We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humourist.
Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak—that side of which comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a world.
In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won.
The soldier—if necessary, the fighter—is there as supple and strong as a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the "something dangerous," for all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness—have a care!—is that of an unusually masculine restraint.
In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's tenderness was almost terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little uncomprehending flower!
"I never gave you aught," as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean: "I gave you all—all that you could not understand." "Yet are not you and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. Is it your father?"
Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his imaginative revitalization of the great old lines—lines worn like a highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine graphically phrased it, "How he revives for us the splendour of the text!"
The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the text is we, of course, all know—know so well that we take it for granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation of such a world of transcendent words.
Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show.
It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling up beneath the voice—springs fed from those infinite sources which "lie beyond the reaches of our souls."