Hor. What is it, you would see? If aught of woe, or wonder, cease your search. Fort. This quarry cries on havock!-O proud death! What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,2 That thou so many princes, at a shot, So bloodily hast struck? 1 Amb. The sight is dismal; And our affairs from England come too late: The ears are senseless, that should give us hearing, That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead: Where should we have our thanks? Hor. Not from his mouth,3 Had it the ability of life to thank you; He never gave commandment for their death. a towering passion," I think, he means, into a lofty expression (not of resentment, but) of sorrow. So, in King John, Vol. VII, p. 330, n. 3: "She is sad and passionate at your highness' tent." Again, more appositely in the play before us: "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." I may also add, that he neither assaulted, nor insulted Laertes, till that nobleman had cursed him, and seized him by the throat. Malone. 1 This quarry cries on havock!] Sir T. Hanmer reads: cries out, havock! To cry on, was to exclaim against. I suppose, when unfair sportsmen destroyed more quarry or game than was reasonable, the censure was to cry, Havock. Johnson. We have the same phraseology in Othello, Act V, sc. i: 66 Whose noise is this, that cries on murder?" See the note there. Malone. 2 What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,] Shakspeare has already employed this allusion to the Choe, or feasts of the dead, which were anciently celebrated at Athens, and are mentioned by Plutarch in The Life of Antonius. Our author likewise makes Talbot say to his son in The First Part of King Henry VI: 3 "Now art thou come unto a feast of death." Steevens. his mouth,] i. e. the king's. Steevens. And let me speak, to the yet unknowing world, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause ;7 Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I 8 And call the noblest to the audience. give order, that these bodies 9 High on a stage be placed to the view;] This idea was apparently taken from Arthur Brooke's Tragicall Hystory of Romeus and Juliet, 1562: "The prince did straight ordaine, the corses that wer founde, “Should be set forth upon a stage hye raysed from the grounde," &c. Steevens. 5 Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts;] Carnal is a word used by Shakspeare as an adjective to carnage Ritson. Of sanguinary and unnatural acts, to which the perpetrator was instigated by concupiscence, or, to use our poet's own words, by "carnal stings. "The speaker alludes to the murder of old Hamlet by his brother, previous to his incestuous union with Gertrude. A Remarker asks, "was the relationship between the usurper and the deceased king a secret confined to Horatio?"No, but the murder of Hamlet by Claudius was a secret which the young prince had imparted to Horatio, and had imparted to him alone; and to this it is he principally, though covertly, alludes.-Carnal is the reading of the only authentick copies, the quarto, 1604, and the folio, 1623. The modern editors, following a quarto of no authority, for carnal, read cruel. Malone. The edition immediately preceding that of Mr. Malone, reads -carnal, and not cruel, as here asserted. Reed. 6 Of deaths put on —] i. e. instigated, produced. See Vol. XIII, p. 84, n. 1. Malone. 7 and forced cause;] Thus the folio. The quartos read— and for no cause. Steevens. 8 some rights of memory in this kingdom,] Some rights, which are remembered in this kingdom. Malone. But let this same be presently perform'd, Even while men's minds are wild; lest more mischance, On plots, and errors, happen. Fort. Let four captains Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; For he was likely, had he been put on, To have prov'd most royally: and, for his passage, Take up the bodies:-Such a sight as this [A dead March. [Exeunt, bearing off the dead Bodies; after which, a Peal of Ordnance is shot off.1 9 And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more: :] No is the reading of the old quartos, but certainly a mistaken one. We say, a man will no more draw breath; but that a man's voice will draw no more, is, I believe, an expression without any authority. I choose to espouse the reading of the elder folio: And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more. And this is the poet's meaning. Hamlet, just before his death, had said: "But I do prophecy, the election lights "On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice; "So tell him," &c. Accordingly, Horatio here delivers that message; and very justly infers, that Hamlet's voice will be seconded by others, and procure them in favour of Fortinbras's succession. Theobald. New 1 If the dramas of Shakspeare were to be characterised, 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. The scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity; with merriment that includes judicious and instructive observations; and solemnity not strained by poetical violence above the natural sentiments of man. characters appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth, the mournful distraction of Ophelia fills the heart with tenderness, and every personage produces the effect intended, from the apparition that in the first Act chills the blood with horror, to the fop in the last, that exposes affectation to just contempt. The conduct is perhaps not wholly secure against objections. The action is indeed for the most part in continual progression, but there are some scenes which neither forward nor retard it. Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity. He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty. Hamlet is, through the whole piece, rather an instrument than an agent. After he has, by the stratagem of the play, convicted the King, he makes no attempt to punish him; and his death is at last effected by an incident which Hamlet had no part in producing. The catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity, than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the dagger, and Laertes with the bowl. The poet is accused of having shown little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose: the revenge which he demands is not obtained, but by the death of him that was required to take it; and the gratification, which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious. Johnson. The levity of behaviour which Hamlet assumes immediately after the disappearance of the Ghost in the first Act (sc. v,] has been objected to; but the writer of some sensible Remarks on this tragedy, published in 1736, justly observes, that the poet's object there was, that Marcellus "might not imagine that the Ghost had revealed to Hamlet some matter of great consequence to him, and that he might not therefore be suspected of any deep design." "I have heard (adds the same writer) many persons wonder, why the poet should bring in this Ghost in complete armour.-İ think these reasons may be given for it. We are to consider, that he could introduce him in these dresses only; in his regal dress, in a habit of interment, in a common habit, or in some fantastick one of his own invention. Now let us examine, which was most likely to affect the spectators with passions proper on the occasion. "The regal habit has nothing uncommon in it, nor surprising, nor could it give rise to any fine images. The habit of interment was something too horrible; for terror, not horror, is to be raised in the spectators. The common habit (or habit de ville, as the French call it,) was by no means proper for the occasion. It remains then that the poet should choose some habit from his own brain: but this certainly could not be proper, because invention in such a case would be so much in danger of falling into the grotesque, that it was not to be hazarded. "Now as to the armour, it was very suitable to a king who is described as a great warrior, and is very particular; and consequently affects the spectators without being fantastick. "The king spurs on his son to revenge his foul and unnatural murder, from these two considerations chiefly; that he was sent into the other world without having had time to repent of his sins, and without the necessary sacraments, according to the church of Rome, and that consequently his soul was to suffer, if not eternal damnation, at least a long course of pennance in purgatory; which aggravates the circumstances of his brother's barbarity; and secondly, that Denmark might not be the scene of usurpation and incest, and the throne thus polluted and profaned. For these reasons he prompts the young prince to revenge; else it would have been more becoming the character of such a prince as Hamlet's father is represented to have been, and more suitable to his present condition, to have left his brother to the divine punishment, and to a possibility of repentance for his base crime, which, by cutting him off, he must be deprived of. "To conform to the ground-work of his plot, Shakspeare makes the young prince feign himself mad. I cannot but think this to be injudicious; for so far from securing himself from any violence which he feared from the usurper, it seems to have been the most likely way of getting himself confined, and consequently debarred from an opportunity of revenging his father's death, which now seemed to be his only aim; and accordingly it was the occasion of his being sent away to England; which design, had it taken effect upon his life, he never could have revenged his father's murder. To speak truth, our poet by keeping too close to the ground-work of his plot, has fallen into an absurdity; for there appears no reason at all in nature, why the young prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as possible, especially as Hamlet is represented as a youth so brave, and so careless of his own life. "The case indeed is this, Had Hamlet gone naturally to work, as we could suppose such a prince to do in parallel circumstances, there would have been an end of our play. The poet, therefore, was obliged to delay his hero's revenge: but then he should have contrived some good reason for it. "His beginning his scenes of Hamlet's madness by his behaviour to Ophelia, was judicious, because by this means he might be thought to be mad for her, not that his brain was disturbed about state affairs, which would have been dangerous. "It does not appear whether Ophelia's madness was chiefly for her father's death, or for the loss of Hamlet. It is not often that young women run mad for the loss of their fathers. It is more natural to suppose that, like Chimene, in the Cid, her great sorrow proceeded from her father's being killed by the man she loved, and thereby making it indecent for her ever to marry him. "Laertes's character is a very odd one; it is not easy to say whether it is good or bad: but his consenting to the villainous contrivance of the usurper's to murder Hamlet, makes him much more a bad man than a good one. It is a very nice conduct in the poet to make the usurper build his scheme upon the generous unsuspicious temper of the person he intends to murder, and thus to raise the prince's character by the confession of his enemy; to make the villain ten times more odious from his own |