CORRESPONDENCE

UPON SHAKESPEREAN SUBJECTS.

From the Hon. John Quincy Adams, of the House of Representatives, and an ex-President of the United States.

HAMLET.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19, 1839.

To James H. Hackett, Esq., New York:

DEAR SIR-I return herewith your tragedy of Hamlet, with many thanks for the perusal of your manuscript notes, which indicate how thoroughly you have delved into the bottomless mine of Shakespeare's genius. I well remember the conversation, more than seven years by-gone, at Mr. Philip Hone's hospitable table, where, at the casual introduction of the name of Hamlet the Dane, my enthusiastic admiration of the inspired (muse inspired) Bard of Avon, commenced in childhood, before the down had darkened my lip, and continued, through five of the seven ages of the drama of life, gaining upon

the judgment as it loses to the imagination, seduced me to expatiate, at a most intellectual and lovely convivial board, upon my views of the character of Hamlet, until I came away ashamed of having engrossed an undue proportion of the conversation to myself. That my involuntary effusions and diffusions of mind on that occasion were indulgently viewed by Mr. Hone, so as to have remained with kindness upon his memory to this day, is a source of much gratification to me, and still more pleasing is it to me that he should have thought any of the observations which fell from me at that time worthy of being mentioned to you.

I look upon the tragedy of Hamlet as the masterpiece of the drama-the master-piece of Shakespeare —I had almost said, the master-piece of the human mind. But I have never committed to writing the analysis of the considerations upon which this deliberate judgment has been formed. At the table of Mr. Hone I could give nothing but outlines and etchings. I can give no more now-snatching, as I do, from the morning lamp, to commune with a lover and worthy representative of Shakespeare upon the glories of the immortal bard.*

What is tragedy? It is an imitative representation of human action and passion, to purify the heart of the spectator through the instrumentality

* It was Mr. Adams's custom to rise at 4 a.m., and dispatch all his private affairs, that they might not interfere with his duties of the day in the House of Representatives. J. H. H.

of terror and pity. This, in substance, is the definition of Aristotle; and Pope's most beautiful lines, in the prologue to Cato, are but an expansion of the same idea.

Hamlet is the personification of a man, in the prime of life, with a mind cultivated by the learning acquirable at an university, combining intelligence and sensibility in their highest degrees, within a step of the highest distinction attainable on earth, crushed to extinction by the pressure of calamities inflicted, not by nature, but against nature-not by physical, but by moral evil. Hamlet is the heart and soul of man, in all their perfection and all their frailty, in agonizing conflict with human crime, also in its highest pre-eminence of guilt. Hamlet is all heart and soul. His ruling passions are, filial affection-youthful love-manly ambition. His commanding principles are, filial duty-generous friendship-love disappointed and subdued-ambition and life sacrificed to avenge his father.

Hamlet's right to the throne has been violated, and his darkest suspicions roused by the marriage of his mother with bis uncle so speedily succeeding his father's death. His love is first trammelled by the conflicting pride of his birth and station operating upon his ambition, and although he has "made many tenders of his affection" to Ophelia, and "hath importun'd her with love in honorable fashion," yet he has made no proposal of marriage to her he has promised her nothing but love, and,

cautioned both by her brother and her father, she meets the advances of Hamlet with repulsion. Instead of attributing this to its true cause, he thinks she spurns his tenderness. In his enumeration of the sufferings which stimulate him to suicide, he names "the pangs of despised love," and his first experiment of assumed madness is made upon her. He treats her with a revolting mixture of ardent passion, of gross indelicacy, and of rudeness little short of brutality-at one moment he is worshipping at her feet at the next, insulting her with coarse indecency--at the third, taunting her with sneering and sarcastic advice to go to a nunnery. And is this the language of splendid intellect in alliance with acute feeling? Aye-under the unsupportable pressure of despised love, combined with a throne lost by usurpation, and a father murdered by a mother and an uncle, an incestuous marriage between the criminals, and the apparition, from the eternal world, of his father's spirit, commanding him to avenge the deed.

The revelation from the ghost caps the climax of calamity. It unsettles that ardent and meditative mind-you see it in the tone of levity instantly assumed upon the departure of the " perturbed spirit" —you see it in the very determination to "put on an antic disposition." It is the expedient of a deadly, but irresolute purpose. He will execute the command of his father, but he will premeditate the time, the place, the occasion, and to fore-arrange the most