Oph. My honour'd lord, I know right well you did, Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind. Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest? Ham. Are you fair? Ophelia begins with expressing her own thoughts and feelings about her lover's gifts, and though she would in any case have obeyed her father's will, she supposes that now she has only to make the effort of giving Hamlet a momentary pain: for the Queen had just told her, that if this stratagem succeeded in making Hamlet avow his love, that love would be approved and encouraged by them all. Yet she is too simple and innocent to play an actor's part well; and her words become so constrained and unnatural, with their formal Polonius-like moral antithesis and jingle, that we cannot but suspect that he dictated them, as well as prescribed her conduct on the occasion. "Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much directed to her, as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him;-and yet a wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self-tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. I did love you once:'-' I loved you not:'-and more particularly in his enumeration of the faults of the sex from which Ophelia is so free, that the mere freedom therefrom constitutes her character. Note Shakspeare's charm of composing the female character by the absence of characters, that is, marks and outjuttings." When Hamlet, in his first surprise at Ophelia's strange speech asks, 'Are you HAMLET SANE, OR MAD? 63 honest?' he probably means 'Are you sincere in what you say.' But instantly divining the plot he gives a wild, mad tone to the question, by following it immediately with Are you fair?' That Hamlet loves Ophelia constantly and steadily from first to last-never abandoning his love, either from caprice, or any notion of having an incompatible duty-can only be doubted from a misapprehension of his character, and of his conduct in this and other scenes. Ophelia herself does not doubt it; she has not this thought to embitter her grief more deeply, when she exclaims-in that soliloquy which Coleridge justly calls "the perfection of love-so exquisitely unselfish O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword: The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, The observed of all observers! quite, quite down! To have seen what I have seen, see what I see! I have endeavoured already to point out that we can neither assert that Hamlet is mad nor that his mind is perfectly healthy: much confusion and misapprehension about the character of Hamlet have arisen from thus attempting an impossible simplification of what is most complex. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the small critic who thinks he has only to rule two columns, with “ mad” at the top of one, and "sane" at the top of the other, and then put the name of Hamlet in one of the two. Hamlet, like all real men, and especially men such as he, has a character made up of many elements, ramifying themselves in many directions, some being healthy and some diseased, and intertwined now in harmony, now in contradiction, with each other. And accordingly it presents different aspects to different observers, who look from opposite points of view, though each with considerable qualifications for judging rightly. We have just seen the view taken by Ophelia, whose deep love, and woman's tact and sentiment, can best appreciate the finer and more delicate features of Hamlet's character, though she perhaps exaggerates the extent of the untuning of his reason, from the influence of her own fears and of her father's declaration that he had gone mad. The shrewd, clear-headed king, with his wits sharpened by anxiety, considers the question from the side of its practical bearing on his own interests, and sees that as far as these are concerned, Hamlet is not mad, but most dangerously sane :— King Love! his affections do not that way tend; Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little, Was not like madness. There's something in his soul, And I do doubt, the hatch, and the disclose, Will be some danger. This is the common sense view of the case, true as far as it goes, though not the whole truth. The king then shows his usual cool, crafty character, in the plan which he resolves on of sending Hamlet at once to England; in concealing the secret purpose of this, under the natural, sensible, reason : Haply the seas, and countries different, This something-settled matter in his heart; Whereon his brains still beating, puts him thus From fashion of himself: and in making the unsuspecting Polonius a party to the scheme, by craftily asking his opinion : Pol. It shall do well. - What think you on 't? HORATIO'S CHARACTER. 65 ACT III, SCENE 2.-Coleridge calls the dialogue of Hamlet with the players, "one of the happiest instances of Shakspeare's power of diversifying the scene while he is carrying on the plot." And the incidents throughout this play are so many, that Dr. Johnson has said, (with a kind of truth which only makes us feel more the bathos of the assertion, when put forward as an adequate exposition of the idea of the play,) that "if the dramas of Shakspeare were to be characterized, each by the particular excellence which distinguishes it from the rest, we must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous that the argument of the play would make a long tale." Indeed the play is so long, that no modern actors and audience have patience to go through it uncurtailed. Steevens says, it would take almost five hours to represent it as it is printed. But these things, as our great critic has elsewhere incidentally observed, are not accidents or oversights of the poet's work, but the results of his consummate art. "The over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident, or by a fit of passion," allows himself to be the sport of circumstances, and therefore it is that they crowd round him in such variety; he exerts no mastery of will over them, and therefore it is that they linger about him, and he among them, while the action of the piece delays, And, like a wounded snake, draws its slow length along. Hamlet's description of Horatio's character, is now fitly introduced, because we now first learn that he had made him his confidant, and are thus satisfied of the propriety of the confidence. The love, respect, and sincere admiration without flattery, of Hamlet's address, and the modest demeanour of Horatio, have a singular calm about them. We feel the quiet influence of Horatio's presence in the scene. Horatio is the very model of the friend of F a great and good prince. good prince. There is a modest, even humble, recognition of his inferiority in rank, united with a sense of his equality as a man and a friend, which commands our instant respect: and we always see in him that calm, well-disciplined temper, which Hamlet so admires, and which, by its contrast to Hamlet's own impetuous disposition, supplies (as some contrast always is required to do) the bond of their mutual friendship. The introduction of the Interlude (here as in other plays,) heightens our feeling of the main Play being a real action of men and women, while the rhyme, &c., and the whole structure of the Interlude, distinguish it from the real dialogue, in a way corresponding with that which has been pointed out in reference to the player's recital of the speech of Æneas. Of one part of that dialogue it seems desirable to say something. Steevens and others have observed, what almost every page of Beaumont and Fletcher makes certain enough, that the style in which Hamlet talks to Ophelia, represents the manners of the young, and fashionable, and no doubt we may add the virtuous, in Shakspeare's day: and though they would not be thought quite seemly by a French or Italian gentleman of our own time, they certainly would not appear to him, nor to those who heard him, so intolerably offensive, as to our present English taste and feeling. Coleridge has somewhere observed with great truth, that in considering such questions, we must distinguish between morality which is always one and the same, and manners which vary in every age and country: and he has said again,- "there is a state of manners conceivably so pure, that the language of Hamlet at Ophelia's feet might be a harmless rallying, or playful teasing, of a shame that would exist in Paradise......Shakspeare's grossness-that which is really so, independently of the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things indifferent,-........is the mere generalities of sex, |