Part 8 (2/2)

Questions of religion were not permitted to be treated on the stage.

But not merely the one deeply intelligent person for whom Shakspere asks the players to act, and for whom the great master certainly endeavoured to write--no, the public at large, too, will have understood that the 'course of thought' which induced Hamlet to forego action from a subtle refinement of cruelty, was not the course of thought prevalent on this side of the Channel, and held up, in this important scene, as that of a hero to be admired.

Hamlet resolved upon keeping out the soul of Nero from his 'firm bosom.'

(What a satire there is in this adjective 'firm'!) He means to be cruel, but not unnatural; he will 'speak daggers, but use none.' A man who lets himself be moved by extraneous circ.u.mstances is not his own master. In cruel, unnatural manner, for no object whatever, he murders poor Polonius. Then he begins to speak daggers in such a manner as to get into a perfect ecstasy. Nor need any priest have been ashamed of the sermon he preaches to his own mother.

In the first edition of 'Hamlet,' the scene between mother and son is rather like a sketch in which most things are merely indicated, not worked out. Only the part of the Ghost, with the exception of the line:--

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,

which is wanting in the first edition, and Hamlet's address to the Ghost, are in both quartos the same. Even as in the first act, so this time also, Hamlet, on seeing the Ghost, calls upon the saints:--

Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings, You heavenly guards!

This was the usual course on the occasion of such doubtful apparitions, of which one did not know whether they were 'airs of heaven' or 'blasts from h.e.l.l.'

A new intercalation is (in the first quarto there is no vestige of it), that Hamlet reproaches his mother with having degraded 'sweet religion'

to 'a rhapsody of words;' that he says 'the Devil hath conquered her at hoodman blind ;' that she should confess herself to Heaven, and 'a.s.sume a virtue if she have it not;' that 'virtue itself of vice must pardon beg in the fatness of these pursy times, yea, curb and woo, for leave to do him good.' So also is the Queen's question new:--

Ay me, what act, That roars so loud, and thunders in the _index_? [44]

There is no trace, in the first quarto, of the following most characteristic thoughts:--

For, use almost can change the stamp of Nature [45]

And either curb (?) the Devil, or throw him out With wondrous potency....

And when you are desirous to be blest, I'll blessing beg of you.

Let us figure to ourselves before what public Hamlet first saw the wanderer from Purgatory; before what youth he bade Ophelia go to a nunnery; before what men he remained inactive at the critical moment simply because the criminal is engaged in his prayers, whilst his own murdered father died without Holy Communion, without having confessed and received the Extreme Unction. Let us remember before what audience he purposely made the thunders of the Index roar so loud; at what place he gets into ecstasy; and where he first preaches to his mother that the Devil may be mastered and thrown out.

Here, certainly, we have questions of religion!

Shakspere's genius has known how to transport these most important questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy with the pa.s.sionless, indifferent eyes of our century. Many men, no doubt, were filled with the thought, to which Bacon soon gave a scientific form, that the human mind can only make true progress if it turns towards the inquiry into Nature, keeping far away from the hampering influence of transcendental dogmas. The liberal, intellectual tendencies of the Reformation were not yet fettered in England with the new dogmatic strait waistcoat of a narrow-minded, melancholy sect.

And Shakspere's views, which he has embodied in 'Hamlet,' were not in divinatory advance of his age; they were easily comprehensible to the best of his time.

Our chief argument will be contained in the chapter in which we shall hear Shakspere's adversaries launch out furiously against the tendency of this drama. Meanwhile, we will exhaust the course of its action.

Hamlet has already come very near to that point of view where Reason at last ceases to guide his conduct, and where he becomes convinced that indiscretion often is of better service than deep planning.

Now in Montaigne's Essay [46] already mentioned we read:--'When an urgent circ.u.mstance, or any violent or unexpected accident of State necessity, induces a Prince to break his word and faith, or otherwise forces him out of his ordinary duty, he is to ascribe that compulsion to a lash of G.o.d's rod.'

The pa.s.sage in which Hamlet consoles himself in regard to the murder committed against Polonius is new:--

I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so, To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister.

Hamlet, beholding the victim of his indiscretion, excuses himself thus:--

I must be cruel, only to be kind.

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