with the dry coolness which belongs to true natures, and which is also apparent, in the first scenes, in Cordelia and Desdemona. We know not what it costs her when she promises obedience to her father's stricter and weightier authority, "I will obey, sir"; further she says nothing. What is passing within her a good actress must tell us by a tone that reveals to us that under this obedience her heart is breaking, when she says, "With almost all the holy vows of Heaven." In this patriarchal submission to her father, in this touching defencelessness, this inability of resistance, which characterizes natures that are boundlessly good and created only for love, she allows herself without demur to be used, when she is sent in Hamlet's way, that they may talk together, while her father and the King privily listen; Hamlet, under the mask of madness, treats her rudely; the pure nobleness of her true, unstained tenderness speaks in the sorrowful words with which the return of his gifts is accompanied; unsuspicious, she believes in his feigned madness; and then her pain breaks out into a lament that points to an abyss from which comes no speech. The deepest tone of the heart, of which a voice is capable, is demanded in this soliloquy; there are few tragic passages sadder or more moving than, "And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, that sucked the honey of his music vows." If it ever can be said of a poetical creation that it has fragrancy in it, it is this picture of the crazed Ophelia, and the inmost secret of this bewitching fragrancy is innocence. Nothing deforms her; not the lack of sense in her sense, not the rude naïveté of those snatches of song: a soft mist, a twilight is drawn around her, veiling the rough reality of insanity, and in this sweet veil, this dissolving melancholy, the story of her death is told.VISCHER, Kritische Gänge. Beyond every character that Shakspeare has drawn (Hamlet alone excepted), that of Ophelia makes us forget the poet in his own creation. Whenever we bring her to mind, it is with the same exclusive sense of her real ex istence, without reference to the wondrous power which called her into life. The effect (and what an effect!) is produced by means so simple, by strokes so few, and so unobtrusive, that we take no thought of them. It is so purely natural and unsophisticated, yet so profound in its pathos, that, as Hazlitt observes, it takes us back to the old ballads; we forget that, in its perfect artlessness, it is the supreme and consummate triumph of art.-Jameson, Shakespeare's Heroines. With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has Shakspeare drawn the pathos of Ophelia's fate! It begins to infect us as soon as we discover that she loves; for her lover receives the visits of a murdered father. We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into what tragedies that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, while she walks unconsciously so close that her garments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the greaves of the grisly visitant. Her helplessness is not cast in a faint outline against the background of these palace treacheries and lusts; but it appears in startling vividness, because she is so pure, so remote from all the wicked world, so slenderly fitted out to contend with it. Tears are summoned when we see how simple she is, and fashioned solely for dependence: a disposition, not a will; a wife for Hamlet's will, but poor to husband one of her own. What will become of her? What becomes of the vine when lightning splits its oak? The clipping tendrils and soft green have lost their reason for existing when the wood which centuries have grained is blasted in an hour. She will shrink into herself, will sicken, grow sere, rustle to and fro. Her leaves will blab loose songs to every wanton wind. To wither is all that is left to do, since all that she could do was to love, to climb, to cling, to cloak ruggedness with grace, to make strength and stature serve to lift and develop all her beauteous quality.-WEISS, Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare. THE QUEEN The Queen is a weak thing; she is Hamlet's mother. Her share in the crime remains doubtful; she is a receiver of stolen goods, buys stolen things cheap, and never asks if a theft has been committed. The King's masculine art overpowers her; her son's lamp of conscience, not lighted until midnight, burns only until morning, and she awakes with the sins of the day before.-BOERNE, Gesammelte Shriften, Dram. Blätter. The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and, to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage "o'er-hasty" (II, ii, 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be happy in it in a good-humored sensual fashion. Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her, the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not last, and so at the end of the in terview (III, iv, 180 ff.) he adds a warning that if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as well.1 It is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in breaking off her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does feel remorse; and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives her husband a false account of Polonius's death, and is silent about the appearance of the Ghost. She becomes miserable; To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss. She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If she had sense to realize Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull. The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic. She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires. These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet: No, no, the drink, the drink,-O my dear Hamlet,— [Dies. Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic with a realism so daring and yet so true to "the modesty of nature"?-BRADLEY, Shakespearean Tragedy. 1 I. e. the King will kill her to make all sure. POLONIUS Greatness of Polonius is the comic character of the play. As Shakespeare advanced in art he threw aside the rude merriment of the clown, and contrived to satisfy the pit's demand for humor by the introduction of a laughable character as one of the regular dramatis persona, and in the earlier part of Hamlet this role is played by Polonius. Polonius is the true father of both Laertes and Ophelia. mind is utterly absent from his system. He is fitted out with a stock of "old saws and modern instances," which serve as contrasts to the imbecility of his own behavior. As a young man he has had the same pleasant trick of lecturing his friends as Laertes has now, and it has grown upon him. His loquaciousness has increased with his years. In figure he is ungainly to the point of exciting merriment, and though Shakespeare never raises laughter at mere deformity, he makes the combination of self-satisfied imbecility with ludicrous incompetence both of mind and body sufficiently amusing.-RANSOME, Short Studies of Shakespeare's Plots. I see in Polonius a real statesman. Discreet, politic, keen-sighted, ready at the council board, cunning upon occasions, he had been valued by the deceased King, and is now indispensable to his successor. How much he suspected as to the death of the former King, or how sincerely he accepted that event, the poet does not tell us. When Polonius speaks to Ophelia of her relations to Hamlet, he pretends ignorance; he has only heard through others that his daughter talks with the prince, and often and confidentially. Here the cunning courtier shows himself, for the visits of the prince to his house could not have been unknown to him. But these visits were made in the time of the late King, and afterwards in the interregnum before the new ruler ascended the throne. The election was doubtful; Hamlet, as we know, had the first right, and the prospect of becoming father-in-law to the King was |