HAMLET’S LAST SOLILOQUY
(From Fun, 1863.)
Alas! alas! and hath it come to this,
That I, no longer Hamlet, play the Ghost?
And such a Ghost! No old time-honoured vision,
In coat of pasteboard trimm’d with gleaming foil,
With whiten’d visage, and with grizzled wig.
But a mere base delusion of the eye;
A mirror’d image in a showman’s glass,
A conjuror’s trick to set a crowd agape,
I stand, forsooth, upon an English stage
To watch a strutting Frenchman ape my prince!
I to be such a Ghost as this? Yes, I,
Who’ve been the Hamlet of some score of years;
Whose face, shape, elocution, manner, all
Mark me the hero’s true and very self!
I play the Ghost? For me the Ghost may go
To his “sulphureous and”—I mean elsewhere.
Help me! ye Britons! from the Wells of Sadler!
Help me! ye powers of earthly Chancery!
Keen-sighted Wood, and most judicious Westbury,
Help me! I cry. It is your Phelps that calls!
[Rushes out at the rate of £40 a week.