the night were 
 come." "Foul deeds will rise." Till night, " sit still 
 my soul." Can it be believed that there are critics 
 who complain at this juncture of the play that Hamlet 
 does not spend the time between Scene II. and 
 Scene IV. in changing his pumps for strong boots, lest 
 he should take cold on the platform of the castle 
 while waiting for his father's spirit ? 
 ■ When the spirit appears, and Horatio cries, "Look, 
 my lord, it comes!" the hasty, instinctive actions of 
 Hamlet are as they have been with other actors. Nor 
 do we see why they should be changed. Some people 
 think it highly absurd to throw off hat and cloak at 
 sight of the majestic apparition. They would have 
 thought it much more absurd if Hamlet had addressed 
 his father's spirit, prudently guarding himself the while 
 against sore throat. The same ingenious writers have 
 
28 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 objected to the ordinary and sensible usage of the 
 scene, that it is very nnpoetical for Horatio and 
 Marcellus to pick up the cap and mantle Hamlet has 
 thrown aside. They would have been the first to 
 complain of the gross unreality involved in leaving 
 the garments on the stage to be visible in the next 
 scene, or to be cleared away by a stage attendant. It 
 is by such baby captiousness as this that the public 
 is compensated for weak appreciation and' obtuseness 
 as to what is really new and noticeable. 
 
 There is, indeed, one point in which Irving follows 
 some other Hamlets, and in which he and they are 
 clearly wrong. They utter the cry, "Angels and 
 ministers of grace defend us 1 " all but inaudibly. The 
 intention is to denote by the whisper a state of awe, 
 and it is presumed everybody will know what words 
 are being uttered under the breath; but this should not 
 be taken for granted. Stage whispers should be heard. 
 If the ear misses a familiar line it is sensible of an 
 unpleasant lacuna, and of course there are thousands 
 of spectators, and not barren ones either, who do not 
 know what words to expect. A play to be kept true 
 to " the purpose of playing," should be performed on 
 each night as audibly and articulately as if the 
 language had never been heard and would never be 
 printed. The extreme and plaintive beseechingness of 
 Irving's address to the ghost — which is the distinctive 
 novelty of his reading — ^has been objected to, but is well 
 justified by the situation, and poignantly illustrative 
 of his conception. Hamlet knows little of the sense 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 29 
 
 of fear, and is not overawed by the supernatural.* 
 Irving's earnest and filial pleading tells us significantly 
 that to him the apparition is the reappearance of the 
 form he has most loved in life, and that, while not 
 unaflfected by natural awe, his being is all but monppo • 
 lised by the yearning desire to know and, if possible, 
 assuage the grief by which his father's last sleep has 
 been disturbed. 
 
 The manner in which, when father and son are 
 alone, Irving receives the spirit's communication, has 
 in it too much of surprise, especially at the word 
 " Murder," but after this the scene is a succession of 
 brilliant hits. The speech, "Hold I hold, my heart," 
 usually mechanical and, as it proceeds, not too in- 
 telligible, is lit up wonderfully by the first display of 
 that tendency of Hamlet to indulged frenzy and 
 exaltation which Irving has been, as we have already 
 asserted, the first to represent with fidelity to nature. 
 'In the speech there occur some words which, to 
 previous Hamlets, have proved such a crux as to 
 tempt one to charge Shakspeare with a childish 
 mistake in giving them to a grown man to utter. 
 After apostrophising his uncle thus : " villain, 
 villain, smiling, damned villain," he exclaims — 
 
 " My tables — meet it is I set it down, 
 That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." 
 
 Who has not felt the absurdity of the action as 
 
 * It has been complained that Irving does not look so 
 frightened as a man ■would who saw a ghost; bnt this is in 
 reality a fine and true tonch of character. To Hamlet this is 
 not a ghost, but the ghost. 
 
30 IRVING AS Camlet. 
 
 they have seen Hamlet after Hamlet, with grand 
 deliberation and careful pose, inscribe this common- 
 place in a memorandum book ? Does Irving discard 
 the tablets ? By no means. But he makes the use 
 of them life-like and probable. His snatching them 
 from his pocket, and writing on 1^em, is the climax of 
 an outburst hardly distinguishable from hysteria. 
 Hamlet is evidently one of those who, though capable 
 of any amount of acting and reticence in company, 
 finds in solitude a license and a cue for excitement, and 
 who, when alone and under the influence of strong 
 feelings, will abandon themselves to their fancies. 
 Such men — ^though sane enough in society — will pace 
 rooms like wUd animals, wiU gaze into looking-glasses 
 until they are frightened at the expression of their 
 own eyes, will talk aloud, will, write and tear iato 
 fragments many pages, will do almost anything to 
 find vent for emotions which their imagination is 
 powerful enough to kindle, but not fertile or methodical 
 enough to satisfy. AU this we are reminded of by 
 Irving's startling hysterical burst at this passage — 
 so awkward hitherto, and destiaed to be awkward yet 
 with actors of temperaments less highly strung. Thus, 
 we can imagine, has Hamlet ere now ranted and 
 scribbled, as Disraeli's Contarini Fleming rants and 
 scribbles his raptures to some Egeria of his boyish 
 fancy. Thus has he uttered aloud with ecstatic in- 
 tonations, and written a thousand times when by 
 himself, the name of his most beautified Ophelia. And 
 thus of late has he often tried, o'er and o'er in his 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 31 
 
 imagination, the occulted giiilt, whether great or small, 
 unnatural murder, or mere heartless bad taste, of his 
 mother and her second spousp. Minds of this turn 
 ordinarily, expect nothing unusual. They revel thus 
 in giving voice and form to their fancies, precisely 
 because they find the emotional experiences and oppor- 
 tunities of fact so few and transient. But when 
 Hamlet has, as it were, been made free of the spirit 
 world — when he has obtained from his dead father's 
 own ghostly accents, horrible, most horrible corrobora- 
 tion of his own frenzied reveries — what wonder that 
 a wild fit of exaltation should ensue, and that, whUe it- 
 lasts, and before seK-control returns with the arrival 
 of Horatio and Marcellus, he should fall into extrava- 
 gances of which, in sober moments, any reasonable 
 being might be ashamed ? 
 
 And note how, even when the restraint of his com- 
 panions' presence is on him, the remaining influence 
 of his recent hysterical frenzy affects the course of 
 his action. As an instance of thoughtful, subtle art, 
 it is worth noticing how gradually the high tide of 
 this excitement ebbs. It does not at once retreat 
 and leave the beach of fact and daily life aU dry' 
 and practicable. Now and then a strong wave of 
 the subsiding half-lunacy astonishes the prince's^^ 
 startled attendants. But the flood retires, and retires, 
 until the point is reached when, melting into sheer 
 craving for human fellowship, Hamlet takes his two 
 companions arm in arm,* and, with pensively bowed" 
 
 * This action was we believe first iatroduced by Macready. • 
 
32 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 head and softened accents, leads them away uttering 
 the simple last words, " Let's go together." 
 
 What is more important is, that the condition which 
 Hamlet is in, when the ghost has gone, up to the 
 moment of the entrance of his fellow-student and the 
 soldier in pursuit of him, lends itself to, and probably 
 suggests, the purpose which he swiftly forms of veil- 
 ing the enterprise on which he has now to enter 
 beneath a show of eccentricity and mental disturb- 
 ance. He has actually been till this very instant 
 in the border-land between sanity and madness, 
 a border-land from which those who frequent it 
 seldom pass into insanity, but in which they yield 
 to impulses such as might easily suggest to Hamlet 
 the facile expedient of putting on an antic disposition. 
 The design is conceived with amazing rapidity and 
 with so little effort, that Shakspeare does not even 
 hint it, either in soliloquy or dialogue, until Hamlet 
 has been for some minutes trying his hand at exe- 
 cuting it ; but once formed it finds ready opportunities 
 in his mood and the chopping sea of his tossing and 
 tumultuous thoughts. The unwholesome sportiveness 
 of Irving, as he tries untimely jests upon his inquisi- 
 tive friends, is even more uncanny than the other 
 form his hysteria has taken in solitude. In the 
 impossibility of discriminating how much of his 
 jocosity is mere spasmodic revulsion, and how much 
 is artful experiment, we see much deeper than here- 
 tofore into the nature of Hamlet's lunacy. When he 
 said he was but mad north-north-west, he was not 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 33 
 
 merely laughing in his sleeve at those whom he was 
 
 perplexing. He knew how near he often was in. 
 
 moments of high excitement to the confines of sanity, 
 
 and how in this tendency he found facilities for 
 
 making other people think him just as mad as he 
 
 pleased. As for Horatio and MarceUus, the first to 
 
 be played upon, they may well think the young prince 
 
 distraught. They have followed the ghost and him 
 
 into the wild and forlorn seclusion, hemmed in by 
 
 flood and clifi", in which the mysterious impartment 
 
 has been made. Their own excitement and anxiety 
 
 is intense. They find Hamlet suddenly possessed 
 
 with all the symptoms of wUd derangement. The 
 
 cunning of his subsequent conversation can hardly 
 
 reassure them. As with an unprecedentedly natural 
 
 action * he warns them not to seem hereafter to know 
 
 his secret, they are still baffled by his restraint 
 
 of speech, and when he leads them kindly away, 
 
 they must quit the scene with feelings strangely 
 
 compounded of curiosity, awe, and solicitude. One 
 
 takes pleasure in recalling that Marcellus appears to 
 
 have sacredly kept his oath, whUe Horatio became a 
 
 close sharer of Hamlet's secrets, and soon learnt to 
 
 knbw how much, and at the same time how little, 
 
 reality there was in his friend's apparent unsoundness 
 
 of mind. It is the new life thrown into this key- 
 
 * At the words, " WitL arms encum'bered thus," it is usual for 
 Hamlets to fold their arms and look mysterious. Irving takes 
 the arpi of one of his companions, as he supposes they may take 
 each others' hereafter, and assumes a confidential air, as if the 
 two were comparing their past recollections. 
 
 D 
 
34 IRVING AS HAMLET, 
 
 scene of the tragedy by Irving's grasp of Hamlet's 
 nervous and susceptible idiosyncrasy that thus in- 
 terests us in the minor characters of the story, and 
 clears up for us, with a bright prevision, much in 
 its later stages that has long puzzled critics and 
 psychologists. 
 
 At the beginning of the Second Act the Lyceum 
 version retains, almost in its integrity, a conversation 
 between Hamlet and Eosencrantz and GuUdenstem, 
 which is usually more cut down. As yet it is not 
 familiar enough to be appreciated by the many, who 
 enjoy some of Shakspeare's more crabbed passages 
 from use and wont ; but it is effective as an ezanlple 
 of Hanalet's antic disposition on its intellectual side ; 
 and Irving's deliveiy of it, as of aU the dialogue, is 
 perfect in spirit, in accentuation, and in play of social 
 tone. Amongst many other nice points there is a 
 fine subacid expression thrown into the words, " if 
 philosophy could find it out," as if Hamlet were 
 laughing half at himself and half at his hearers for 
 discussing, as a subject of grave criticism, the gross 
 flunkeyism of the court towards his uncle, the newly 
 crowiJfed supplanter. On the other hand, Irving seemed 
 to overcharge the meaning of the simple phrase, 
 " who shall 'scape whipping ? " in the admonition to 
 Polonius to treat every man better than he deserves. 
 No covert signification is likely to have been here 
 intended. These, however, are small points. A very 
 fine and thoughtful rendering of the long soliloquy, 
 " Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I," is none 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET, 35 
 
 the less fine for being somewhat peevish in tone; and 
 it concludes with a flash of ingenuity which is already 
 widely famous. During the actor's recitation, Hamlet 
 has been observed to be revolving something in his 
 mind. Then he has asked the actor to study and 
 insert in the "murder of Gonzago," a speech which 
 he will prepare. And now, in the "rogue and peasant 
 slave " soliloquy, he has descanted on the plan by which 
 he means to tent his uncle to the quick, and to obtain 
 grounds of action more relative than the ghost's 
 revelation. A silly practice has prevailed amongst 
 Hamlets of uttering the concluding words — 
 
 " The play's the thing 
 Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." 
 
 as if the idea had just struck them. Irving makes 
 them partly the culmination of a line of thought, and 
 partly the natural accompaniment of a most striking 
 action. With an exuberance exactly corresponding in 
 another groove of feeling with the quasi-hysterical 
 use of his tablets in the first act, he rushes to a pillar 
 and, placing his note-book against it begins, as the act- 
 drop descends, to scribble hints for the speech he means 
 to write. This bold innovation is purely inventive. 
 Irving himself would not pretend that it is suggested 
 by or necessary to the text. That it has been received 
 with unanimous approbation proves how weU it is 
 done. That upon mature examination it must still be 
 applauded as a safe and brilliant illustration of cha- 
 racter, where the actor has the art and the temperament 
 
36 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 required to do it eflfectively, proves how true was the 
 insight which guided the new Hamlet in the great 
 scene after the ghost's revelation to the finiitful and 
 never-misleading idea of an idiosyncrasy which in 
 solitude is singularly exuberant and ecstatic. "Now 
 I am alone " — exclaims Hamlet in the Second Act ; 
 and the freedom, the simplicity, the abandonment, 
 the expansiveness, the almost unhinged and yet con- 
 sistently ordered excitement of his solitude — these are 
 the phenomena, freshly seen and truly scanned, upon 
 which Irving has founded the interpretation he has 
 developed. 
 
 Afterwards, when Hamlet, by the contrivance of 
 'Polonius, meets Ophelia, we learn, in the scene in 
 which Irving rises highest perhaps in tragic grandeur, 
 that there are circumstances which may bring out, 
 even when, he is not alone, the strange ecstasy in 
 which it is Hamlet's nature, as this fine actor reads 
 it, to expatiate. When he begins to talk to Ophelia 
 he is on his guard. Other business than lovermaking 
 is in his thoughts. An instinct warns him to shun 
 the distractions and wooings of the passion. Yet 
 the fair Ophelia is before him, and the love of forty 
 thousand brothers is in his heart. He has no shield, 
 no disguise, but his "antic disposition "; and he puts 
 it on. The rule with modern Hamlets is to pretend 
 to be mad later, when they have perceived behind the 
 arras the King and Polonius, lawful but despicable 
 espials. This is not Irving's idea. It is in the cool- 
 ness of the opening conversation that he affects the 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET, 37 
 
 forgetfulness, the eccentricity, the insensibility of 
 derangement. His love peeps forth sadly, in a 
 melancholy line or accent, here and there, but the 
 general tone of his talk to the poor jUted Ophelia 
 is mere baffling unaccountableness. The excitement, 
 however, as it mounts, is evidently too much for him. 
 The two strongest feelings he has ever had are at 
 odds which shall be master. He is as self-watching 
 by habit as he is impulsive in the passionate processes 
 of his affections. He is accustomed, and knows he 
 is accustomed, to yield himself up to overwhelming 
 feelings. He now finds himself between two. He 
 remembers well the irresistible tumult into which the 
 sight of Ophelia used to throw him. He is puzzled 
 by a sort of paralysis of the affection which he weU 
 knows still holds lordship in his bosom.* He loves 
 Ophelia ; and with the old love ; but not with the 
 old tempestuousness. A stronger power has curbed 
 and bitted his hitherto untameable passion. A voca- 
 tion has been thrust upon him, which fully tasks 
 his powers, and will probably expel for ever from 
 his heart the capacity for domestic pleasure. As he 
 hastUy pierces here and there, with strong yet futile 
 glances, the thick-gathering, darkness of his situation, 
 
 * The effect of this obvious element of Hamlet's excitement 
 would be even greater in the Lyceum representation but for 
 the unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, suppression of the 
 pathetic recital by Ophelia, in the First Scene of the Second Act 
 of Hamlet's visit to her, sometimes interpreted as a part of his 
 " shamming," but in fact denoting a crisis in the internal conflict 
 between his old love and his new duty. 
 
38 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 the time, though only a few momenta, seems to those 
 who watch Irving with understanding eyes, to cover 
 an indefinite period of anxious and exciting thought. 
 What can young Hamlet do, with the " prettiness " 
 of his life thus turned into an inferno^ and with 
 neither time to think, nor chance of thinking to any 
 purpose? There is nothing for it but wild and 
 whirling words, and these he utters amidst many 
 strange, fitful glarings, and many a suffering pressure 
 of the hand to his throbbing head. What is beauty ? 
 A. temptress. What is Ophelia's honesty? A mere 
 fleeting virtue, that can neither live nor inoculate her 
 natural depravity. He did love her once — ^this in a 
 momentary interval of melancholy sincerity — but she 
 should not have believed him. Why should she be 
 a breeder of sinners ? For himself, though indifferent 
 honest, he could accuse himself of such things, that 
 it were better his mother had not borne him , What 
 should such fellows as he— arrant knaves all — do 
 crawling between earth and heaven ? Then, suddenly 
 he sees Polonius and the King, and the climax comes. 
 But not as hitherto usual, in the shape of pre- 
 tended ma,dness. Eather does his lunacy become all 
 but real and pronounced. To all his other griefs, 
 as if they were not enough, is added environment by 
 spies. Nothing could so agonisingly cut to the in- 
 most sense of one already almost distracted by agony. 
 For a moment he is stern iu self-defence. . Her father 
 is at home. Let the doors be shut upon Viim that 
 he may play the fool only there. But these are the 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET, 39 
 
 last "words he can say with any degree of sanity. 
 His first sudden "farewell," is a frantic ebullition 
 of all-encompassing, aU-racking pain. What was till 
 now histrionic, passes, as the histrionic phase of highly 
 strung natures easily does, into real frenzy. His 
 words come faster and wilder. His eyes flash with 
 a more sinister lightning as he gives Ophelia the 
 plague of inevitable calumny for her dowry. Again 
 " farewell ; " and now he rushes forth, but only to 
 return laden, as it were, with a new armful of hastily 
 gathered missiles of contumely. He is getting now 
 to the very leavings of his mind. He has nothing to 
 hurl at his love but the common- places of men against 
 women. They paint, they jig, they amble, they lisp, 
 and make their wantonness their ignorance. There 
 shall be no more of it^and one almost feels that so 
 furious and fiery a reformer may prevent it by fling- 
 ing sheer terror about him, like brands from a 
 conflagration. There shall be no more marriages^ It 
 hath made him mad, he says ; and it is almost true. 
 He flies — as if his head and feet were winged Uke 
 Mercury's — his now for ever discarded love. A flash 
 of frenzy, and he has quitted the scene. He leaves 
 behind him the fair maiden who has ere now sucked 
 the honey of his music vows, bemoaning her destiny, 
 to have seen what she has seen, see what she sees. 
 The audience, which this episode leaves petrified with 
 a strange and seldom experienced feeling of exhaustion 
 from pent excitement, may well show after a moment's 
 pause, by rare demonstrations of enthusiasm, its vivid 
 
40 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 compreliension of a feat of psychological acting which 
 has hardly been paralleled in living memory. Forty 
 lines or so of print contain the whole of the text, but 
 in the acting there is a whole volume of power. 
 
 Now observe once more how truly and purely Irving's 
 power has been drawn from those springs of character 
 which his original insight divined and discovered at 
 the outset of the play. Bear in mind the youth, the 
 eloquence, and the impressibleness of Hamlet ; his 
 natural tendency to excited self-communing, easily 
 passing into the affectation of madness, and sometimes 
 barely distinguishable from it ; and the degree to 
 which he must naturally be affected by the cruel and 
 perplexing accumulation of griefs and annoyances in 
 the interview with Ophelia. It is from deep con- 
 templation of all this that Irving has drawn the 
 grandeur of the scene. How different it is from all 
 that we have been accustomed to I Shall we ever 
 again bear with the wigged, elderly gentleman, who 
 skips alertly on to the stage, and exclaims with weU- 
 primed ferocity, " I have heard of your paintings too ! " 
 Of course he has. Any time these forty years. Too 
 often to talk about them now, even in frenzy. Expe- 
 rience is in his stride, in his rhythm, in his methodical 
 wavings of his hands. He would be hlasi, but that 
 he must play his part with the due and business-like 
 amount of energy which is required by precedent. 
 Irving's prince is young — essentially young — not 
 merely in the matter of his own actual years, but in 
 spirit. To this Hamlet belongs perpetual youth. He 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 41 
 
 is of the temperament that will see a play at fifty as 
 eagerly, and hear a speech as readily, as at twenty^ 
 Above all, his love of woman, his interest in her, his 
 chivalry about her, his knowledge (like WUl Honey- 
 comb's) that we can only know she is not to be known, 
 is of the kind which in some men never burns out, 
 nor is snuffed out, nor flickers into noisome knowing- 
 ness. It is this mood, in the form it takes on the 
 threshold of manhood, that supplies Hamlet with the 
 slights he hurls upon Ophelia ; and this mood — the 
 mood of perennial simplicity, brightness, excitableness, 
 and juvenility* — Irving's genius has unerringly singled 
 out as that which Shakspeare meant to exhibit, acted 
 upon by the exceptional circumstances of the weird 
 tragedy of Elsinore. 
 
 * The critic of the Spectator, with a piquant mixture of 
 perception and perversity, has complained that Irving recites 
 the " To be, or not to be " soliloquy, as if it were one of Bulwer's 
 bits of pseudo-philosophic rhetoric, meant to attract by its 
 eloquent mannerism. We are heretical enough to think that 
 Shakspeare meant it to be Bulwerian and knew it was 
 Bulwerian, and that its charm, though certainly not in its 
 mannerism, does lie in its perfect form rather than in its 
 hackneyed substance. In fact, Shakspeare never forgot what 
 few critics seem able to realise, that Hamlet was not an ex- 
 perienced moral philosopher, but a very eloquent and precocious 
 young man, whom it is most interesting to follow through 
 the perplexities and agonies of an unexampled moral struggle. 
 Such a young man, when in repose, would be sure to indulge in 
 Bulwerian reveries, and those reveries had the vast advantage of 
 being composed by Shakspeare. When under strong excitement, 
 he ran into tragic wUdnesses too grand for any Bulwer to have 
 conceived ; but he remains throughout as juvenile and freshly 
 susceptible as the most Bulwerian of Lord Lytton's heroes. 
 
42 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 The scene with Ophelia lay ia the route of our 
 disquisition on Irving's conception of Hamlet's tem- 
 perament, and we therefore gave it precedence, but 
 we must not forget that it is immediately preceded by 
 the most celebrated and most rhetorical of Hamlet's 
 soliloquies. 
 
 In analysing a performance, whose distinctive merit 
 lies in an original and true conception, it is on the 
 scenes most salient in the exhibition of character that 
 space and observation must be principally spent. In 
 other scenes we can only demand consistency with the 
 strong conception distinctly marked (to use a musical 
 expression) in bars which contain the signature of the 
 key, and that high level of histrionic efficiency, with- 
 out which it would be an impertinence for even the 
 most original thinker to obtrude his ideas of a great 
 character upon the public. The first of these merits 
 — which if not the more important is the more essen- 
 tially characteristic of the actor — must be allowed to 
 Irving by everybody who can distinguish one notion 
 of Hamlet from another. The merit of adequacy in 
 histrionic detail may, perhaps, be by some less readily 
 conceded ; but to follow Hamlet from speech to speech, 
 vindicating his representative line by line, is im- 
 possible. We shall only, therefore, repeat that manner- 
 isms ought not to be too severely proscribed, since 
 they have had to be tolerated in nearly all great 
 actors, and suggest that, if any of the fine speeches 
 of Hamlet are less effective than they have been in 
 more artificial impersonations, the sacrifice of some 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 43 
 
 elocationarj beauties is also part of the price that has 
 to be paid for fresh and sensitive dramatic fidelity. 
 Most frankly do we admit that " To be, or not to be," 
 spoken in various casual attitudes, with natural up- 
 risings and down-sittings, just as Hamlet would have 
 thought it, and with the idea running through the 
 recitation that such is the usual stufi" of Hamlet's re- 
 flections, is not so telling as its delivery in front of 
 the stage by a polished reciter with a deep melodious 
 voice who, though it is true he has other business to 
 do, has nothing on his mind for the time but to make 
 this exquisite speech delightfully impressive. The 
 fact is that such speeches are amongst the many con- 
 ventions of art, and perhaps they ought to be treated 
 as such. It may be as little in character to utter 
 them in ultra-natural attitudes, and with realistic 
 avoidance of point-making, as it would be to decline 
 to utter them at all, on the ground that in real life 
 people do not talk to themselves. These recitations 
 are in a play what the solos are in an opera. It 
 would be a dangerous experiment for Elvino to sing 
 " Tutto h sciolto " sitting on a stile, or shifting from 
 seat to seat in his cottage, however natural such 
 attitudes might be ; and it is not less daring for Irving 
 to deliver the Hamlet speeches as he delivers them, 
 while the musical voices of well-graced tragic soloists 
 are ready to win from him, by a few lines of balanced 
 declamation, the wreath which is fairly his by virtue 
 of a superior conception and more . inspired study. 
 To what extent an artist with a noble and original 
 
44 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 theory of a grand part should concede to poptdar taste, 
 it is difficult to say ; but the essentially rhetorical 
 character of Shakspeare's great speeches, and the 
 traditions of majesty and melody which cling to them, 
 seem to suggest that a great actor may, without undue 
 condescension from his ideal, do his utmost to con- 
 ciliate his reading of the character he plays with the 
 reading of these show-pieces ia the manner experience 
 has shown to be most effective with the million. A 
 little study with this- canon in view, instead of. the 
 desire, very fit in other passages, to be absolutely real 
 and consistent, would, we believe, enable so fine a 
 master of his art as Irving to approach nearer the 
 popular ideal, without sacrificing many shades of. the 
 character he is bent on preserving. And he may be 
 encouraged to the effort by reflecting that the great 
 show-speeches of Hamlet have passed into immortal 
 popularity, as we have already hinted in a note, not 
 through their profundity, but because of the exquisite 
 forms in which their skilfully elaborated inlagery and 
 diction have embodied the most familiar puzzles of 
 human meditation. As given on the first night by 
 Irving, these soliloquies were conceived with so little 
 attention to their essentially declamatory traditions, 
 that he did not even study to end them with the 
 usual perorative inflections, which give a distinct and 
 satisfying sense of something concluded to the ear. 
 This seems to be carrying purism of reality and 
 character farther than is warranted by the structure 
 and tone of Shakspeare's work ; and with an actor of 
 
1RVI:SG AS HAMLET. 45 
 
 less power and slower instincts, it might have injured 
 the general effect of the performance. For, be it re- 
 membered, it would never do to play "Much Ado 
 about Nothing, " in the style of Eobertson's " Ours." 
 
 In aU other respects than that of declamatory form, 
 Irving's soliloquies are full of beauties, to enumerate 
 which would be a very tedious form of homage. And, 
 indeed, having made clear our idea of the conception 
 upon which he has worked, it will now be easy to 
 indicate with brevity the most conspicuous remaining 
 instances in which in detail he has individualised his 
 performance. 
 
 One of these is the advice to the players, the plea- 
 santness, grsLCGj and point of which produce a thrill 
 of satisfaction, such as only attends the very finest 
 high comedy. Most Hamlets in this speech are 
 saved by the words ; Irving helps the words ; and for 
 once it is possible to say that there is not a passage 
 in the play in which Hamlet runs counter to his own 
 directions." Similarly graceful is Irving's conduct 
 during the quiet parts of the play-scene. The key 
 of it is in the remark made to Horatio before it 
 begins — "I must be idle." Irving is idle. Before 
 the spectators enter, his demeanour is not subtle and 
 contriving, but anxious, and his looks are haggard. 
 He has set more than his life upon the cast. But 
 when the King and Queen and courtiers enter, he 
 becomes gay and insouciant. Ophelia's fan, with 
 which he plays, is of peacocks' feathers, and as he 
 lies at her feet, patting his breast with it, at the 
 
46 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 words, " Your majesty, and we that have free 
 souls," the feathers themselves are not lighter than 
 his spirits seem. In his double-meaning replies to 
 the King there is none of that malignant significance 
 with which it is the custom for Hamlets to discount 
 the coming victory. His "no offence i'the world" 
 i3 said drily, and that is aU. His watching of the 
 King is not conspicuous. He does not crawl pre- 
 maturely towards him, or seize his robe. Even up 
 to the crisis, though his excitement rises, his spirits 
 bear him almost sportively through. But when once 
 the King and Queen start from their chairs, Hamlet 
 springs from the ground, darts with a shrill scream 
 to the seats from which they vanished like ghosts, 
 flings himself — a happy thought — ^into the chair 
 which the King has vacated, his body swaying the 
 while from side to side in irrepressible excitement, an^d 
 recites there — ^though the roar of applause into which 
 the audience is surprised renders it barely audible — ^the 
 well-known stanza, "Why, let the stricken deer go 
 limp." A still greater, because wild and bizarre, effect 
 follows as Hamlet leaves the chair, and in a sort of 
 jaunty nonsense rhythm chants the seldom-used lines, 
 
 " For thou dost know, Damon dear, 
 This realm dismantled was 
 Of Jove himself ; and now reigns here 
 A very very — peacock." 
 
 At the last word, said suddenly after a pause, he 
 looks at Ophelia's fan, which he has kept tiU now, 
 and throws it away, as if it had suggested a word 
 
IBVING AS HAMLET. 47 
 
 and was done with. There is infinite significance in the 
 apparent inconsequence of this last boyish burst, and 
 it is very suggestive of the force and truth of Irving's 
 conception, that the audience receive it with as much 
 enthusiasm as if it .were a perfectly logical and 
 intelligible climax. The doggrel has only the faintest 
 if any connection with the event, but it is e\'idently 
 introdticed by Shakspeare, as another example of 
 Hamlet's constitutional exuberance, and upon this 
 Irving has worked. So vivid a rendering of the 
 play-scene lives not iu our recollection, and we cannot 
 allow that it is rendered less effective by the extempore 
 character of the arrangements made for representing 
 the little drama. These are very natural, and such 
 as might be expected in an old pillared palace, used 
 for domestic as well as state purposes. They therefore 
 greatly strengthen the effect of the situation. In this, 
 as in other respects, the manager of the theatre has 
 exercised a wise discretion, and proved himself the 
 possessor of a chastened judgment. 
 
 In the earlier passages of it, the play-scene is made 
 deeply interesting by some touches of fruitful artistic 
 instinct on the part of Miss Isabella Bateman, who 
 plays Ophelia. Of this character, as a rule, little can 
 be said. It is all favour and prettiness — aU poetry, 
 picturesqueness, and pathos — and all that can usually 
 be recorded is, that the actress who plays it preserves 
 these qualities. Yet there are opportunities in it, as 
 Miss Bateman shows us, which, slight as they are, may 
 greatly heighten the general interest of the story. It 
 
48 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 is a good rule in acting to remember, without disturb- 
 ing the ensemble, that to each individual human 
 creature, except under the stress of strong, feelings, 
 the most important and engrossing thing in the "world 
 is himself or herself. Now, a raarked beauty of Miss 
 Bateman's Ophelia is, that though she knows Polonius's 
 fair daughter, so easily won and thrown away, must 
 be of small consideration in the story of a prince's 
 life, most tragically disturbed, she carefully preserves 
 in the critical moment of the play-scene OpheUa's 
 identity, and indicates the sensibility which must under 
 her circumstances have been acu,tely touched. It is 
 in conformity with this true reading that in the play- 
 scene, instead of exhibiting that airy and chittish in- 
 difference, which even good Ophelias" are apt to show, 
 she is obviously in low spirits, and iU disposed for 
 Hamlet's banter. When Hamlet calls her "metal more 
 attractive," her response, " You are merry, my lord," 
 has a touch of mournful pique in it, as if Ophelia 
 meant to remind him that it was easy for him to break 
 poor girls' hearts and go his way laughing, and as if 
 also she was sincerely sorry to see in his merriment, 
 following so speedily on his recent alarming display of 
 passion, new evidence of the wreck of his mind. Her 
 other few slight words have the same effect, though the 
 language does not permit it to be so marked; and the 
 result, in making the scene natural and life-like, is 
 much greater than could be expected from so slight 
 a cause. In, all the usual points of Ophelia, Miss 
 Bateman is graceful and effectually pathetic, while in 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 49 
 
 this particular she illustrates how much may be done, 
 even in the smallest incidents, by original thought con- 
 centrated upon them, in the desire to be faithful to the 
 whole truth of what has to be represented. 
 
 We pass to the scene between Hamlet and his 
 mother. The celebrated opening of this — the murder 
 of Polonius— ^is not amongst Irving's strongest episodes. 
 For some reason not easy to assign, he does not give 
 the usual force to the question, " Is it the King ? " in 
 which Charles Kean was, and Sullivan is, great. The 
 idea that Hamlet is startled into the most vehement 
 excitement by the thought that he has done upon 
 hazard the deed for which he has been trying to nerve 
 and prepare himself, does not appear to have been so 
 overpoweringly present to the new Hamlet as to his 
 predecessors. All the rest of the scene is very fine. 
 Hamlet's beseeching of his mother — ^to whom, be it 
 remembered, he has come in mercy, not in judgment — 
 is affecting beyond measure. His dispensing with the 
 Biiniatures, in contrasting ' the two brothers, raises to 
 a greater height of poetry language which has hitherto 
 been lowered by these said pictures towards prose. 
 And, above everything else poignant and impressive is 
 the earnestness with which Hamlet kneels and casts 
 his head upon his mother's lap, at the adjuration to 
 her not to escape the reproaches of her conscience by 
 attributing to him madness. Here, with a mother to 
 save from sin and destruction, there is nothing left of 
 the son's antic disposition ; but the deep, the tearful, sus- 
 
50 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 ceptibility which lies so near the base of his character, 
 remains. Understood in the full significance of the 
 relations between Hamlet and Gertrude, which Irving 
 helps us to perceive by throwing aside aU the accus- 
 tomed stilted magnificence of the " leading tragedian," 
 the spectacle is most memorable. A son kneeling 
 where he said his first prayers, to implore the mother 
 who taught him to lisp them to forsake her sin, is an 
 incident worthy of the greatest poet, and only to be 
 fitly enacted by the greatest of tragic actors. As the 
 act drop descends, Hamlet is seen dragging the body of 
 Polonius from behind the arras, and this has been 
 objected to. But the spirit of Shakspeare is not in 
 those who could find fault with it. He never glossed 
 or blinked the horrors of tragedy. He could invest 
 the motives of murder with the loftiest poetry, and 
 yet leave plainly written on his pages, that where there 
 is homicide there must be disgusting incidents, and 
 that even the most poetical beings cannot faU into 
 courses of criminal violence without consequences 
 sordidly and repulsively horrible. 
 
 Our task is now almost at an end. Hamlet having 
 brought his mission of revenge to an inefiectual crisis, 
 as so young and frank and tardy an avenger was 
 pretty sure to do, is sent abroad, and in the Fourth 
 Act at the Lyceum there is little of interest except Miss 
 Bateman's performance of Ophelia's flower-bedecked 
 lunacy. Her inconsequence when distraught is as 
 touching as her reproaehfalness when sane. In the 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 51 
 
 Fifth Act Hamlet returns. Irving's performance of 
 the churchyard scene has fitness, vigour, and genuine 
 poetry, but no novelty — ^nothing noticeable, indeed, 
 except subtle indications of the restraint which is 
 placed on Hamlet when he is not alone by a quick 
 sense of the ridiculous. But when we pass from this 
 to the last scene, the whole spirit of the play is made 
 new by his originality. Instead of producing the 
 impression of a duly arranged shambles, usually con- 
 veyed by the moodiness and solemnity of all concerned 
 in the fencing bout except Osric, the scene, as here 
 played, gives one the feeling of a real trial of skill. 
 For a wager Hamlet has for the nonce cast his nighted 
 colour off, and is ready for sport. It is the breathing- 
 time of day with him, and he has no arriere pensSe. 
 He is sorry, heartily, for having injured Laertes, and 
 makes amends like a true gentleman. He fences like 
 one also, with delightful ease and brilliancy. Between 
 the hits he talks merrily and self-complacently with his 
 backers. AU his troubles have not extinguished in him 
 his liking for ribands in the cap of his youth. Probably 
 he has begun to see that in great imdertakings chance 
 or Providence has more to say than we have. At 
 any rate he is free for the time. Trouble will come 
 soon enough. He is happier than he has seemed 
 since he threw away Ophelia's fan. He means tie 
 King to win his wager, and wOl not heed the odd hits. 
 In fact, for anything that appears in this portion 
 of the scene, the fencing match might be a mere 
 
52 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 lightsome parenthesis in the tragedy, not tending 
 in any way to its catastrophe. But the mounte- 
 bank's unction is to change all this. "No cataplasm 
 so rare, collected from all -simples that have virtue 
 under the moon," can save an hour longer the long- 
 forfeited life of Claudius. On a sudden the fencers 
 are incensed. They change foils in a brilliantly con- 
 trived pass. They mutually inflict fatal -woirnds. 
 Then the truth gushes forth from the lips as the life- 
 blood from the side of Laertes. Hamlet's misgiving, 
 "such as might trouble a woman," has come true. 
 There is a Providence in the bating of a foil as in 
 the fall of a sparrow. In Hamlet there is not half an 
 hour's life. But a moment will suffice. The envenomed 
 point might be dispensed with, so savage is the prince's 
 onslaught on his adulterous uncle. Hamlet seizes the 
 King by the collar of his royal robe as he might an 
 intrusive scullion — runs him through as he holds him 
 — ^flings him down backwards to the earth like carrion. 
 The vengeance has come at last, from his hands and 
 by his win, but not by his contrivance. There is no 
 triumph in his victory. He has to die, and he yearns 
 but to clear himself to those who look pale and trem- 
 bling at this chance. He compels Horatio to live and 
 do him justice. Then peacefully he expires, reaching 
 his right hand upward to the heaven he hopes for, 
 and then falling back in silence upon the earth — that 
 " sterile promontory " where the best year of his life 
 has been made iinutterably unhappy. 
 
IRVING AS HAMLET. 53 
 
 So dies Hamlet — ^but lives immortal ; henceforth 
 more than ever a pathetic ideal of refined humanity, 
 torn and wrecked upon criiel and coarse troubles ; of 
 young philosophy ; of peering irresolution ; of awed yet 
 venturesome imagination ; of wayward tricksiness ; of 
 religion faratly clouded with doubt, yet clear in 
 tenderness of conscience and purity of sweet counsel ; 
 of love, domestic and sexual, embittered and shattered; 
 of a heart riven by the sorrow most trying to it ; of 
 powers coping with problems horrible either to be 
 mastered by or to master ; of thoughts teeming with 
 imagery and conjecture, on which the world never 
 tires of meditating; of a fate, fitfuUy shunned, reck- 
 lessly challenged, and at last encountered by mere 
 chance medley ; of many other things, also, which even 
 Shakspeare can barely express, and about which lesser 
 men can only wrangle. 
 
 To present this matchless figure worthily and vividly 
 to the men of his time has been the highest ambition 
 of every great actor, and that ambition Henry Irving 
 has abundantly attained. To prove it, we have dwelt 
 not on his general philosophical sublimity or tragic 
 grandeur, in which he could but rank with noble 
 predecessors, but on the features of Hamlet's being he 
 has especially revealed and illuminated. In this cha- 
 racter a thousand undying beauties and significances 
 of art have been piously cherished from age to age. 
 To Irving belongs the merit of snatching— with a 
 hand feverish, perhaps, but sure^-graces which were 
 
54 IRVING AS HAMLET. 
 
 not, and can hardly become, in a stage Sense, tradi- 
 tional. He has made Hamlet mucli more, and some- 
 thing more ethereal, than a type of feeble doubt, of 
 tragic struggle, or even of fine philosophy. The im- 
 mortality of his Hamlet is immortal youth, immortal 
 enthusiasm, immortal tenderness, immortal nature. 
 
 Printed 6y William Moore ^ Co. 
 

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