Shakespeare's Hamlet; with introduction, notes, and examination papers (selected)

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Introduction To Hamlet

" William Shakespeare. — He was born, it is thought, April 23, 1564, the son of a comfortable burgess of Stratf ord-on-Avon. While he was still young, his father fell into poverty, and an interrupted education left the son an inferior scholar. He had 'small Latin and less Greek.' But by dint of genius and by living in a society in which all sorts of information were attainable, he became an accomplished man. The story told of his deer-stealing in Charlecote woods is without proof, but it is likely that his youth was wild and passionate. At nineteen, he married Ann Hathaway, seven years older than himself, and was probably unhappy with her. For this reason, or from poverty, or from the driving of the genius that led him to the stage, he left Stratford about 1586-1587, and went to London at the age of twenty-two, and, falling in with Marlowe, Greene, and the rest, became an actor and a play wright, and may have lived their unrestrained and riotous life for some years.

"His First Period. — It is probable that before leaving Stratford he had sketched, a part at least, of his Venus and Adonis. It is full of the country sights and sounds,

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of the ways of birds and animals, such as he saw when wandering in Charleeote woods. Its rich and overladen poetry and its warm coloring made him, when it was published, 1591-1593, at once the favorite of men like Lord Southampton, and lifted him into fame. But before that date he had done work for the stage by touching up old plays, and writing new ones. We seem to trace his ' prentice hand ' in many dramas of the time, but the first he is usually thought to have retouched is Titus Andronicus, and, some time after, the First Part of Henry VI.

" Love's Labor's Lost, the first of his original plays, in which he quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was followed by the rapid farce of the Comedy of Errors. Out of these frolics of intellect and action he passed into pure poetry in the Midsummer Night's Dream, and mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, the mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the English mechanic. Italian story then laid its charm upon him, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona preceded the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet, in which he first reached tragic power. They complete, with Love's Labor's Won, afterwards recast as A ll's Well That Ends Well, the love plays of his early period. We may, perhaps, add to them the second act of an older play, Edward III. We should certainly read along with them, as belonging to the same passionate time, his Rape of Lucre ce, a poem finally printed in 1591, one year later than the Venus and Adonis.

" The same poetic succession we have traced in the

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poets is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic feeling of England, also represented in Marlowe and Peele, now seized on him, and he turned from love to begin his great series of historical plays with Richard II., 1593-1594. Richard III. followed quickly. To introduce it and to complete the subject, he recast the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. (written by some unknown authors), and ended his first period with King John ; five plays in a little more than two years.

"His Second Period, 1596-1602. — In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare reached entire mastery over his art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic threads is brought to its highest point of color when Portia and Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy followed in his retouch of the old Taming of the Shrew, and all the wit of the world, mixed with noble history, met next in the three comedies of Falstaff, the First and Second Parts of Henry IV., and the Merry Wives of Windsor. The historical plays were then closed with Henry V., a splendid dramatic song to the glory of England.

" The Globe theatre, in which he was one of the proprietors, was built in 1599. In the comedies he wrote for it, Shakespeare turned to write of love again, not to touch its deeper passion as before, but to play with it in all its lighter phases. The flashing dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was followed by the far-off forest world of As You Like It, where 'the time fleets carelessly/ and Rosalind's character is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the first touch we have of the older Shakespeare who had ' gained his experience, and whose experience had made him sad.' And yet it was but a touch ; Twelfth Night shows no trace of it, though the play that followed, All's Well That Ends Well, again strikes a sadder note. We find this sadness fully grown in the later sonnets, which are said to have been finished about 1602. They were published in 1609.

"Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind changed with it. He had grown wealthy during this period, and famous, and was loved by society. He was the friend of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and of William Herbert, Lord Pembroke. The queen patronized him ; all the best literary society was his own. He had rescued his father from poverty, bought the best house in Stratford and much land, and was a man of wealth and comfort. Suddenly all his life seems to have grown dark. His best friends fell into ruin, Essex perished on the scaffold, Southampton went to the Tower, Pembroke was banished from the Court ; he may himself, as some have thought, have been concerned in the rising of Essex. Added to this, we may conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry of the sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been betrayed in his love by a dear friend. Disgust of his profession as an actor, and public and private ill weighed heavily on him, and in darkness of spirit, though still clinging to the business of the theatre, he passed from comedy to write of the sterner side of the world, to tell the tragedy of mankind.

"His Third Period, 1602-1608, begins with the last days of Queen Elizabeth. It contains all the great tragedies, and opens with the fate of Hamlet, who felt, like the poet himself, that l the time was out of joint.' Hamlet, the dreamer, may well represent Shakespeare, as he stood aside from the crash that overwhelmed his friends, and thought on the changing world. The tragi-comedy of Measure for Pleasure was next w r ritten, and is tragic in thought throughout. Julius Ccesar, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus and Cressida (finished from an incomplete work of his youth), Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon (only in part his own) were all written in these five years. The darker sins of men, the un pitying fate which slowly gathers round and falls on men, the avenging wrath^of conscience, the cruelty and punishment of weakness, the treachery, lust, jealousy, ingratitude, madness of men, the follies of the great, and the fickleness of the mob, are all, with a thousand other varying moods and passions, painted, and felt as his own while he painted them, during this stern time.

"His Fourth Period, 1608-1613. — As Shakespeare wrote of these things, he passed out of them, and his last days are full of the gentle and loving calm of one who has known sin and sorrow and fate, but has risen above them into peaceful victory. Like his great contemporary, Bacon, he left the world and his own evil time behind him, and w T ith the same quiet dignity sought the innocence and stillness of country life. The country breathes through all the dramas of this time. The flowers Perdita gathers in Winter's Tale, and the frolic of the sheep-shearing he may have seen in the Stratford meadows ; the song of Fidele in Cymbeline is written byone who already feared no more the frown of the great, nor slander nor censure rash, and was looking forward to the time when men should say of him — ■

" ' Quiet consummation have ; And renowned be thy grave ! '

"Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived in the house he had bought at Stratf ord-on-Avon. He was reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays he writes speak of domestic peace and forgiveness. The story of Marina, which he left unfinished, and which two later writers expanded into the play of Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas. The Two Noble Kinsmen of Fletcher, a great part of which is now, on doubtful grounds, I think, attributed to Shakespeare, and in which the poet sought the inspiration of Chaucer, would belong to this period. Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and the Tempest bring his history up to 1612, and in the next year he closed his poetic life by writing, with Fletcher, Henry VIII. For three years he kept silence, and then, on the 23d of April, 1616, the day he reached the age of fifty-two, as is supposed, he died.

" His Work. — We can only guess with regard to Shakespeare's life ; we can only guess with regard to his character. It has been tried to find out what he was from his sonnets and from his plays, but every attempt seems to .

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be a failure. We cannot lay our hand on anything and say for certain that it was spoken by Shakespeare out of his own character. The most personal thing in all his writings is one that has scarcely been noticed. It is the Epilogue to the Tempest; and if it be, as is most probable, the last thing he ever wrote, then its cry for forgiveness, its tale of inward sorrow, only to be relieved by prayer, give us some dim insight into how the silence of those three years was passed ; while its declaration of his aim in writing, i which was to please/ — the true definition of an artist's aim, — should make us very cautious in our efforts to define his character from his works. Shakespeare made men and women whose dramatic action on each other, and towards a catastrophe, was intended to please the public, not to reveal himself.

" No commentary on his writings, no guesses about his life or character, are worth much which do not rest on this canon as their foundation: What he did, thought, learned, and felt, he did, thought, learned, and felt as an artist. And he was never less the artist, through all the changes of the time. Fully influenced, as we see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and more philosophic cast of thought of the later time of Elizabeth ; passing on into the reign of James I., when pedantry took the place of gayety, and sensual the place of imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves to the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, the sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Elizabethan poetry. The

Winter's Tale is as lovely a love story as Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest is more instinct with imagination than the Midsummer Night's Dream, and as great in fancy, and yet there are fully twenty years between them. The only change is in the increase of power, and in a closer and graver grasp of human nature. Around him the whole tone and manner of the drama altered for the worse as his life went on, but his work grew to the close in strength and beauty." — Stopford Brooke.

HISTORY OF THE PLAY

"1. The first known edition of Hamlet appeared in 1603. It bore the following title-page : —

The

Tragicall Historie of Hamlet

Prince of Denmarke

By William Shake- speare.

As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse ser-

uants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two V-

niuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere

At London printed for N. L. and John Trundell. 1603.

" The second quarto appeared in the following year, with a title-page much altered : —

THE

Tragicall Historie of

Hamlet,

Prince of Denmarke

By William Shakespeare.

Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much

againe as it was, according to the true and perfect

Coppie.

At London,

Printed by I. R. for N. L., and are to be sold at his

shoppe vnder St. Dunston's Church in

Fleetstreet 1604.

" It was upon this second quarto that all future editions of the play were based. It is conjectured that Shakespeare worked upon the basis of an old play, an edition of which is known to have appeared in 1602 ; that the quarto of 1603 represents his remodelling of this old play; and that the edition of 1601 was a complete and final recast.

"2. The story seems to have been drawn from the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, a native of Elsinore, who wrote about the end of the twelfth century ; though the earliest existing edition of his history has the date of 1514. A French writer, Francis de Belief orest, embodied the story of Amleth, Hamlet, or Hamblet in his Histoires Tragiques ; and an unknown English writer translated this story and published it separately under the title of The Hystorie of Hamblet — a black-letter. quarto copy of which, bearing the date of 1608, exists in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

"3. The play of Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's plays ; and it is one of the greatest. It is also the most varied in incident ; and the argument of the play would make a very long story. Though full of incident, the main interest of the play is centered in thought and character — in the moods of mind through which Hamlet passes, until he meets death in the fulfillment of the purpose towards which he has not marched or hastened, but simply drifted. There has also been more written about Hamlet than about any other play in the world. The books, pamphlets, and papers that have appeared on this play would constitute a respectable library. The play belongs to what has been called Shakespeare's period of ' Middle Tragedy'; and its companion in this category is Julius Ccesar. Both are tragedies of thought ; and both were written when Shakespeare was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight.

"4. The young reader may with advantage study fully and carefully the character of Hamlet, as it stands out from and over against the circumstances which surround him, and as it may be interpreted — - by the aid of contrast — by the characters of the other personages of the play. He is a student at the University of Wittenberg ; he hears of the sudden and mysterious death of his father; he hastens home to find his mother married to his uncle — an event which shocks his soul and begins to poison his feelings towards his mother ; he hears of the appearance of his father's ghost ; he has an interview with it and a stern task laid upon him ; l^e whole of the habits of his previous life are broken up ; he is tortured by grief, doubt, love, and difficulty ; and only in dying does he attain to clearness of mind and strength of soul. After having studied the relation of Hamlet to^the circumstances and characters that surround him, the reader may take the other personages of the play and study them in pairs. Thus Horatio may be compared with Laertes ; and both again with Hamlet. Horatio

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says little, and is little affected by external events. Laertes is a worldly man — the son of his father ; and with no inner life at all. He is as thoughtless as Hamlet is thoughtful — as rash and eager for action as Hamlet is filled to excess with considerations, reflections, and balancings of judgment. Claudius, again, stands in direct contrast with the late King (see III. iv. 56-66). Polonius, full of wise maxims which he has lost the power of applying to present exigencies, may be contrasted with Horatio, who says nothing, but is always ready to help, whatever may happen. Osric, in the end of the play, is an admirable set-off to the quiet soldierliness of Marcellus and Bernardo, in the beginning. Ophelia, with her deep, unspeaking nature — one of those persons 'who live only in their own hearts, and upon their own hearts ' — forms a noble contrast to the shallow external nature of the Queen, wmose conscience and heart do not begin to speak until they are appealed to in the directest and strongest way by Hamlet himself and by tragical events." — Meiklejohn.

CRITICAL OPINIONS

" The universality of Shakespeare's genius is in some sort reflected in Hamlet. He has a mind wise and witty, abstract and practical; the utmost reach of philosophical contemplation is mingled with the most penetrating sagacity in the affairs pf life ; playful jest, biting satire, sparkling repartee, with the darkest and \ deepest thoughts that can agitate man. He exercises all his various faculties with surprising readiness. He passes without an effort ' from grave to gay, from lively to severe,' — from his everyday character to personated lunacy. He divines, with the rapidity of lightning, the nature and motives of those who are brought into contact with him ; fits in a moment his bearing and retorts to their individual peculiarities ; is equally at home whether he is mocking Polonius with hidden raillery, or dissipating Ophelia's dream of love, or crushing the sponges with sarcasm and invective, or talking euphuism with Osric, and satirizing while he talks it ; whether he is uttering wise maxims, or welcoming the players with facetious graciousness, — probing the inmost souls of others, or sounding the mysteries of his own. His philosophy stands out conspicuous among the brilliant faculties which contend for the mastery. It is the quality which gives w r eight and dignity to the rest. It intermingles with all his actions. He traces the most trifling incidents up to their general laws. His natural disposition is to lose himself in contemplation. He goes thinking out of the world. The commonest ideas that pass through his mind are invested with a wonderful freshness and originality. His meditations in the churchyard are on the trite notion that all ambition leads but to the grave. But wmat condensation, w r hat variety, what picturesqueness, what intense, unmitigated gloom I

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It is the finest sermon that was ever preached against the vanities of life.

" So far, we imagine, all are agreed. But the motives which induce Hamlet to defer his revenge are still, and perhaps will ever remain, debatable ground. The favorite doctrine of late is that the thinking part of Hamlet predominated over the active, — that he was as weak and vacillating in performance as he was great in speculation. If this theory were borne out by his general conduct, it would no doubt amply account for his procrastination; but there is nothing to countenance, and much to refute, the idea. Shakespeare has endowed him with a vast energy of will. There could be no sterner resolve than to abandon every purpose i of existence, that he might devote himself, unfettered, to his revenge; nor was ever resolution -better observed. He breaks through his passion for Ophelia, and keeps it down, under the most trying circumstances, with such inflexible firmness, that an eloquent critic has seriously questioned whether his attachment _was real. The determination of his character appears again at the death of Polonius. An indecisive mind would have been shocked, if not terrified, at the deed. Hamlet dismisses him with a few contemptuous words, as a man would brush away a fly. He talks with even greater indifference of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he sends Ho sudden death, not shriving-time allowed.' He has on these, and, indeed, on all occasions, a short and absolute way which only belongs to resolute souls. The features developed in his very hesitation to kill the King are inconsistent with the notion that his hand refuses to perform what his head contrives.

He is always trying to persuade himself into a conviction that it is his duty, instead of seeking for evasions. — Quarterly Review, Vol. LXXIX., 1847. " When Hamlet was written, Shakspere had passed through his years of apprenticeship, and become a master-dramatist. In point of style the play stands midway between his early and his latest works. The studious superintendence of the poet over the development of his thought and imaginings, very apparent in Shakspere's early writings, now conceals itself; but the action of imagination and thought has not yet become embarrassing in its swiftness and multiplicity of direction. Rapid dialogue in verse, admirable for its combination of verisimilitude with artistic metrical effects, occurs in the scene in which Hamlet questions his friends respecting the appearance of the Ghost ; the soliloquies of Hamlet are excellent examples of the slow, dwelling verse which Shakspere appropriates to the utterance of thought in solitude ; and nowhere did Shakspere write a nobler piece of prose than the speech in which Hamlet describes to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern his melancholy. But such particulars as these do not constitute v the chief evidence which proves that the poet had now attained maturity. The mystery, the baffling, vital obscurity of the play, and in particular of the character of its chief person, make it evident that Shakspere had left far behind him that early stage of development when an artist obtrudes his intentions, or, distrusting his own ability to keep sight of one uniform design, deliberately and with effort holds that design persistently before him. When' Shakspere completed Hamlet, he must have trusted himself and trusted his audience ; he trusts himself to enter into relation with his subject, highly complex as that subject was, in a pure, emotional manner. Hamlet might so easily have been manufactured into an enigma, or a puzzle ; and then the puzzle, if sufficient pains were bestowed, could be completely taken to pieces and explained. But Shakspere created it a mystery, and therefore it is for ever suggestive ; for ever suggestive, and never wholly explicable.

" It must not be supposed, then, that any idea, any magic phrase, will solve the difficulties presented by the play, or suddenly illuminate everything in it which is obscure. The obscurity itself is a vital part of the work of art, which deals not with a problem, but with a life ; and in that life, the history of a soul which moved through shadowy border-lands between the night and day, there is much (as in many a life that is real) to elude and baffle inquiry. . . . The vital heart of the tragedy of Hamlet cannot be an idea ; neither can it be a fragment of political philosophy. Out of Shakspere's profound sympathy with an individual soul and a personal life the wonderful creation came into being. . . .

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" Hamlet is not merely or chiefly intellectual ; the emotional side of his character is quite as important as the intellectual ; his malady is as deep-seated in his sensibilities and in his heart as it is in the brain. If all his feelings translate themselves into thoughts, it is no less true that all his thoughts are impregnated with feeling. To represent Hamlet as a man of preponderating power of reflection, and to disregard his craving, sensitive heart, is to make the whole play incoherent and unintelligible. It is Hamlet's intellect, however, together with his deep and abiding sense of the moral qualities of things, which distinguishes him, upon the glance of a moment, from the hero of Shakspere's first tragedy, Romeo. . . .

" Hamlet does not assume madness to conceal any ( plan of revenge. He possesses no such plan. And as far as his active powers are concerned, the assumed madness is a misfortune. Instead of assisting him to-' achieve anything, it is one of the causes which tend to retard his action. For now, instead of forcing himself upon the world, and compelling it to accept a mandate of his will, he can enjoy the delight of a mere observer and critic ; an observer and critic both of himself and of others. He can understand and mock, whereas he ought to set himself sternly to his piece of work. He utters himself henceforth at large, because he is unintelligible. He does not aim at producing any effect with his speech, except in the instance of his appeal to Gertrude's conscience. His words are

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not deeds. They are uttered self- indulgently to please the intellectual or artistic' part of him, or to gratify his passing mood of melancholy, of irritation, or of scorn. He bewilders Polonius with mockery, which effects nothing, but which bitterly delights Hamlet by its subtlety and cleverness. He speaks with singular openness to his courtier-friends, because they, filled with thoughts of worldly advancement and ambition, read all his meanings upside down, and the heart of his mystery is absolutely inaccessible to their shallow wits. When he describes to them his melancholy, he is in truth speaking in solitude to himself. Nothing is easier than to throw them off the scent. ; A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.' The exquisite cleverness of his mimetics and his mockery is some compensation to Hamlet for his inaction ; this intellectual versatility, this agility, flatters his consciousness ; and it is only on occasions that he is compelled to observe into what a swoon or syncope his will has fallen.

" Yet it has been truly said that only one who feels Hamlet's strength should venture to speak of Hamlet's weakness. That, in spite of difficulties without and inward difficulties, he still clings to this terrible duty, — letting it go, indeed, for a time, but returning to it again, and in the end accomplishing it, — implies strength. He is not incapable of vigorous action, — if only he be allowed no chance of thinking the fact away into an idea. . . . But all his action is sudden we are by abundant evidence, that Shakspere transformed with energetic will his knowledge into fact, we may be confident that when Hamlet was written, Shakspere had gained a further stage in his culture of self-control, and that he had become not only adult as an author, but had entered upon the full maturity of his manhood."

— Dowdex, Shakspere: His Mind and Art "In Hamlet, though there is no Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare has suggested the prevailing rudeness of manners quite enough for his purpose. We see it in the single combat of Hamlet's father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgar wassail of the king, in the English monarch being expected to hang Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand merely to oblige his cousin of Denmark, in Laertes, sent to Paris to be made a gentleman of, becoming instantly capable of any the most barbarous treachery to glut his vengeance. We cannot fancy Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculating at Wittenberg, but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and Shakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through the play we get the notion of a state of society in which a savage nature has disguised itself in the externals of civilization, like a Maori deacon, who has only to strip and he becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his mouth watering for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the date of Hamlet, the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies alive in their houses, with as much of their family about them as might be to make it comfortable. Shakespeare seems purposely to have dissociated his play from history by changing nearly every name in the original legend. The motive of the play — revenge as a religious duty — belongs only to a social state in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative, but, with infallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen, not untamed Nature, as he found it in history, but the period of transition, a period in w T hich the times are always out of joint, and thus the irresolution which has its roots in Hamlet's own character is stimulated by the very incompatibility of that legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the past with the new culture and refinement of which he is the representative. . . .

" It is an inherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet's that it should be conscious of its own defect. Men of his type are forever analyzing their own emotions and motives. They cannot do anything, because they always see two ways of doing it. They cannot determine on any course of action, because they are always, as it were, standing at the cross-roads, and see too well the disadvantage of every one of them. It is not that they are incapable of resolve, but somehow the band between the motive power and the operative faculties is relaxed and loose. The engine works, but the machinery it should drive stands still. The imagination is so much in overplus, that thinking a thing be-

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comes better than doing it, and thought with its easy perfection, capable of everything because it can accomplish everything with ideal means, is vastly more attractive and satisfactory than deed, which must be wrought at best with imperfect instruments, and always fall short of the conception that went before it. 1 If to do,' says Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, — < If to do were as easy as to know what 'twere good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.' Hamlet knows only too well what 'twere good to do, but he palters with everything in a double sense : he sees the grain of good there is in evil, and the grain of evil there is in good, as they exist in the world, and, finding that he can make those feather-weighted accidents balance each other, infers that there is little to choose between the essences themselves. He is of Montaigne's mind, and says expressly that ' there is nothing good or ill, but thinking makes it so.' He dwells so exclusively in the world of ideas that the world of facts seems trifling, nothing is worth the while ; and he has been so long objectless and purposeless, so far as actual life is concerned, that, when at last an object and a name are forced upon him, he cannot deal with them, and gropes about vainly for a motive outside of himself that shall marshal his thoughts for him and guide his faculties into the path of action. He is the victim not so much of feebleness of will as of an intellectual indifference that hinders the will from working long in