SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMMENTATORS
It was a favourite wish of the beneficent Caligula that all mankind had but one neck, that he might finish them off at a single chop. It would ill comport with my known modesty, were I to lay claim to any thing like the all-embracing humanity of the old Roman philanthropist; but I must acknowledge that I have frequently felt inclined to apply his pious aspiration to the commentators on Shakespeare. Impatience is not my prevailing weakness; but these pestilent annotators have often been instrumental in convincing me that I am no stoic. I have frequently regretted the days of my youth, when no envious commentary obscured the brilliancy of that genius which has consecrated the language through which it finds utterance, and made it venerable to the scholars of all lands and ages. My love of Shakespeare, like the gout which has been stinging my right foot all the morning, is hereditary. My revered grandmother was very fond of solid English literature. She had not had, it is true, the advantages which the young people of the present day rejoice in; she had not studied in any of those seminaries which polish off an education in a most Arabian-Nightsy style of expedition, and send a young lady home in the middle of her teens, accomplished in innumerous ologies, and knowing little or nothing that is really useful, or that will attract her to intellectual pursuits or pleasure in after life. She had acquired what is infinitely better than the superficial omniscience which is so much cultivated in these days. The more active duties of life pleased her not; and Shakespeare was the never-failing resource of her leisure hours. Mr. Addison's Spectator was for her a "treasure of contentment, a mine of delight, and, with regard to style, the best book in the world." I shall never forget that happy day (anterior even to the jacket era of my life) when she took me upon her knee, and read to me the speeches of Marullus, and Mark Antony, and Brutus. In that hour I became as sincere a devotee as ever bent down before the shrine of Shakespeare's genius. Nor has that innocent fanaticism abated any of its ardour under the weight laid upon me by increasing years. The theatre has lost many of its old charms for me. The friendships of youth—the only enduring intimacies, for our palms grow callous in the promiscuous intercourse of the world, and cannot easily receive new impressions—have either been terminated by that inexorable power whose chilling touch is merciless alike to love and enmity, or have been interfered with by the varying pursuits of life. But Shakespeare still maintains his wonted sway, and my loyalty to him has not been disturbed by any of the revolutionary movements which have made such changes in most other things. Martin Farquhar Tupper has written, but I am so old-fashioned in my prejudices that I find myself constantly turning to my Shakespeare, in preference even to that gifted and proverbially philosophic bard.
But I am wandering. From the day I have mentioned, Robinson Crusoe was obliged to abdicate, and England's "monarch bard" (as Mr. Sprague calls Anne Hathaway's husband) reigned in his stead. I first devoured the Julius Cæsar. I say "devoured," for no other word will express the eager earnestness with which I read. The last time I read that play through, it was "within a bowshot where the Cæsars dwelt," and but a few minutes' walk from the palace which now holds great Pompey's statua, at whose foot the mighty Julius fell. Increase of appetite grew rapidly by what it fed on, and I was not long in learning as much about the black-clad prince, the homeless king, the exacting usurer, the fat knight and his jolly companions, the remorseful Thane, and generous, jealous Moor, as I knew about Brutus and the other red republican assassins of imperial Rome. My love of Shakespeare was greatly edified by a friendship which I formed in my earliest foreign journeyings. It was before the days of railways,—which, convenient as they are, have robbed travelling of half its zest, by rendering it so common. I had been making a little tour through the north of France. I had admired the white caps and pious simplicity of the peasants of Normandy, and had drunk in that exaltation of soul which the lofty nave of the majestic Cathedral of Amiens always imparts, and was about returning to Paris, when a rheumatic attack arrested my progress and prolonged my stay in the pleasant city of Douai. I there met accidentally with an English monk of that grand old Benedictine order, whose history for more than twelve centuries has been the history of civilization, and literature, and religion. He was descended from one of those old families which refused to modify their creed at the demand of a divorce-seeking king. He was a man of clear intellect and fascinating simplicity of character. He seemed to carry sunshine with him wherever he went. He occupied a professional chair in the English College attached to the Benedictine Monastery at Douai, and when his class hours were ended, he daily came to visit me. His sensible and sprightly conversation did more towards untying the rheumatic knots in my poor shoulder, than all the pills and lotions for which M. le Médecin charged me so roundly. When I visited him in his cell, I found that a well-worn copy of Shakespeare was the only companion of his Breviary, his Aquinas and St. Bernard on his study table. He loved Shakespeare for himself alone. He never used him as a lay figure on which he might display the drapery of a pedant. He hated commentators as heartily as a man so sincerely religious can hate any thing except sin, and was as earnest in his predilection for Shakespeare, "without note or comment," as his dissenting fellow-countrymen would have wished him to be for a similar edition of the only other inspired book in the world. He had his theories, however, concerning Shakespeare's characters, and we often talked them over together; but I must do him the justice to say that he never published any of them. I always regarded this fact as a splendid evidence of the entireness of his self-abnegation, and of his extraordinary advancement in the path of religious perfection. Many have taken the three monastic vows by which he was bound, and have lived up to them with conscientious fidelity; but few scholars have studied Shakespeare as he did, and yet resisted the temptation to tell the world all about it in a book.
Mousing the other day in the library of a venerable citizen of Boston, who is no less skilled in the gospel (let us hope) than in the law, I stumbled over a seedy-looking folio containing A Treatise of Original Sinne, by one Anthony Burgesse, who flourished in England something more than two centuries ago. One of the discoloured fly-leaves of this entertaining tome informed me, in a hand-writing which resembled a dilapidated rail-fence looked at from the window of an express train, that Jacobus Keith me possedit, An. Dom. 1655; and also bore this inscription, so pertinent to my present theme: "Expositors are wise when they are not otherwise." I feel that it is safe to leave my readers to make the application of this apothegm to the Shakespearean annotators of their acquaintance, so few of whom are wise, so many otherwise. I think it was the late Mr. Hazlitt who said (and if it was not, it ought to have been) that if you desire to know to what sublimity human genius is capable of ascending, you must read Shakespeare; but that if you seek to ascertain to what a depth of imbecility the intellect of man may be brought down, you must read his commentators.
Notwithstanding the low estimate which I am inclined to place upon the labour of the majority of the commentators on Shakespeare, still I have often felt a strong temptation to enroll myself among them. Not all their stupidity in explaining things which are clear to the meanest capacity, not all their pedantry in elucidating matters which are simply inexplicable, not all their inordinate voluminousness, could quench my ambition to fasten my roll of waste paper to the bob (already so unwieldy) of the Shakespearean kite. Others have soared into fame by such means; why should not I? We ought not to study Shakespeare so many years for nothing, and I feel that a sacred duty would be neglected if the result of my researches were withheld from my suffering fellow-students. But let me be more merciful than other commentators; let me confine my remarks to a single play. From that one you may learn the tenor of my theories concerning the others; and if you wish for another specimen, I shall consider that I have achieved an unheard-of triumph in this department of literature.
The tragedy of Hamlet has always been regarded as one of the most creditable of Shakespeare's performances. It needs no new commendation from me. Dramatic composition has made great progress within the two hundred and sixty years that have elapsed since Hamlet was written, yet few better things are produced nowadays. We may as well acknowledge the humiliating fact that Hamlet, with all its age, is every whit as good as if it had been written since Lady Day, and were announced on the playbills of to-morrow night, with one of Mr. Boucicault's most eloquent and elaborate prefaces. The character of Hamlet has been much discussed, but, with all due respect for the genius of those who have fatigued their reader with their treatment of the subject, I would humbly suggest that they are all wrong. Hamlet resembles a picture which has been scoured, and retouched, and varnished, and restored, until you can hardly see any thing of the original. Critics and commentators have bedaubed the original character so thoroughly, and those credulous people who rejoice that Chatham's language is their mother tongue, have heard so much of their estimate of Hamlet's character, that they receive them on faith, flattering themselves all the while that they are paying homage to the Hamlet of Shakespeare. High-flown philosophy exerts its powers upon the theme, and Goethe gives it as his opinion that the dramatist wished to portray the effects of a great action, imposed as a duty upon a mind too feeble for its accomplishment, and compares it to an oak planted in a china vase, proper to receive only the most delicate flowers, and which flies to pieces as soon as the roots begin to strike out.
Now let us drop all this metaphysical and poetical cant, and go back to the play itself. Shakespeare will prove his own best expositor, if we read him with docile minds, having previously instructed ourselves concerning the history of the time of which he wrote. There is a tradition common in the north of Ireland that Hamlet's father was a native of that country, named Howndale, and that he followed the trade of a tailor; that he was captured by the Danes, in one of their expeditions against that fair island, and carried to Jutland; that he married and set up in business again in that cold region, but that he afterwards forsook the sartorial for the regal line, by usurping the throne of Denmark. The tradition represents him to have been a man of violent character, a hard drinker, and altogether a most unprincipled and unamiable person, though an excellent tailor. Now, if we take the old chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus, (Historia Danorum,) from which Shakespeare drew the plot for his tragedy, we shall find there little that does not harmonize with this tradition. Saxo Grammaticus tells us that Hamlet was the son of Horwendal, who was a famous pirate of Jutland, whom the king, Huric, feared so much, that, to propitiate him, he was obliged to appoint him governor of Jutland, and afterwards to give him his daughter Gertrude in marriage. Thus he obtained the throne. The old Irish name, Howndale, might easily have been corrupted into Horwendal by the jaw-breaking Northmen, and for the rest, the Danish chronicle and the Irish tradition are perfectly consistent. That there was frequent communication at that early period between Denmark and Ireland, I surely need not take the trouble to prove. All the early chronicles of both of those countries bear witness to it. It was to the land evangelized by St. Patrick that Denmark was indebted for the blessings of education and the Christian faith. But the visits of the Danes were not dictated by any holy zeal for the salvation or mental advancement of their benefactors, if we may believe all the stories of their piratical expeditions. An Irish monk of the great monastery of Banchor, who wrote very good Latin for the age in which he lived, alludes to this period in his country's history in a poem, one line of which is sometimes quoted, even now:—
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
"Time was, O Danes, we feared your gifts."
The great Danish poet, Œhlenschlæger, makes frequent allusions in the course of his epic, The Gods of the North, to the relations that once existed between Denmark and Ireland, and to the fact that his native land received from Ireland the custom of imbibing spirituous liquors in large quantities.
Hamlet's Irish parentage would naturally be concealed as much as possible by him, as it might prejudice his claims to the throne of Denmark; therefore we can hardly expect to find the ancient legend confirmed in the play, except in a casual manner. The free, outspoken, Irish nature would make itself known occasionally. Thus we find that when Horatio tells him that "there's no offence," he rebukes him with