But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may be no more elaborate than those of a guignol in the Champs-Elysées.
Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted.
His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day, with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage saying, "This is Elsinore."
One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them.
With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, Gervinus, with the commentary of Wilhelm Meister in our minds, not to speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our fathers—though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us of today—that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world.
When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well thought of him,—Ophelia and Horatio,—and as one who saw him only as he sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his knees.
Ophelia's
Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state;
the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"—the soldier for whose passage Fortinbras commanded
The soldier's music and the rites of war.