Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. University of Illinois Library MAY 19 I9G5 0£c 7 ,, , . r* r* p ...... * 6/6 -JL ,wo 0t L 2 7 ,h, 3/ $ RPR 20 !: k "Vl % 153 DEC 31974 DEL -1 !3ou DEC „ I * ^ • 3 im DEC 2 61973 Ji id- MAR 151980, o V\Y-L JAN 9 1981 t \ < u J DEC 3 0 19*. DEC 29 1SS , HAy 4 2? I9f|' MAI ( 0 9 1989 APR 2 9 1365 { L161—H41 ' LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS HAMLET. 'te- VN ATTEMPT TO ASCERTAIN WHETHER THE QUEEN WERE AN ACCESSORY, BEFORE THE FACT, IN THE MURDER OF HER FIRST HUSBAND. i - ■ Laertes. His means of death, • • • • ■ • • t • > Cry to be heard, as ’twere from heaven to earth, That I must call’t in question. King. So you shall ; A.nd where tli’ offence is, let the great axe fall. I pray you, go with me. Hamlet , act iv. sc, 5. LONDON: JOHN RUSSELL SMITH, 36, SOHO SQUARE. 1856. I' aj V TUCKER AND CO. PRINTERS, PERRY’S PLACE, OXFORD STREET Erratum.— Page 3, for “ fatricide ” read “ fratricide.” HAMLET [ N the second volume of his "Notes on Shakspeare," in speaking v the P^y of " Hamlet,’’ Coleridge says " I confess that Shakspeaie has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fatricide?" He does not tell us whether by this "consciousness of the fatricide," o he meant a knowledge of the intended crime before its commission : b y Claudius, or only a subsequent discovery of the fact, on the part of the Queen. But, whichever construction be put upon his words, the answ ei to the question appears to be very far from generally ; agreed upon amongst the readers of the play. In the hope of attracting to the subject the attention of those most conversant with the writings of Shakspeare, and so, of obtain- ^ ing, if it be possible, a solution of the problem, I propose in the present paper to consider the " Hamlet" so far only as it relates to the murder of Hamlet’s father; and, having first linked together all the alleged evidences of tne Queen’s share in the crime in ques¬ tion, I shall proceed to weigh such proofs against those which appear to be in favour of her innocence. I he evidences commonly adduced to prove her participation in the murder are the following :— 1. The fact that she married Claudius within a month after the ^ death of her first husband—act i. sc. 2 :— 3 Frailty, thy name is woman! A little month; or ere those shoes were old With which she follow’d my poor father’s body Like Niobe, all tears; why she, even she, (O God ! a beast that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn’d longer)—married with my uncle. 2. Her parade of excessive grief at the funeral of her first husband:— W ith which she follow’d my poor father’s body Like Niobe, all tears. IS43287 4 3. Her anxiety to convince Hamlet that his father’s death was natural—act i. sc. 2 :— Qu. Thou know’st, ’tis common; all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Ham. Ay, madam, it is common. Qu. If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee P 4. The foreboding of Hamlet shown in the words :— It is not, nor it cannot come to, good, in speaking of his mother’s “ most wicked speed ” in contracting * the second marriage—act i. sc. 2. 5. Her anxiety to wean Hamlet from his sorrow and to retain him at Elsinore—act i. sc. 2 :— and. Do not, for ever, with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust: Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet: I pray thee, stay with us; go not to Wittenberg. Hamlet’s remark, in speaking of his mother, in his soliloquy the Ghost’s disclosure—act i. sc. 5 :— O most pernicious woman ! The Ghost’s command to Hamlet—act 1. sc. 5: But howsoever thou pursu’st this act, Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive, Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, ► To prick and sting her. 8. The two couplets in the plav-scene, act iii. sc. 2, and Hamlet’s remark interposed :— Player Qu. In second husband let me be accurst; None wed the second, but who killed the first. Hamlet {aside). Wormwood, wormwood. Player Qu. A second time I kill my husband dead, When second husband kisses me in bed. And the dialogue in the interview-scene, act iii. scene 4, ensuing upon Hamlet’s accidental slaughter of Polonius :— Qu. 0, what a rash and bloody deed is this ! _ Ham. A bloody deed; almost as bad, good mother, 0 , As kill a king, and marry with his brother, yt /r/ / Qu. As kill a king ! v -/ Ham. Ay, lady, ’twas my word. 9AThe Queen’s soliloquy, act iv. scene 5, immediately before her reluctant interview with the distracted Ophelia :— To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is. Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss: So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. 5 lOyThe poetical justice of her fate in dying by poison; the murder of which she is accused having been effected by the same means. liy'the words of Horatio at the end of the play, in act v. scene 2, when he promises to accept the trust reposed in him by the dying Hamlet, and to— Speak to the yet unknowing world, How these things came about— where he says :— So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters. Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc’d cause. And, in this upshot, purposes mistook, Fall’n on the inventors’ heads : all this can I Truly deliver. The words “ accidental judgments” referring, as the accusers of the Queen allege, to the justice of her fate. Beyond these eleven heads of accusation, I am not aware of any evidences alleged against the Queen ; and I now proceed to consider these, seriatim. The accusers of the Queen rely, in the first place, upon the fact that she is first introduced to us as having married Claudius within a month after the death of her former husband, and as trying to persuade Hamlet how “ common” his father’s death was :— Thou know’st, ’tis common; all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Ham. Ay, madam, it is common. Q,u. If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee ?— in exactly the same strain as Claudius does—and as begging Hamlet to mourn no longer for his father— and not to go to Wittenberg; —all of which Claudius urges upon him also. But, I think, the play, throughout the greater part of it, shows us that the Queen was very much under the influence of Claudius, and the “ witchcraft of his wit ”; and he was undoubtedly very anxious both that Hamlet should forget the father whom he had murdered, and should also stay at the court of Elsinore, that he might watch the form which Hamlet’s “ melancholy” might assume, in order to his own safety, and to ensure the fact that Hamlet was not, at a distance, plotting to obtain the crown, to which he had a stronger claim than Claudius, as being the next heir of the murdered King, and also as possessing, in a greater degree than Claudius, the “ great love ” of the “ general gender,” in an elective monarchy. __ This being so, Claudius might very probably, and most certainly would, beg his wife, who had much more influence with Hamlet, her own son, to use this influence to keep him at their court, and to wean him from his sorrow for his father’s death. f 6 Nor was Claudius mistaken as to the result; for Hamlet, who had made no reply to his entreaty, accedes at once to his mother’s request:— I shall in all my best obey you, madam. And this course would appear very plausible in Claudius, who throughout the play affects a very great love for, and interest in, Hamlet, whenever he speaks either to him, or of him to the Queen or his courtiers. He is careful to parade this affection on every possible occasion; and both the Queen and his courtiers appear to be misled by the display, and to believe his pretended love for Hamlet to be real and true. I think this suggestion—namely, that the Queen was acting under the influence of Claudius in trying to comfort Hamlet and to retain him at Elsinore—is a sufficient vindication of her conduct in this particular; but, if it be not thought so, might she not very naturally, upon her own account, and without any concurrence in the motives of Claudius, use the argument and pursue the course above men¬ tioned towards Hamlet? We know that she was exceedingly fond of him. Claudius tells us :— The queen, his mother. Lives almost by his looks ; she might therefore very naturally endeavour to alleviate his sorrow by the use of the trite consolation which reminds him of the “ commonness” and every-day occurrence of death, and also might hope more effectually to console him if he remained near her. She also knew that Claudius had “ popp’d in between the election and his hopes,” and she, being now the wife of Claudius, had an interest in seeing that Hamlet was not, during his stay at Wittenberg, plotting to recover this lost “ election” of himself to the crown of Denmark, to the injury of her present husband. For her own sake, also, she might naturally wish to divert Hamlet’s memory from the “ noble father ” whom she herself was so anxious to forget; and the remembrance of whose excellence would serve at once to remind Hamlet of her fickleness and declension, and to aggravate, by contrast, the deficiencies of her present husband, " whose natural gifts were poor to those of” the murdered King. The knowledge that Claudius had, most probably through unjust means, but at all events to the injury of Hamlet, procured his own election to the crown, as well as that she had sinned against her son in her infidelity to his father and her incestuous and indecently hasty marriage with his uncle, would most naturally communicate to her intercourse with Hamlet that appearance of uneasiness and deprecation which is attributed by her accusers to a consciousness on her part of participation in the murder of her former husband. The fact of her marrying Claudius within so short a time after the death of her first husband is, of course, no proof of her blood- guilt ; and can only, at the most, be taken as affording evidence of a motive on her part for desiring the death in question. 7 I come now to Hamlet’s first soliloquy, in act i. scene 2, in which occurs his description of his mother’s grief while following his father’s body to the grave :— Or ere those shoes were old, With which she followed my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears. It is urged by her accusers, that her parade, as they deem it, of excessive grief on this occasion, whilst, all the while, she had been faithless to her husband, and doubtless intended to marry Claudius directly, is a proof that such sorrow was entirely affected, and designed only to divert the spectators from all suspicion that she had been instrumental in the crime of her husband’s death, But I do not think that this display of excessive sorrow needs to have been altogether, if in any degree, false ; or that it suffices to convict her of hypocrisy, much less of murder. Her character throughout the play appears to be that of an affectionate, weak, vacillating, woman; not by any means altogether bad, nor at all firm of purpose and persistent in following the same course ; easily led into sin, and no less easily affected by the remem¬ brance of her sin. Such a woman, having really loved Hamlet the elder, and having her affections seduced by Claudius, might very reasonably be really affected, and acutely so, by the death of a kind and noble husband —“ so excellent a king ”—whom she had once truly loved, and against whom she had grievously sinned, of which sin liis death would painfully remind her; even though both before and after such passionate tears, she were faithless to her marriage vows. There is nothing unnatural or improbable in the expression of real and passionate sorrow for a sin of which there is no real repentance, or intention of repentance, to be testified by relinquish¬ ment of the sin in question. So, Macbeth, almost directly after murdering Duncan, wishes that the knocking at the door had the power to wake his victim from the sleep of death, though he just as much as ever intended to seize the golden prize for which he had committed the murder, and to wade forwards through the sea of blood, instead of attempting to retrace his steps. And how does his wife describe him ? “ Infirm of purpose ” ! Of course, in this allusion to Macbeth, I mean to infer that the Queen’s tears at the grave of her husband in the “ Hamlet ” were in reality tears of remorse at the remembrance of her sin against the husband then borne dead before her, quite as much as tears of regret at his death. But Hamlet had not, at the time he complains of her apparent hypocrisy, any knowledge of her faithlessness to his father, and consequently was not aware of all her motives for sorrow. More¬ over, the tone of Hamlet’s mind is just that which exaggerates and abhors the every-day hypocrisy of human life as evinced by the “ trappings and the suits of woe,” and the want of a corresponding internal sorrow;—but this question—the state of Hamlet’s mind— I propose to consider hereafter. 8 r In this same soliloquy, I observe that Hamlet speaks of his mother before he has seen the Ghost, or suspected the murder of the King, in terms of almost as great reprehension as he does after the Ghost’s disclosures. Thus, he speaks of the Queen, before he “~has seen the Ghost, and before he believed her guilty of adultery during the life of his father, in the following words :— That it should come to this ! But two months dead !—nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king; that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr : so loving to my mother That he might not let e’en the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth ! Must I remember P Why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on : and yet, within a month,— Let me not think on’t. Frailty, thy name is woman ! A little month ; or ere those shoes were old, With which she follow’d my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears;—why she, even she,— (O God ! a beast that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn’d longer)—married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father, Than I to Hercules : within a month; Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married.—O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets ! It is not, nor it cannot come to, good. This, spoken at a time when Hamlet had neither seen the Ghost, nor heard of its appearance, and had not, so far as we know, am suspicion that his father had been murdered, is very nearly as strong in reprehension of his mother’s conduct as the terms in which he speaks of her after he has seen the Ghost, and been informed of the \ murder. After he has seen the Ghost, it is only “ O most pernicious woman !” and this difference in speaking of her is lessened by the considerations that he then knew of the Queen’s adultery during the life of his father, and that, consequently, Claudius must have felt sure of obtaining her hand in case he succeeded in removing the only obstacle which stood in the way of their union; and, therefore, / Hamlet would feel that the Queen, whether cognizant or not of Claudius’s intention to commit the murder, had, at least, by her encouragement and indulgence of his licentious passion, been passively, though perhaps quite unintentionally, instrumental to the \murder of her husband. This reflection would be quite enough to make Hamlet, in the bitterness of his grief, burst out into the words :—“ O most pernicious woman ! ” without requiring us to believe that he had understood the Ghost to accuse his mother of a 9 share in the crime of murder. Again, in Hamlet’s interview with his mother long after, in act iii. scene 4, it is only— This was your husband : look you now, what follows. Here is your husband ; like a mildew’d ear Blasting his wholesome brother.—Have you eyes ? Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, And batten on this moor? * * * * * * * * And what judgment Would step from this to this ? ***** O shame ! where is thy blush ? ltebellious hell, If thou can’st mutine in a matron’s bones, To flaming youtli let virtue be as wax,— And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame, When the compulsive ardour gives the charge, Since frost itself as actively doth burn, And reason panders will; which is hardly at all more violent in reprehension than the terms he applies to the Queen before he knows of the murder at all. But of Claudius how different are the terms he uses after he has seen the Ghost! Before he sees the Ghost, Claudius is merely a “satyr”; afterwards, he is “damned villain,” “bloody, baw 7 dv, villain.” The words used at the close of the first soliloquy of Hamlet, in speaking of his mother’s marriage with Claudius :—“ It is not, nor it cannot come to, good,” which are used by the accusers of the Queen to prove that Hamlet, before seeing the Ghost, suspected the foul play attending his father’s death, and feared that she was con¬ cerned in it, seem to me unimportant. Of course, the Queen’s conduct was very far from “ good,” even if she were innocent of the murder, nor could such an “ o’erhasty ” and incestuous marriage be hoped to “come to good,” i.e. to be blessed. The first real foreboding on Hamlet’s part appears to be his remark after he has heard of the Ghost’s appearance from Horatio, act i. sc. 2 :— My father’s spirit in arms ! all is not well; I doubt some foul play. I would next direct the attention of my readers to the dialogue which takes place between Polonius and Beynaldo in act ii. scene 1, in which Polonius, before sending his servant to Paris to play the spy upon his son, directs him how to entrap the companions of Laertes into information respecting the habits and amusements of their friend, by accusing him falsely of certain specified vices. Polonius concludes by explaining to his servant the object of these false accusations against his son:— See you now; Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth: 10 And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlaces, and with assays of bias, By indirections, find directions out: So, by my former lecture and advice, Shall you my son. What purpose does this scene serve? Is it designed merely to acquaint us with the character of Polonius, and to show us his intense enjoyment of his own imbecile craft? Is it not possible that the poet intended these directions of the old courtier to subserve another purpose, and one more nearly affecting the main interest of the play:—namely—to warn his audience, not to attach to the accusations of the subsequent play-scene (act iii. sc. 2) greater weight than they deserve; but to consider them also only as “ windlaces, and assays of bias,” to drag forth the truth, and that the significance to be attached to these tests was to be decided only by the degree of success which attended their operation ? If I am right in this conjecture, it detracts very greatly from the force of the two couplets in the play-scene, and the dialogue in the interview-scene (quoted at the commencement of my paper, No. 8), upon which the alleged guilt of the Queen is chiefly made to rest. The play-scene I shall consider in its place; but I return now to the Ghost’s narrative to Hamlet. What does he tell Hamlet of the murder? Is there a single word in it which attaches the guilt of blood to the Queen? Not one;—it is only—- The serpent, that did sting thy father’s life, Now wears his crown— 0 * * * * ^ % Sleeping within mine orchard, My custom always in the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebenon in a phial, And in the porches of mine ears did pour The leperous distilment. J * * * * * * * * * * Thus, was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand. Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d.— The very mention of the “ queen ” as one of the objects of which the King was robbed, appears to me to infer that she was not one of the robbers; for there seems something absurd in the construction of the passage on a contrary supposition. What is the Ghost’s charge to Hamlet?— If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury, and damned incest.— But, howsoever thou pursu’st this act, Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, To prick and sting her. 11 The thing which he w as not to “ bear,” w r as the then present defilement of the royal bed, though the “act” which he was charged to “ pursue ” may be the joint crime of incest and murder; but there is nothing in the passage to prove that the Ghost com¬ manded Hamlet not to “ pursue ” the crime of murder as against the Queen—or to imply that she was guilty of that crime; inasmuch as though the “ act ” to be pursued included the murder, we know that it included the “damned incest” also, in regard to which the guilt of the Queen is admitted; and this deprives the words in question of any force which they would otherwise have had as an assumption of her guilt in the crime of murder. I think the Ghost's rage against the Queen would have been extreme if she had had any hand in his murder, and would not have allowed of any such compassion on his part towards her, as is shown in the concluding words of his charge to Hamlet:— Leave her to heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, To prick and sting her— into repentance, as we may fairly assume, not only from the Ghost's tender regret in alluding to her “declension” on this occasion,but also from his direction to Hamlet in the interview-scene (actiii. sc. 4):—■ But, look ! amazement on thy mother sits : O ! step between her and her fighting soul; Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. Speak to her,* Hamlet. Again, in what terms does the Ghost describe the Queen in this his first interview with Hamlet ? Only as my most seeming-virtuous queen, and as lust, though to a radiant angel link’d. And in the interview between the Queen and Hamlet, the Ghost alludes to her as a “ weakest body.” _ All this, when contrasted with the terms he applies to Claudius, is noticeable as referring only to lust and weakness, and in no wise / to blood-guiltiness. The order of the Ghost's narrative is also remarkable—the first mention of the murder—the criminal passion towards the Queen on the part of Claudius as one cause of the murder—the short, and almost tender digression of regret at her frailty—“ O Hamlet, what a falling off was there ! ” as though he could hardly bear to reflect how her sin had blinded her eyes, and caused her to decline Upon a wretch, whose natural gifts were poor To those of mine !— * In the edition of 1603, mentioned at the end of my paper, the Ghost’s pity is still more strongly expressed :— Thy mother’s fearful, and she stands amaz’d : Speak to her, Hamlet, for her sex is weak; Comfort thy mother, Hamlet, think on me. 12 And then the return to Claudius and his “ cursed hebenon”— the aggravation of the crime as committed by a brother’s hand, and as cutting him off— Even in the blossoms of his sin, Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d;— and the manner in which the remembrance of all this, and the consciousness of his present consequent sufferings, inflame his rage against Claudius, and cause him to charge Hamlet to I Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder, accompanied by a caution not to punish the Queen for the “ luxury and damned incest.” I consider that the Ghost’s narrative implies the guilt of adultery in the Queen, during the life of her first husband. It was while she was “ to a radiant angel link’d,” and while she could “ sate herself in a celestial bed,” that she yet further “ preyed on garbage”; and this fact disarms the words addressed by Hamlet to his mother, in his distant interview with her (act iii. sc. 4), of the force which they might otherwise have had. The words which I mean are:— Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, x\nd batten on this moor ? Had it not been for the inference to be drawn, as I think, from the Ghost’s narrative—that the Queen had been faithless to her mar¬ riage vows during the life of her husband—this “ leave to feed ” might perhaps have been considered to imply the guilt of murder in the Queen, as charging her with having by her own act caused the cessation of this “food,” and not as implying that the “food” was removed from her by the stroke of natural death, in which latter case it would have left her, and not she it. • Hamlet was not aware of this adultery until after he had seen • the Ghost; because, before that, he accuses her of “posting to in¬ cestuous sheets,” only after the death of his father. We come now to Hamlet’s discourse with Ophelia (act iii. sc. 1), which is very remarkable as bearing only and entirely upon the unchastity of women. “ For the power of beauty will sooner trans¬ form honesty [i.e. chastity] from what it is to a bawd, than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness; this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” In which he seems to intimate that the temptations incident to his mother’s beauty had triumphed over her chastity, instead of her chastity having refined and spiritualized her beauty: he represents it as a struggle between the two, in which the baser kind of ornament, the sensuous beauty, overcame and assimilated to its lower self, the? nobler ornament of spiritual purity. He goes on—“You should notfT have believed me [that I did love you], for virtue cannot so 1 inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it. I loved you not,” i —implying that, being the son of his false and vicious mother, hef 13 was necessarily as such tainted with her infidelity and untruthful¬ ness, and that no inoculation of virtue could purify the son of such a mother from his inherent and inherited natural deceitfulness an$K impurity of appetite. His questions, “ Are you honest [i.e. chaste] ? Are you fair?” show how his mother's frailty had led to a natural association in his mind between personal beauty and unchastity in woman, and; made him believe that they were inseparable. Now, the same reason which may be conjectured to have kept Hamlet silent towards his mother, during the subsequent interview with her (act iii. sc. 4), upon the subject of her supposed participa¬ tion in the murder of her husband, would in no way have operated to keep him from hinting at such conjectured blood-guilt in these (l ‘ dark sayings ” to Ophelia; in which he may be supposed to show, rather to the reader of the play, than to the heart-broken girl who could extract no meaning from his words, his sad knowledge of his mother's infidelity, and its effects in rendering him dis¬ trustful of the seeming virtue of a fair woman. Why, then, does he not darkly hint to Ophelia at the much graver crime of murder, into which he is supposed to believe that his mother has fallen ? I think the entire absence of all such hints in this conversation affords a strong presumption that he held no such belief. So again, he says to her:— Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them; “ monsters'' meaning horned men, i.e. cuckolds—a very common synonym amongst dramatists. Yet, if wives commonly murdered tlieir husbands, the husbands w r ere something more pitiable than cuckolds, and would avoid marriage for some stronger reason than a fear of the infidelity of their wives. I have omitted, in its proper place, to observe, that Hamlet, in proposing to himself (act ii. sc. 2) to have the “ mousetrap'' acted as a test of the guilt of his uncle, never makes the least mention of his mother as a party to be tried by the same test. Yet, is this f likely ? Had he really and fully suspected his mother, would he not have been most painfully anxious to have his suspicions removed, or, if it must be, confirmed ? A mother whom he so dearly loved ? Had he so understood the Ghost, would he not have put that spirit's “ honesty'' to this test also? Yet he seems to think of nothing but the testing of his uncle's guilt:— "—^ I ’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father, Before mine uncle; I ’ll observe his looks; I ’ll tent him to the quick; if he but blench, I know my course. * ***** * * * * the play’s the thing, Wherein I ’ll catch the conscience of the king. - A 14 So, in his directions to Horatio, in act iii. sc. 2 :— There is a play to-night before the king; One scene of it comes near the circumstance, Which I have told thee, of my father’s death ; I prythee, when thou seest that act afoot, Even with the very comment of thy soul. Observe mine uncle ; if his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech, It is a damned ghost that we have seen, And my imaginations are as foul As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note; Eor I, mine eyes will rivet to his face, And after, we will both our judgments join In censure of his seeming. Surely, if lie had really suspected his mother also, he would have had a much better chance of detecting the common crime of murder, to watch both the suspected criminals, and the glances which might, nay, which must, pass between them, on seeing the mirror of their v joint crime. And, if he had ever hinted to Horatio any suspicion of the Queers guilt, would not the latter certainly have suggested the adviseability of extending their observation to her also ? Yet he does nothing of the sort; his reply has reference to Claudius only:— Well, my lord; If lie steal aught the whilst the play is playing, And ’scape detecting, I will pay the theft. I may be accused of inconsistency in my defence of the Queen, because I suggest hereafter that the two couplets in the play-scene, and the remark in Hamlets subsequent interview with his mother, were inserted and made by him as a sort of side-wind-tests of his mother’s guilt. But all that I mean here is, that he never so sus¬ pects her of blood-guilt as to disclose to Horatio his intention of testing such supposed guilt, even to this trifling extent; nay, never so much as confesses so dreadful a suspicion even to himself, as to soliloquize upon it, as he does above, as regards his uncle’s guilt, in the lines :— I ’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father, Before mine uncle, &c. I also notice, that before the King has been reminded of his guilt by the play-scene, his conscience is at work. Thus, in act iii. sc. 1, when Polonius says :— We are oft to blame in this,— ’Tis too much prov’d,—that, with devotion’s visage, And pious action, we do sugar o’er The devil himself,—■ 15 Claudius replies— O ’tis too true. {Aside) —How smart A lash that speech doth give my conscience ! The harlot’s cheek, beau tied with plastering art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it, Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden ! There are no such soliloquies of guilt on the part of the Queen before the play-scene—if at all—(which I doubt) as respects the crime of murder—her only soliloquy of uneasiness being the one in act iv. sc. 5, beginning— To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is— which I shall consider in its place. In act ii. sc. 2, the King and Queen are alone together. The King says (of Polonius) :— He tells me, my dear Gertrude, he hath found The head and source of all your son’s distemper. To which the Queen replies:— I doubt, it is no other but the main : His father’s death, and our o’erhasty marriage. Would one of two murderers, alone together, speak of their joint crime as “ his father’s death ” ? Whilst the phrase “ o’erhasty marriage ” shows that her conscience was at work ? Does the King alone so speak of his crime?—(Act iii. scene 3.) Listen to his wretched outcry :— O ! my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal, eldest curse upon’t, A brother’s murder! * * * 4k, 4 4 ± ± 4 4 ... .p 'p n* /jv What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow ? * * * * * * * # Then I ’ll look up : My fault is past. But, 0 ! what form of prayer Can serve my turn ? Forgive me my foul murder ! That cannot be; since I am still possess’d Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. Here is no periphrasis! no calling the murder “ his father’s death ”! Before the play-scene, Hamlet’s mind is still oozing out its re¬ membrance of his mother’s infidelity, in his reply to Ophelia:— Oph. ’Tis brief, my lord,— Ham. As woman’s love. \ l(j I cannot suppose that, had he understood the Ghost to charge his mother with murder, his mind would have been so entirely filled with the consideration of her infidelity alone, as to preclude all reflection on, and consequent allusion to, the much graver crime of murder. Nor do I consider it any answer to this objection, to say that he contemplated the crime of murder, so far as the Queen might have been concerned in it, as a necessary consequence of, and involved in, her sin of infidelity. The latter sin had been committed during the lifetime of Hamlet the elder, evidently without his suspecting it; and therefore there was very little advantage to be gained by the Queen, in proceeding to the murder, to counterbalance the dis¬ advantages attendant upon the commission of so dangerous a crime; whereas Claudius obtained, not only undisputed possession of the Queen’s person, but also the object of his more serious ambition—the crown and kingdom. Nor does Hamlet’s reflection upon Claudius’s incest ever cause him to lose sight of his blood-guiltiness in reflect¬ ing upon the lesser sin. Not at all—he always classes the murder and incest of Claudius together :—“ He that hath kill’d my king, and whor’d my mother ”—“ bloody, bawdy villain”—“ remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.” It is noticeable also that Hamlet always classes his mother amongst the sufferers by the act of murder, and not together with the supposed other perpetrator of it :—“ I that have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d”—“He that hath kill’d my king, and whor’d my mother:”—thus adopting nearly the same classification as the Ghost, who places the Queen amongst the possessions of which the act of murder deprived him, and not coupling her with the perpetrator of that act:— Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand, Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d. I now come to the play-scene (act iii. sc. 2), upon the two couplets in which, and the remark interposed, the supposed guilt of the Queen is chiefly made to rest. These couplets are— Player Queen. In second husband let me be accurst; None Aved the second, but who kill’d the first. Hamlet {aside). Wormwood, wormwood. Player Queen. A second time I kill my husband dead, When second husband kisses me in bed. And, in answer to these couplets and remark, I say that the whole of the play-scene must be regarded as an experiment to dis¬ cover the guilt of the supposed murderer or murderers of the deceased King; and although Hamlet might not have understood from the Ghost, or have believed, that his mother were guilty of the murder, and although the main tests were designed for Claudius, yet he might, not unnaturally, shocked as he was, and revolted at his discovery of his mother’s infidelity, have determined by a side-wind, at the same time, to apply the murder-test less fully to her. 17 I say that Polonius's directions to Reynaldo (act ii. sc. 1), on the manner of falsely charging Laertes with vice, in order to prove whether he were indulging in it (and the very sorts of vice were to be specified—the charge was to be made most precise and direct), ought to be allowed to have their influence on the reader in the consideration of this play-scene. I say that Hamlet himself lias cautioned us that we should not attach to his suspicions, or consequently to his remarks, more weight than they deserve (act ii. sc. 2) :— The spirit, that I have seen, May be the devil; and the devil hath power T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps, Out of ray weakness, and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I ’ll have grounds More relative than this:—the play’s the thing Wherein I ’ll catch the conscience of the king. This frame of mind, this “ weakness ” and “ melancholy”—the utter disgust of life, expressed in his first soliloquy—his regarding the heavens as merely a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” and the world as an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank, and gross in nature, Possess it merely— must also be allow ed to have their due 'weight in our consideration of flamlet’s suspicions; who, in his utter revulsion of feeling at dis¬ covering his mother’s frailty, is exceedingly likely, in his melancholy, and distrust of all mankind, to colour her siu more deeply than there was any ground for doing. Exactly thus he deals with Ophelia. Regarding her as merely a representative and type of female humanity, that womanhood which thitherto had been to him so glorious and divinely enchanting, and which he had worshipped, in Ophelia’s person, with a “ love” exceed¬ ing that of “forty thousand brothers,” but which, by a shock so aw T ful and unlooked for, had been suddenly discovered to be angelic only in appearance [like Lear’s, “ But to the girdle do the gods inherit; beneath is all the fiend’s”]—with the violent reaction natural upon so dreadful a discovery, he rebounds to the opposite extreme; and all his great love being thus turned to poison, he regards her simply as the type of this whitened sepulchre—woman¬ kind ; and pours out on her, as the representative of her deceitful sex, the awful phials of his wrath. This question, viz., the state of Hamlet’s mind, and the extent to which his mental vision was distorted by the shock consequent on the discovery of the murder of his father, and of his mother’s guilty connection with the murderer, is a most important element in the consideration of my subject, because the couplets in the play-scene are, as I suppose, some of those “dozen or sixteen lines” which b 18 Hamlet himself had interpolated into “ the mnrder of Gonzago,” and the remark in the interview-scene is made by him also; and because the charges against the Queen, specified at my commence¬ ment, and numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8, and which contain all that is of any importance against her, all reach us through Hamlet’s lips alone. As illustrations of his state of mind, he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “ Denmark is a prison ” ; that the heavens are “ a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours ”; and he has already, before he knew of the murder at all, and while only shocked at his father’s death, and disgusted by his mother’s marriage with Claudius, described the world as “ an unweeded garden, possessed merely by things rank and gross in nature.” But here I prefer to quote what Coleridge has said upon the subject:— “ One of Shakspeare’s modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakspeare, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds,—an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed : his thoughts and the images of his fancy are far more vivid than his actual perceptions; and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his con¬ templations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet’s mind, which, unseated from its healthy rela¬ tion, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without; giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all commonplace actualities.” Just so I suppose him to see everything through the dark medium of his uncle’s guilt and his mother’s frailty; and it is most natural that this jaundiced frame of mind should lead him to exaggerate the sin of his mother; and that, knowing her infidelity, he should go on to entertain gloomy fears as to her freedom from blood-guilt. Phantom-fears, however, which he shrank, as I think, from com¬ municating to Horatio, and scarcely dared, on reflection, to confess even to himself, though still sufficiently distressed by them to cause him, in order to make his “ assurance ” of her innocence “ doubly sure,” to insert the two couplets in the play-scene, and to make the remark to his mother in his interview with her in act iii. sc. 4:— Queen. 0, what a rash and bloody deed is this ! Iiamlet. A bloody deed;—almost as bad, good mother, * As kill a king, and marry with his brother. I think that the remarks of Hamlet to his mother, and his actions and words respecting her, ought to be considered only in conjunc¬ tion with the foregoing reflections as to his state of mind, and not, 19 as is too often the case, as if they were the impartial declarations of a chorus, employed to inform the minds of the spectators of the real state of the case. So, in remarking upon Claudius's words in act iv. sc. 5:— There’s such divinity doth hedge a king, &c.,— Coleridge says :—“ Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspcare never intended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes; though I sus¬ pect the managers have long done so." That the whole test of the play-scene is not exactly fitted to the existing case, is proved by the fact that the Player-King is murdered before the murderer (who is his nephew, and not brother,) makes love to the Player-Queen, which does not agree with the Ghost's narrative of the facts. The Ghost describes Claudius as having won to bis shameful lust The will of my most seeming virtuous queen, before— Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole. With juice of cursed hebenon in a phial. And in the porches of mine ear did pour The leperous distilment. So Hamlet has before told us that the representation was only to be “ something like the murder of my father." In the play-scene, it is noticeable how each one of the guilty spec¬ tators is dwelling upon his and her own share in the crimes repre¬ sented, and how Hamlet avails himself of the opportunity afforded by their remarks to drive the iron yet deeper into their souls. The Queen says, of the Player-Queen's professions of affection for her husband, “ The lady doth protest too much, methinks," and Hamlet blasts her with the scoff, “ Ay, but she '11 keep her word,"—thus reminding his mother of her parade of love towards her murdered husband, which he has elsewhere described in the words:— Heaven and earth! Must I remember ? Why, she would hang on him As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on; and yet within a month, See. The King's conscience is troubled with the foreboding of some darker accusation. He inquires—“ Have you heard the argument ? Is there no offence ?" and Hamlet stabs him to the quick with the reply—“ Oh ! they do but jest! poison in jest! " and then—“ But what of that ? Your majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not; let the galled jade wince, our withers arc unwrung." How keen is the satire! how well he knew what pangs Claudius was suffer¬ ing in feeling that his “soul" was no longer “free," as we hear the wretched murderer in his retirement directly afterwards exclaiming— O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged; and that this stab told, we know by Hamlet's question to Horatio 4 20 afterwards —“ Didst perceive? upon the talk of the poisoning/* and not upon the acting of it subsequently. I think the Queen is entitled to the benefit of the consideration here suggested, namely, that her susceptibility to the representation in the play-scene is confined entirely to the crime of infidelity to her deceased husband, and that Hamlet’s answer to her remark is re¬ stricted within the same limits; whereas, with regard to Claudius, it is exactly the reverse, and has reference only to the “ poisoning/* When the catastrophe of the play-scene comes, where the poison¬ ing is represented, it is Claudius only who seems alarmed. The Queen appears to make no movement until after Claudius has risen; and then it is only to inquire into the stir made by her husband. The text is as follows:— Oph. The king rises. Ham . What! frighted with false fire ? Queen. How fares my lord? Pol. Give o’er the play. King. Give me some light;—away !— It seems to me that Shakspeare, in making Ophelia tell us that c: the king rises/* followed by the Queen*s inquiry, " How fares my lord?** meant clearly to intimate the Queen*s innocence of, and consequent indifference to, the vision of the murder just presented to her eyes. Would not she have also shrunk from the sight, had she been implicated in the crime represented ? Had she a more perfect command over her feelings, and more skill in concealing her alarm, than the crafty Claudius, whose whole life is one great lie ? In the dialogue between Hamlet and Horatio, directly after the play-scene, their remarks upon the obvious effect of the representa¬ tion refer to Claudius only :— Hamlet. Didst perceive ? upon the talk of the poisoning.— Horatio. I did very well note him. Why did not Horatio, as well as Hamlet, watch the Queen also, if Hamlet really believed her to be guilty? Hamlet*s remark, “ Oh good Horatio! I *11 take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound ** —would also seem to imply that this “ word,** now proved to be true, charged Claudius alone with the guilt of murder, since no action of the Queen had confirmed such a charge in relation to herself. What is the effect of the play-scene on Claudius? It utterly oversets him, and sends him weeping to his knees. (Actiii. sc. 3.) Would he, then, have dared, if the Queen had been an accomplice in the murder, and she so infirm of purpose as she was, and so extremely fond of Hamlet, and so evidently subject to his superior intellect, to have allowed this weak, fond mother, directly after seeing her crime mirrored, to be submitted to the test of a search¬ ing interview with this clever son of the murdered man ?—who, moreover, had just shown the King that he more than suspected the foul play attending his father’s death?—Would Claudius himself 21 have dared to undergo the test of this interview ? and was the Queen made of less “ penetrable stuff” ? Not, if we credit the Ghost of her murdered husband, who tells us, in reference to her, that:— Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. Nor w r ould there have been any difficulty in relinquishing the proposed interview. The only persons informed of the proposal were Claudius, the Queen, and Polonius. Hamlet was not invited to the interview at all, until after the play-scene was concluded (by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—act iii. sc. 2). Claudius himself was so “ frighted with false fire,” that he could not endure the torture of the play-scene to the end—but risked the betrayal of his guilt, rather than sit it out; and so, his guilt “ spills itself in fearing to be spilt.” And yet, he submits this weak mother—who he tells us “ lives almost by his (Hamlet’s) looks,” and who Polonius tells us is “ made partial by nature ” to her son—no longer to “ false fire,” but to the real fire of Hamlet’s searching mind ! This one fact appears to me to preclude the possibility of believing that the Queen was consentient to or cognizant of the murder. o What utter madness it would have been, thus to have placed in Hamlet’s power the only confirmation which his suspicions then needed to ripen them into perfect certainty !—a confirmation which he would have been most certain to extract from his mother. And, granting that Claudius were such a fool (which he was not, for the Ghost describes the “ witchcraft of his wdt”), could he have persuaded the Queen to undergo this test, if she had just seen the mirror of her crime held up ? Most surely not. She is not so fond of these scenes. She says, when Ophelia wants to see her after the death of Polonius, “ I will not speak with her.” So, surely, would she, if guilty, have refused to see Hamlet, had Claudius been fool enough to allow her to be put to this trial. But supposing, for the sake of the argument, that the Queen were an accomplice in the murder, and that Claudius chose, for some unimaginable reason, to run the risk of submitting her to the test of an interview with Hamlet, w ould he not have taken care that such interview should take place without the audience of any third party unacquainted with the murder, and who might learn from the dialogue between the Queen and her son, that the late King had been murdered? Claudius feared, we know, that “the hatch and the disclose ” of Hamlet’s apparent madness would be “ some danger” to himself, and this interview was designed for the especial purpose of eliciting the disclosure. Yet he not only allows, but commands, Polonius to be within hearing; and there is every reason to believe, as I shall endeavour hereafter to show, that Polonius was ignorant of the murder. The Queen also consents that Polonius shall overhear the dialogue, which would have been as objectionable to her, had she been participant in the murder, as to Claudius. / The other view of the subject appears to me infinitely more reasonable, namely, that the Queen knew nothing of the murder; 22 and that Claudius, knowing this, and anxious to learn whether the horrible vision of discovery which the play-scene had just sug¬ gested to him were intentional or accidental, tremblingly employs her for the purpose of deciding this momentous question. Whilst the experiment is being made, Claudius, in his retire¬ ment, shows us the interior of his heart in his soliloquy :— 0 ! my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal, eldest curse upon’t, A brother’s murder! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow ? * * * * * * * Then, I ’ll look up ; My fault is past.—But, O ! what form of prayer Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder!— That cannot be; since I am still possess’d Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. This soliloquy is very remarkable throughout, as not making the least allusion to any accomplice in his crime. He speaks of himself as the sole perpetrator of the murder :— since I am still possess’d Of those effects for which I did the murder. If the Queen had been participant in the crime, would he not have availed himself of the miserable consolation of accusing her jointly with himself, and of reflecting that he was not alone in the sin, but that his Queen was in the same condemnation as himself? —a consolation, which, groundless as it really is, never fails to be applied to themselves by persons in the position of Claudius. His feeling of solitariness in his crime appears to me to be a marked feature of his soliloquy—his knowledge that he could not alleviate the dreadful burthen of his crime, by attributing a part of it to any other person. And it seems to me that, even if he had not at first intended in his soliloquy to devolve any part of his burthen on the Queen, still the mention of “ my queen ” as one of the objects gained by his commission of the murder, would have reminded him that he was not alone in his crime, had shebeen participant in it. Just as the dying Front-de-Boeuf in Scott’s “ Ivanhoe ” demands that Ulrica shall be the sharer of his agonies, on the ground that she had been “the foul provoker, the more foul rewarder of the deed—let her, as well as I, taste of the tortures which anticipate hell! ” Before I consider the interview between Hamlet and his mother, immediately after the play-scene, I would observe, that the inter¬ view itself had not originated with Claudius, but with Polonius, 23 as is proved by tlie words of the latter to Claudius, in act iii. scene 1:— My lord, do as you please : But if you hold it fit, after the play, Let his queen mother all alone entreat him To show his grief; let her be round with him: And 1 ’ll be placed, so please you, in the ear Of all their conference. If she find him not, To England send him. And this, although it appears from the dialogue between the same speakers in act iii. sc. 4, that the proposal for overhearing the effect of this interview between Hamlet and his mother had first come from Claudius. Polonius says to him :— My lord, he’s going to his mother’s closet; Behind the arras I ’ll convey myself To hear the process; I ’ll warrant she ’ll tax him home : And, as you said, and wisely was it said, ’Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, Since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear The speech, of vantage. Which two dialogues are a proof how very little sympathy of action there was between Claudius and the Queen—the former of whom, we here see planning a scheme for discovering the cause of Hamlet's wildness, in concert with a courtier who was no party to the murder, and in fact, practising upon, and making use of, his alleged co-murderess for the discovery in question ! Is not this a most improbable presumption, that Polonius would have been in the confidence of Claudius, to the exclusion of a participator in the crime? This surely would be a dangerous game for one of two murderers to play. And now I return to the Queen, who is waiting to hold this interview with Hamlet; who, in approaching her chamber, tells us that he intends to go to the fullest length of speech which was possible to him —“ to speak daggers, but use none,"—“ to be cruel" —and savs :— How in my speech soever she be shent, To give them seals, never my soul consent; which most clearly expresses his deliberate intention to be as severe of speech as possible, but not to reduce his speech to action. So, he approaches her chamber, determined to “speak daggers" to her. What dagger would have been so sharp as an accusation of murder?—an accusation which he never brings ; and only sug¬ gests, in his reply to her outcry upon his stabbing Polonius behind t the arras:— O’ what a rash and bloody deed is this! when he answers;— A bloody deed;—almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king, and marry with his brother; 24 which words, the only ones which can possibly be constrned into a direct charge of murder as against the Queen, I class with the two couplets in the play-scene, as being a further and final test of his mother’s guilt; and then appears to me to be confirmed in her mind the hideous suspicion that her husband had been murdered. “ As kill a king ? ” she cries, horror-stricken at hearing to what an extent of crime her encouragement of Claudius’s guilty passion had led, and that she had married a blood-stained man! So, after the play-scene she is described by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as (e struck into amazement and admiration” at Hamlet’s “behaviour” during the play-scene, in which the first dreadful vision of blood-guilt had been suggested to her! When the Queen cried out, “ As kill a king ? ” I apprehend that Hamlet saw nothing in her behaviour to confirm the suspicion suggested in his words; inasmuch as he never, throughout the remainder of the interview, makes the slightest further allusion to any blood-guilt on her part; but entirely concentrates his force on the charge of infidelity to her deceased husband, and incest, which he iterates and reiterates in every possible form, and pictures the sin with all his great eloquence. Would this have been a fulfil¬ ment of his before-expressed threats :— Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge: You go not ’till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you; and again:— Leave wringing of your hands. Peace ! sit you down And let me wring your heart : for so 1 shall, If it be made of penetrable stuff. Would his picture of her adultery have represented “ the inmost part ” of her, if she had been further guilty of the murder ? Or would a charge of adultery have “ wrung her heart,” if her conscience had accused her also of murder? Why should he dilate so enor¬ mously upon the breach of her marriage vows, and leave the far greater crime of murder so lightly touched ? W r hy does he not use this more trenchant weapon, if her guilt had exposed her to its attacks ? Again, when she tries to bully him, by asking :— , W hat have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue, In noise so rude against me ? Hamlet would, most surely, if he could, have out-heroded her brag with the charge of murder; yet his reply is only: — Such an act, That blurs the grace and blush of modesty; | Calls virtue, hypocrite; takes off the rose ' From the fair forehead of an innocent love, 25 And sets a blister there ; makes marriage vows As false as dicers’ oaths : O ! such a deed As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul; and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words : * * ‘ * * * * * * O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell, If thou cans’t mutine in a matron’s bones, To flaming youth let virtue be as wax, And melt in her own lire: proclaim no shame. When the compulsive ardour gives the charge, Since frost itself as actively doth burn, And reason panders will.— Which is very noticeable in its reiteration of her immodesty and licentious passion—and in its allusion only to the breach of her “ marriage vows/’ and to her having, by the “ act ” which he re¬ probates, destroyed the essence of her “contraction,” and disgraced the sacrament of marriage. When he has made these repeated charges, she appears to me, not to have room in her conscience for the remembrance of any deeper crime. She says of the words quoted above :— These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears;— but there would have been “daggers,” in comparison with which these would have been pointless, had she been guilty of murder. Yet she seems to have reached the bottom of her grief for her sin, in reflecting on her infidelity to her deceased lord; and would she not have gone back in her mind to the still greater sin of murder, had she been guilty of it ? She declares— O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain— and evidences the sincerity of her repentance, by the wish to amend—“What shall I do?”—and her acceptance of his reproof by promising to keep his counsel; which she vows most solemnly to do, and keeps her vow. And now her knowledge of Claudius’s guilt of murder is perfected, and her desertion of him evidenced by her vow to keep silence about Hamlet’s discovery of the murder, is the immediate consequence of such knowledge. Towards the close of the interview between Hamlet and his mother, and during the presence of the Ghost, when the Queen says to Hamlet, “To whom do you speak this?” after he had already addressed the Ghost, “ Do you not come your tardy son to chide,” thus showing her that he supposed his father’s spirit to be before them, it proves, I think, how very little susceptible she was of any consciousness of foul play towards her husband on the part of her¬ self; particularly coupled with her words : “This bodily creation, ecstasy is very cunning inand Hamlet’s silence, as to the murder, on alluding to “ his father in his habit as he lived,” is all, I think, confirmatory of her innocence of blood-guilt. 26 So, I think, is the Ghost’s tenderness of address in referring to her:— But look ! amazement on thy mother sits; O ! step between her and her fighting soul, Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works : Speak to her, Hamlet. And these words of considerate kindness are the last uttered by the spirit. Very kind of him, if she had murdered him! Very different also from his direction to Hamlet to revenge his murder on Claudius: a direction which at that moment he had again ap¬ peared for the very purpose of enforcing:— Ghost. Do not forget. This visitation Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. Which may fairly lead us to conclude, that, had the Ghost chanced to come into the presence of Claudius, his rage would have been extreme at the sight of that “ incestuous, that adulterate beast and that he would assuredly have shown no such consideration for him, as he does for the Queen. It is remarkable also that the Queen is the only person of all those before whom the Ghost appears to whom the apparition is in¬ visible. On the platform it is seen by Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio, who have no concern in the murder, and is always visible to them whenever it appears, as also it is to Hamlet. But when the spirit appears to him, during this interview with his mother, sbe never sees the apparition at all:— Ham. Save me, and hover o’er me with your wings, You heavenly guards !—What would you, gracious figure ? Qu. Alas ! he ’s mad. And again:— Qu. Alas ! how is’t with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy, And with th’ incorporal air do hold discourse ? ***&**** * * * * Whereon do you look ? And again:— Qu. To whom do you speak this ? Ham. Do you see nothing there ? Qu. Nothing at all; yet all that is I see. Ham. Nor did you nothing hear ? Qu. No, nothing but ourselves. Ham. Why, look you there ! look, how it steals away ! My father, in his habit as he lived ! Look, where he goes, even now out at the portal! [Exit Ghost. Qu. This is the very coinage of your brain : This bodily creation ecstasy Is very cunning in. 27 So that of the two persons present during the apparition of the spirit, the one who is supposed to have been concerned in the murder is the one to whom the spirit is invisible—which is exactly reversing the order of things in “ Macbeth,” where Banquo’s ghost is visible to him, the murderer, alone. Macbeth’s vision would seem to have been rendered preternaturally acute by his crime of murder; but in “ Hamlet,” if the Queen were guilty, her vision would appear to have been blunted by the same crime in exactly an inverse ratio. Is this probable ? Of the u Macbeth ” Coleridge says :—“ He has by guilt torn himself live-asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preternatural state : no wonder, then, that he is inclined to super¬ stition and faith in the unknown of signs and tokens and super¬ human agencies.” How opposed is this to the Queen’s exclamation to Hamlet:— This is the very coinage of your brain: This bodily creation ecstasy Is very cunning in. Words spoken, be it remembered, immediately after her heart had been wrung by the representation of her sins towards her deceased lord, which Hamlet had just before made to her, and which con¬ tained the only charge of murder which is ever brought against her. The conclusion of Hamlet’s charge to his mother, like the rebuke which had preceded it, seems to me to point altogether to spouse- breach, and nothing more :— And do not spread the compost on the weeds To make them ranker. The murder was done; nothing would make it “ ranker.” Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come : i. e. you have been, up to this time, incestuous; henceforth cease to be so: the crime was even yet in process of commission; not like murder, which, if “ past,” could have no portion yet “ to come ” and which might be avoided. So again:— Forgive me this my virtue ; For in the fatness of these pursy times. Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg, Yea, curb and woo, for leave to do him good. The “ fatness of these pursy times ” applies very exactly to full- fed, luxurious times [“ as fed horses in the morning, every one neighing after his neighbour’s wife”], and by no means to bloody times;—he does not characterise them as “ bloody ” in speaking to her, but only as luxurious. “ Vice,” too, would be a very tame and mild synonym for murder, and yet is a very exact one for adultery. 28 So again, in the beginning of his interview he had said: And let me wring your heart; for so I shall If it be made of penetrable stuff : If damned custom have not braz’d it so, That it is proof and bulwark against sense. What “ damned custom ” could so “ braze ” a wife’s heart, that her “ sense ” could not be appealed to, as condemning her for the crime of murder? The words surely can carry no graver meaning than spouse-breach. So, of this, is her repentance to consist:— Good night; but go not to mine uncle’s bed. Still, this, if she were a murderess, would hardly— Master the devil, or throw him out With wondrous potency. Which expulsion the “use” of this self-denial is nevertheless to effect. He alludes to her sin throughout as an habitual one, like adultery—which murder, i.e . the murder of one individual, of course, could never be :— Qu. O Hamlet! thou hast cleft my heart in twain. Ham. 0 throw away the worser part of it, And live the purer with the other half. Good night; but go not to mine uncle’s bed: Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat Of habits, devil, is angel yet in this; That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery That aptly is put on : refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence; the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And master the devil, or throw him out With wondrous potency. Once more, good night. How differently had he proposed just before to deal with Claudius ! No talk of repentance for him ! And when he saw him in prayer he decided to spare his life only until he could take it in some act of sin:— About some act, That has no relish of salvation in it; Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damn’d, and black, As hell, whereto it goes. Most unjust both of the Ghost and of Hamlet ! for if Claudius and the Queen were both murderers, the Queen, as a sworn wife and help meet, was infinitely the greater criminal of the two. 20 u And lie is dead. Murder’d, damnably murder’d,—this was your husband— #**##*## * A Ah! have you eyes, and can you look on him That slew my father, and your dear husband, To live in the incestuous pleasure of his bed ? And the Queen, in the same scene, declares to her son :— But, as I have a soul, I swear by heaven I never knew of this most horrid murder. To which Hamlet, alluding to his intention to slay Claudius, replies:— And, mother, but assist me in revenge, And in his death your infamy shall die. Whereupon she rejoins:— I will conceal, consent, and do my best, What stratagem soe’er thou shalt devise. 4 , i 4 47 There is also, in the edition I am now quoting, a scene which does not exist at all in the received text. It takes place between the Queen and Horatio, after Hamlet's escape from the embassy to England; and in it Horatio narrates to the Queen the plot of Claudius to murder Hamlet, and the escape of the latter at the expense of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When the Queen hears of her husband's plot she says, in speaking of Claudius :— Then I perceive there's treason in his looks That seem’d to sugar o’er his villainy; Rut I will soothe and please him for a time, For murderous minds are always jealous. She also directs Horatio to bid Hamlet awhile Re wary of his presence, lest that he Fail in that he goes about,— alluding to his intention to kill Claudius. - ‘ As regards the authenticity of this edition of 1603, Mr. Charles Knight, in his “ Studies of Shakspeare," has declared his belief that it “gives us the play as originally written by Shakspeare," who, he considers, afterwards elaborated this first conception into the glorious tragedy which we now possess. Mr. Collier, with far greater probability, conjectures that it was compiled from a short¬ hand writer's notes, and that Shakspeare is in no way responsible for its imperfections. At the same time, Mr. Collier says, “ It is of high value in enabling us to settle the text of various important passages;" and one particular stage direction, which occurs in no other edition of the play, he believes, with great probability, to carry out the author's intention with respect to the appearance of the Ghost in the scene in question. If we accept Mr. Knight's belief, I think it sets the matter at rest as to Sliakspeare's intention with regard to the Queen's inno¬ cence of the crime of murder, and proves that she first became acquainted with such crime in her interview with Hamlet after the play-scene. But, if we prefer Mr. Collier’s far more probable conjecture, even then the edition of 1603 shows to us the impression produced upon the mind of an attentive spectator by the performance of the play by a body of actors, one of whom was William Shakspeare himself; and who can doubt that lie, who in this very play has given to actors for all time such minute directions how to “speak the speech " appointed to each one, and has directed them to “ suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that they o'erstep not the modesty of nature"—who can doubt that he also directed the living actors of his own com¬ pany to impart to each one of the scenes of his masterpiece, which 48 they were enacting in concert, the exact tone and colour which he desired it to possess ? It may also be remembered that in the interview-scene between Hamlet and his mother, in which occur the passages which differ so materially from the received text, Shakspeare himself was actually present in the part of the Ghost, which he enacted. This renders it probable that the other actors in the same scene would be more than ever careful to observe the directions which they might have received from the author of the play, as to the colour which he desired should be imparted to the scene in question. It is not likely that the short-hand writer, from whose notes I am supposing the edition of 1603 to have been taken, should have completed such notes during the course of one representation of the play. Most probably he saw it acted many times; and the version which he has given us of the interview-scene between Hamlet and his mother may, therefore, fairly be accepted as showing the impression made upon his mind by the manner in which the actor who personated the Queen understood and represented the part habitually, even although the words which the short-hand writer has put into the mouth of the Queen were not actually uttered by the actor of the part, or written by Shakspeare, but merely the embodiment of the impression left upon the mind of the spectator by the performance of an actor who was sustaining the part of the Queen under the eye of Shakspeare himself. Tuckkh &■ Co., Printers Perry’s Place, Oxford Street. • . ■ . ' . ■ , \ \ * Library of Old Authors. Handsomely printed in foolscap 8 vo, cloth , each Author sold separately. HPHE DRAMATIC AND POETICAL WORKS OF* JOHN -*• MAES TON. Now first collected, and edited by J. O. IIalliwell. 3 vols. 15s * f A poet of distinguished celebrity in his own day, no less admired for the versatility of his genius in tragedy and comedy, than dreaded for the poignancy of his satire; in the former department the colleague of Jonson, in the latter the antagonist of Hall.”— Rev. P. Hall. “ The edition deserves wfcll of the public; it is carefully printed, and the annotations, although neither numerous nor extensive, supply ample explanations upon a variety of interesting points. If Mr. Halliwell had doner no more than collect these plays, he would have conferred a boon upon all lovers of our old dramatic poetry.”— Literary Gazette. ■y rrHE VISION AND CREED OF PIERS PLOUGHMAN. 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