ON THE CHARACTER OF HAMLET.

Hamlet has no character--therefore it is that the part cannot be played. It wants individuality. He has attributes, but they belong not to him but to his kind; they take no hue, no aspect from his peculiar conformation or temperament. An actor's attempt to pourtray him must of necessity be a failure. It is a mingled dream of poetry, passion, and repose, blent into such indivisible combination, that any attempt to exhibit one quality, covers up and conceals the others.

Shakspeare himself had no conception of, did not contemplate a corporeal Hamlet, with earthly form and pressure. It is but "a beautiful thought and gently bodied forth;" an exquisite and matchless incongruity. The poet, in framing it, resigned himself to the play of his imagination, not swaying but swayed by its power: or rather the vision created itself in his brain, without any effort of volition on his part to aid or shape the formation.

In the performance, the character of Hamlet varies through almost every scene. It is only in the mind of the reader that the poet, by some peculiar spell, contrives to preserve the individuality, and suggests to you some spiritualized and contemplative

abstraction. In one scene he is a critic, in another a quiz—a moralist, a plodder, a fantastic; and yet, though all the different characters are brought out in perfect distinctness, they are invested with a peculiar atmosphere, that, like mellowing moonlight, chastens down and refines them. Shakspeare himself had no distinct perception of the form which his Hamlet should present to the eye. We have a vague description of him, by Ophelia, which gives nothing but generalities—

"The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue,
sword;

"The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
"The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,
"The observed of all observers."-

This panegyric would prompt us to figure forth something exquisitely finished and elegant; a form, though attenuated by sorrow and solicitude, still finely moulded in the exactest symmetry of graceful beauty; and a cheek, though faded by grief,

"And sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,"

yet still preserving a high and classic expression of refined intellectuality. If he laboured under any bodily malady, it should be of some character which would endear the sufferer, and render him more touchingly interesting-like that of which it has been beautifully said, "The rose whose root is death." Nobody ever contemplated in

"That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth."

a fat asthmatic Hamlet-Shakspeare could have no such conception-and yet he makes the Queen say, in the "foil scene,' -"He's fat and scant of breath."

Then, again, in his age, Shakspeare seems to overlook the character he desires to exhibit. By most readers Hamlet would be considered in his non-age; and this belief gathers strength from his intention of going back to his studies to Wittenberg. Yet we find, in another portion of the text, that Hamlet is exactly thirty years old.

Clown. Of all days in the year I came to it (grave-making) that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras."

Hamlet." How long's that since ?

Clown." Cannot you tell that? every fool can tell that. It was the very day that young Hamlet * I have been sexton here, man and

was born.

**

boy, thirty years."

If thirty years be what Ophelia calls, "the feature of blown youth," she must have referred rather to Patriarchal than modern existence.

These incongruities, as well as every other contradiction in the character-his passion and spirituality his love for Ophelia—

"I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
"Could not, with all their quantity of love,
"Make up my sum"-

and yet his harshness towards her; his desire for

revenge

"Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying;

"And now I'll do't, and so he goes to heaven, &c.

and his indecision and weakness in the execution of it-all can be accounted for, when we reflect that the poet was trying to keep together and combine the wronged and revengeful prince of Saxo Gramaticus' history, with the graceful, gentle, and thoughtlike vision of his own imagination.

Shakspeare would appear to have framed no plan for his Hamlet. Depending entirely upon the story already "extant," he suffered his mind to operate at its will upon the material before it. He shaped no particular course for his imagination to pursue

"But roam'd in the confusion of his heart,
"Alive to all things, but forgetting all.

Hence Hamlet is a wit, a scholar, a metaphysician, a critic, a soldier, a lover, a courtier, but still a contemplative and visionary day-dreamer, whose chiefest and most chosen delight is languidly to revel and repose

"In that sweet mood, when pleasant thoughts
"Bring sad thoughts to the mind."

How could an actor blend, preserve, and exhibit these various and contradictory combinations? His very presence-his real and palpable presence would destroy them. The mingled beauties may be preserved and held together in the closet, they separate and fly from the stage. There is so much for the mind of the reader to invest the character with, that no other mind but our own can perform the task. The reader who would conceive, must for the time be

himself the Hamlet. The idea which the poet would inspire must be created in our own soul, and by the operation of our own imagination. It can never be conjured up through the tones, the looks, the gestures of another. Why then go to see it performed?Merely with a hopeless expectation of a remote possibility. One of those encouragings which we know can never be realized.

Hamlet is too ideal to be invested with individuality by any powers of representation. An attempt to enact any particular scene according to the text, is subversive of the general tone of the character.— Like the conceptions of perfect and abstract beauty in some of the antique statues, reality flies from the abstraction. Semblance to humanity is there, but too etherialized and sublimated for individual comparison. Even in portraitures of less animated vitality this distinction is discernable. Who does not at once distinguish between the real of Salvator Rosa and the imaginary of Claude Lorraine ?

Some critics insist that John Kemble played Hamlet. There was too much hard distinctness, too severe an "outlining" in hisrepresentations to fall in and harmonize with the gentle spirit which so delicately breathes through Shakspeare's fond creation. It is for this charm, and this alone, we cling to it. The natural in passion and feeling is more strongly and distinctly depicted in other of the great master's works. The love of Romeo; the better expressed, though not so well-founded, revenge of Iago: supernatural terror is more highly wrought in the short