Volume Ii Part 26 (1/2)

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go,--

O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wis.h.i.+ng and willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self remains!

'Ib.' sc. 4.

'Ham'. A b.l.o.o.d.y deed;--almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

'Queen'. As kill a king?

I confess that Shakspeare has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide?

Act iv. sc. 2.

'Ros'. Take you me for a spunge, my lord?

'Ham'. Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities, &c.

Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had pa.s.sed through his mind before;--in fact, in telling home-truths.

Act. iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother concerning the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, pa.s.sion, murder itself--she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of a.s.sociation is instanced in the close:--

My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel.

'Ib.' Gentleman's speech:--

And as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every ward-- They cry, &c.

Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of judgment in Shakspeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, 'rational and consequential,' reflection in these lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions.

'Ib.' King's speech:--

There's such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but peep to what it would, Acts little of his will.

Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspeare never intended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so.

'Ib.' Speech of Laertes:--

To h.e.l.l, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!