"Deutschland ist Hamlet! Ernst und stumm
In seinen Thoren jede Nacht
Geht die begrabne Freiheit um,
Und winkt den Männern auf der Wacht.
Da steht die Hohe, blank bewehrt,
Und sagt dem Zaudrer, der noch zweifelt:
'Sei mir ein Rächer, zieh dein Schwert!
Man hat mir Gift in's Ohr geträufelt.'"
XVIII
HAMLET AS A CRITIC
Along with so much else, Hamlet gives us what we should scarcely have expected—an insight into Shakespeare's own ideas of his art as poet and actor, and into the condition and relations of his theatre in the years 1602-3.
If we read attentively the Prince's words to the players, we see clearly why it is always the sweetness, the mellifluousness of Shakespeare's art that his contemporaries emphasise. To us he may seem audacious, harrowingly pathetic, a transgressor of all bounds; in comparison with contemporary artists—not only with the specially violent and bombastic writers, like the youthful Marlowe, but with all of them—he is self-controlled, temperate, delicate, beauty-loving as Raphael himself. Hamlet says to the players—
"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows, and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'er-doing—Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
"I Play. I warrant your honour.
"Ham. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor."
Here ought logically to follow a warning against the dangers of excessive softness and sweetness. But it does not come. He continues—