fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.

Ros. My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

Ham. Why did you laugh then, when I said, "Man delights not me?"

a

Ros. To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you: we coted them on the way; and hither are they coming, to offer you service.

Ham. He that plays the king shall be welcome; his majesty shall have tribute of me: the adventurous knight shall use his foil and target: the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humorous man shall end his part in peace: the clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled o' the sere; and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for 't.-What players are they?

Ros. Even those you were wont to take delight in, the tragedians of the city?

Ham. How chances it they travel? their residence, both in reputation and profit, was better both ways.

Ros. I think, their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.

Ham. Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed? Ros. No, indeed, they are not.

Ham. How comes it? Do they grow rusty? Ros. Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace: But there is, sir, an aiery of children, little that eyases, cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for 't: these are now the fashion; and so berattle the common stages, (so they call them,) that many, wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose quills, and dare scarce come thither.

Ham. What, are they children? who maintains them? how are they escoted? Will they

a Lenten-sparing-like fare in Lent.

b Coted-overtook-went side by side-from côté.

c The quarto of 1603 reads, "that are tickled in the lungs." The sere is a dry affection of the throat, by which the lungs are tickled; but the clown provokes laughter even from those who habitually cough.

d Escoted-paid. The scot or shot-the coin cast down-is

pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players, (as it is like most, if their means are no better,) their writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim against their own succession ?

Ros. 'Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; and the nation holds it no sin, to tarre them to controversy: there was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question. Ham. Is 't possible?

Guil. O, there has been much throwing about of brains.

Ham. Do the boys carry it away?

Ros. Ay, that they do, my lord; Hercules and his load too.

out.

с

Ham. It is not strange; for mine uncle is king of Denmark; and those that would make mowes at him while my father lived, give twenty, forty, an hundred ducats a-piece, for his picture in little. There is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it [Flourish of trumpets within. Guil. There are the players. Ham. Gentlemen, you are welcome to ElsiYour hands. Come: the appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony: let me comply with you in the garb; lest my extent to the players, which, I tell you, must show fairly outward, should more appear like entertainment than yours. You are welcome: but my unclefather, and aunt-mother, are deceived.

nore.

Guil. In what, my dear lord?

Ham. I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.d

Enter POLONIUS.

too;

Pol. Well be with you, gentlemen! Ham. Hark Guildenstern, and you you, -at each ear a hearer; that great baby you see there is not yet out of his swathing clouts.

Ros. Happily, he's the second time come to the share of any common charge paid by an individual. The French escotter, is to pay the scot. Hence "scot and lot."

a In some modern editions, "to tarre them on." The folio has not on. In King John (Act IV. Sc. 11.) we have "Like a dog that is compelled to fight, Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on." To tarre is to exasperate, from the Anglo Saxon tirian. b In quartos, very strange.

In quartos, mouths. The mowes of the folio is more Shaksperian-as in the Tempest.

"Sometimes like apes that moe and chatter at me."

d Handsaw the corruption in this proverbial expression of heronshaw-hernshaw, a heron. In Spenser, we have "As when a cast of falcons made their flight At an herneshaw."

e Swathing, in folio; in quartos, swaddling.

them; for, they say, an old man is twice a child.

Han. I will prophesy. He comes to tell me of the players; mark it.-You say right, sir: o' Monday morning; 't was so, indeed.

Pol. My lord, I have news to tell you. Han. My lord, I have news to tell you. When Roscius was an actor in Rome,a— Pol. The actors are come hither, my lord. Ham. Buz, buz!

Pol. Upon mine honour,

Ham. Then came each actor on his ass,

Pol. The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoricalcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ, and the liberty, these are the only men. Hea. O Jephthah, judge of Israel,—what a treasure hadst thou!

Pol. What a treasure had he, my lord?

Enter Four or Five Players.

You are welcome, masters; welcome, all:— I am glad to see thee well :-welcome, good friends. -0, my old friend! Thy face is valiant since I saw thee last; Com'st thou to beard me in Denmark?-What! my young lady and mistress! By-'r lady, your ladyship is nearer heaven, than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine.3 Pray God, your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring-Masters, you are all welcome. We'll e'en to't like French falconers, fly at any thing

we see: We'll have a speech straight: Come, give us a taste of your quality; come, a passionate speech.

1 Play. What speech, my lord?

Ham. I heard thee speak me a speech once, —but it was never acted; or, if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleased not the million; 't was caviare to the general:5 but it was (as I received it, and others, whose judgments, in such matters, cried in the top of mine,) an excellent play; well digested in the scenes; set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember, one said, there were no sallets " in the lines to make the matter savoury; nor no matter in the phrase that might indite the author of affectation; but called it, an honest method [as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine]. One chief speech in it I chiefly loved: 't was Eneas' tale to Dido; and thereabout of it especially, where he speaks of Priam's slaughter: If it live in your memory, begin at this line; let me see, let me

see;-

The rugged Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,

't is not so; it begins with Pyrrhus.

The rugged Pyrrhus,-he, whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smear'd
With heraldry more dismal; head to foot

Now is he total gules; b horridly trick'd c

With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons;

Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets,

That lend a tyrannous and damned light

To their vile murthers: d Roasted in wrath and fire,

And thus o'er-sized with coagulate gore,

With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus

Old grandsire Priam seeks.

Pol. 'Fore God, my lord, well spoken; with good accent, and good discretion.

1 Play. Anon he finds him

Striking too short at Greeks; his antique sword,
Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,
Repugnant to command: Unequal match'd,
Pyrrhus at Priam drives; in rage strikes wide,
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword
The unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium,
Seeming to feel his blow, with flaming top
Stoops to his base; and with a hideous crash
Takes prisoner Pyrrhus' car: for, lo! his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverend Priam, seem'd i' the air to stick :
So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood;
And, like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.

But, as we often see, against some storm.

A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,

a Sallets, ribaldry.

b Gules, red, in heraldic phrase.

c Trick'd, painted; also a word in heraldry.

d Vile murthers, in the folios; in quartos, lord's mur.her

The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death: anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region: So, after Pyrrhus' pause
A roused vengeance sets him new a work;
And never did the Cyclops' hammers fall
On Mars's armours, forg'd for proof eterne,
With less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword
Now falls on Priam.-

Out, out, thou strumpet, Fortune! All you gods,
In general synod, take away her power;

Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel, And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven, As low as to the fiends.

Pol. This is too long.

a

Ham. It shall to the barber's, with your beard.-Prithee, say on:-He's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps:-say on: come to Hecuba.

1 Play. But who, O who, had seen the mobled queenb

Ham. The mobled queen?

Pol. That's good: mobled queen is good.

1 Play. Run barefoot up and down, threat'ning the flame
With bisson rheum; a clout about that head,
Where late the diadem stood; and, for a robe,
About her lank and all o'er-teemed loins,

A blanket, in the alarum of fear caught up;
Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep'd,
'Gainst fortune's state would treason have pronounc'd.
But if the gods themselves did see her then,
When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
In mincing with his sword her husband's limbs,
The instant burst of clamour that she made
(Unless things mortal move them not at all,)
Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven,
And passion in the gods

Pol. Look, whether he has not turn'd his colour, and has tears in's eyes.-Pray you, no

more.

Ham. 'Tis well; I'll have thee speak out the rest soon.-Good my lord, will you see the players well bestow'd? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstracts, and brief chronicles, of the time: After your death you were better have a bad epitaph, than their ill report while you lived.

Pol. My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

Ham. Odd's bodikin man, better: Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape

A jig, a ludicrous interlude.

b Mobled. This is the reading of quartos (A) and (B). In the folio we have inobled, which is, we have little doubt, a misprint. In the folio of 1632, the original reading was restored. Mobled, mabled, is hastily muffled up. The mobled queen has

"A clout about that head Where late the diadem stood.'

In Sandys' Travels we have "their heads and faces are mabled in fine linen." To mob, or mab, is to dress carelessly; a mob is a covering for the head,-a close covering, according to some, a mobile covering, more probably.

c Abstracts, in the folio; another reading is abstract, adjectively.

d Better, in the folio; in quartos, much better.

a

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous, that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his whole conceit,
That from her working, all his visage wann'd;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with
tears,

And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant; and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property, and most dear life,
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks Lay pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the
throat,

As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha!

a Whole, in folio; in quartos, own.

b Wann'd in the quartos; the folio, warm'd.

c Free,-free from offence.

d John-a-dreams,-a soubriquet for a heavy, lethargie fellow

Why, I should take it: for it cannot be,
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or, ere this,
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal: Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless
villain!

O vengeance!

What an ass am I ay, sure, this is most brave;"

That I, the son of the dear murthered, b
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a cursing, like a very drab,

A scullion!

So the folio. The quartos, omitting the short line, "O vengeance," read

"Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave. bSo the folio; the quartos, "a dear father murder'd." The rejection, by some editors, of the beautiful reading of "the dear murthered," would be unaccountable, if we did not see how pertinaciously these have treated the folio of 1623 as of no authority

Fye upon't! foh! About, my brains! I have heard,

That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions
For murther, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. 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 spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps,
Out of my weakness, and my melancholy,
(A3 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.

[Erit.

1 SCENE II." Seneca cannot be too heavy," &c.

IN the second scene of the third act, Hamlet thus addresses Polonius :-"My lord, you played once in the university, you say?" It is to the practice amongst the students of our universities, in the time of Elizabeth, of acting Latin plays, that Hamlet alludes; and the frequency of such performances, as Warton remarks, may have suggested to Shakspere the names of Seneca and Plautus in the passage before us. In that very curious book, Braun's 'Civitates,' 1575, there is a Latin memoir prefixed to a map of Cambridge, in which these theatrical entertainments are described; and the fables of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, are expressly mentioned as being performed by the students with elegance, magnificence, dignity of action, and propriety of voice and countenance. Malone says,

"The most celebrated actors at Cambridge were the students of St. John's and King's colleges: at Oxford, those of Christ-church. In the hall of that college a Latin comedy, called Marcus Geminus, and the Latin tragedy of Progne, were performed before Queen Elizabeth in the year 1566; and, in 1564, the Latin tragedy of Dido was played before her majesty, when she visited the University of Cambridge. The exhibition was in the body or nave of the chapel of King's College, which was lighted by the royal guards, each of whom bore a staff-torch in his hand." The account of this visit of Elizabeth to Cambridge is to be found in Peck's 'Desiderata Curiosa,' vol. ii. page 25; and it appears from the subjoined passage, that there was great competition amongst the colleges for the theatrical recreation of her majesty :

"Great preparations and charges, as before in the other plays, were employed and spent about the tragedy of Sophocles, called Ajax Flagellifer, in Latin, to be this night played before her. But her highness, as it were tired with going about to the colleges, and with hearing of disputations, and overwatched with former plays, (for it was very late nightly before she came to them, as also departed from them,) and furthermore, minding early in the morning to depart from Cambridge and ride to a dinner unto a house of the Bishop of Ely, at Stanton, and from thence to her bed at Hinchinbrook (a house of Sir Henry Cromwell's, in Huntingdonshire, about twelve miles from Cambridge,) could not, as otherwise, no doubt, she would, (with like patience and cheerfulness, as she was present at the other,) hear the said tragedy; to the great Borrow, not only of the players, but of all the whole University."

2SCENE II.-" One fair daughter and no more," &c.

There is an old ballad, which was first printed in Percy's Reliques, under the title Jephthah, Judge of Israel,' and is there given as it "was retrieved from utter oblivion by a lady who wrote it down from memory, as she had formerly heard it sung by her father." A copy of the ballad has since been recovered; and is reprinted in Evans' Collection, 1810. The first stanza is as follows:"I have read that many years agoe,

When Jepha, judge of Israel,
Had one fair daughter and no more,
Whom he loved passing well.

As by lot, God wot,

It came to passe most like it was,
Great warrs there should be,

6

And who should be the chiefe, but he, but he." The lines quoted by Hamlet almost exactly correspond with this copy. Hamlet, in the text of the quarto of 1611, calls the poem, The Pious Chanson; but in the quarto of 1604, and the folio of 1623, it is 'the Pons Chanson.' Pope says, this refers to the old ballads sung on bridges. We believe Pons is a typographical error; for in the quarto of 1603, we find "the first verse of the godly ballet."

3 SCENE II.-"By the altitude of a choppine."

The best description of a choppine is found in Coryat's 'Crudities,' 1611; and we subjoin a representation of several specimens of these monstrous clogs, which Evelyn calls "wooden scaffolds: "...