So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, Which have folicited,-The rest is filence. [Dies. HOR. Now cracks a noble heart :-Good night, fweet prince; And flights of angels fing thee to thy rest!* 8 the occurrents,] i. e. incidents. The word is now dif used. So, in The Hog hath lost his Pearl, 1614: " Such strange occurrents of my fore-paft life." Again, in The Barons' Wars, by Drayton, Canto I: "With each occurrent, right in his degree." STEEVENS. 9 Which have folicited, Solicited, for brought on the event. WARBURTON. Warburton says that folicited, means brought on the event; but that is a meaning the word cannot import. That have folicited, means that have excited; but the sentence is left imperfect. M. MASON. What Hamlet would have faid, the poet has not given us any ground for conjecturing. The words feem to mean no more than which have incited me to-. MALONE. * Now cracks a noble heart: Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels fing thee to thy reft!] So, in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1609: "If thou liv'st, Pericles, thou hast a heart, The concluding words of the unfortunate Lord Essex's prayer on the scaffold were these : and when my life and body shall part, fend thy blessed angels, which may receive my foule, and convey it to the joys of heaven." Hamlet had certainly been exhibited before the execution of that amiable nobleman; but the words here given to Horatio might have been one of the many additions made to this play. As no copy of an earlier date than 1604 has yet been discovered, whether Lord Effex's last words were in our author's thoughts, cannot now be afcertained. MALONE. And flights of angels fing thee to thy reft!] Rather from Marston's Infatiate Countess, 1603: "An host of angels be thy convey hence!" STEEVENS. Let us review for a moment the behaviour of Hamlet, on the strength of which Horatio founds this eulogy, and recommends him to the patronage of angels. Why does the drum come hither? [March within. Hamlet, at the command of his father's ghost, undertakes with seeming alacrity to revenge the murder; and declares he will banish all other thoughts from his mind. He makes, however, but one effort to keep his word, and that is, when he mistakes Polonius for the king. On another occafion, he defers his purpose till he can find an opportunity of taking his uncle when he is least prepared for death, that he may insure damnation to his foul. Though he afsaffinated Polonius by accident, yet he deliberately procures the execution of his school-fellows, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who appear not, from any circumstances in this play, to have been acquainted with the treacherous purposes of the mandate they were employed to carry. To embitter their fate, and hazard their punishment beyond the grave, he denies them even the few moments necessary for a brief confeffion of their fins. Their end (as he declares in a subsequent conversation with Horatio) gives him no concern, for they obtruded themselves into the service, and he thought he had a right to destroy them. From his brutal conduct toward Ophelia, he is not less accountable for her distraction and death. He interrupts the funeral defigned in honour of this lady, at which both the king and queen were present; and, by fuch an outrage to decency, renders it still more neceffary for the ufurper to lay a second stratagem for his life, though the first had proved abortive. He infults the brother of the dead, and boafts of an affection for his fifter, which, before, he had denied to her face; and yet at this very time must be confidered as defirous of fupporting the character of a madman, so that the openness of his confeffion is not to be imputed to him as a virtue. He apologizes to Horatio afterwards for the abfurdity of this behaviour, to which, he fays, he was provoked by that nobleness of fraternal grief, which, indeed, he ought rather to have applauded than condemned. Dr. Johnfon has obferved, that to bring about a reconciliation with Laertes, he has availed himself of a dishonest fallacy; and to conclude, it is obvious to the most careless spectator or reader, that he kills the king at last to revenge himself, and not his father. Hamlet cannot be faid to have pursued his ends by very warrantable means; and if the poet, when he facrificed him at last, meant to have enforced such a moral, it is not the worst that can be deduced from the play; for, as Maximus, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Valentinian, fays, Although his justice were as white as truth, "His way was crooked to it; that condemns him." The late Dr. Akenfide once observed to me, that the conduct of Hamlet was every way unnatural and indefenfible, unless he were to be regarded as a young man whose intellects were in some degree Enter FORTINBRAS, the English Ambaffadors, and Others. FORT. Where is this fight? What is it, you would fee? impaired by his own misfortunes; by the death of his father, the lofs of expected fovereignty, and a sense of shame resulting from the hafty and incestuous marriage of his mother. I have dwelt the longer on this fubject, because Hamlet seems to have been hitherto regarded as a hero not undeferving the pity of the audience; and because no writer on Shakspeare has taken the pains to point out the immoral tendency of his character. STEEVENS. Mr. Ritfon controverts the justice of Mr. Steevens's strictures on the character of Hamlet, which he undertakes to defend. The arguments he makes use of for this purpose are too long to be here inferted, and therefore I shall content myself with referring to them. See REMARKS, p. 217, to 224. REED. Some of the charges here brought against Hamlet appear to me questionable at least, if not unfounded. I have already observed that in the novel on which this play is constructed, the minifters who by the king's order accompanied the young prince to England, and carried with them a packet in which his death was concerted, were apprized of its contents; and therefore we may prefume that Shakspeare meant to describe their representatives, Rofencrantz and Guildenstern, as equally criminal; as combining with the king to deprive Hamlet of his life. His procuring their execution therefore does not with certainty appear to have been an unprovoked cruelty, and might have been confidered by him as necessary to his future Safety; knowing, as he must have known, that they had devoted themselves to the service of the king in whatever he should command. The principle on which he acted, is afcertained by the following lines, from which also it may be inferred that the poet meant to represent Hamlet's school-fellows as privy to the plot against his life: "There's letters feal'd: and my two school-fellows- They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way, " And marshall me to knavery: Let it work; " For 'tis the sport, to have the engineer If aught of woe, or wonder, cease your search. "Hoist with his own petar; and it shall go hard, Another charge is, that "he comes to disturb the funeral of Ophelia:" but the fact is otherwise represented in the first scene of the fifth act: for when the funeral procession appears, (which he does not feek, but finds,) he exclaims, "The queen, the courtiers: who is this they follow, nor does he know it to be the funeral of Ophelia, till Laertes mentions that the dead body was that of his fifter. I do not perceive that he is accountable for the madness of Ophelia. He did not mean to kill her father when concealed behind the arras, but the king; and still less did he intend to deprive her of her reason and her life: her subsequent distraction therefore can no otherwise be laid to his charge, than as an unforeseen consequence from his too ardently pursuing the object recommended to him by his father. He appears to have been induced to leap into Ophelia's grave, not with a design to insult Laertes, but from his love to her, (which then he had no reason to conceal,) and from the bravery of ber brother's grief, which excited him (not to condemn that brother, as has been stated, but) to vie with him in the expreffion of affection and forrow: "Why, I will fight with him upon this theme, When Hamlet says, "the bravery of his grief did put me into a towering paffion," I think, he means, into a lofty expression (not of resentment, but) of forrow. So, in King John, Vol. VIII. p. 64. n. 9. "She is fad and passionate at your highness' tent." Again, more appofitely in the play before us: "The inftant burst of clamour that she made, I may alfo add, that he neither affaulted, nor insulted Laertes, till that nobleman had cursed him, and seized him by the throat. MALONE. *be comes-] The words stood thus in edit. 1778, &c. STEEVENS. FORT. This quarry cries on havock! 3-0 proud death! What feast is toward in thine eternal cell, That thou so many princes, at a fhot, So bloodily hast struck? 1. AMB. The fight is dismal; Where should we have our thanks? HOR. Not from his mouth, Had it the ability of life to thank you; 3 This quarry cries on havock!] Sir T. Hanmer reads, cries out, havock! To cry on, was to exclaim against. I suppose, when unfair sportf- We have the fame phraseology in Othello, Act V. fc. i: " See the note there. MALONE. 4 What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,] Shakspeare has already employed this allufion to the Chose, 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 fay to his fon in the First Part of King Henry VI: 5 "Now art thou come unto a feast of death." -his mouth,] i. e. the king's. STEEVENS. give order, that these bodies STEEVENS. High on a stage be placed to the view;) This idea was ap |