‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The expectancy and rose of the fair state.’
Let us look at this Prince, almost a fairy one, thirty years of age, too good for the earth, not good enough for Heaven. You know what he says: ‘What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?’
Well, instead of being thin as in the picture, and fancy he is; by his mother’s, the queen’s, words, ‘He’s fat, and scant of breath. Heere’s a napkin, rub thy browes, the Queen carowses to thy fortune, Hamlet.’ Of course it’s very well to wriggle and say oh, that, like the ‘beard,’ was put in to suit Burbage. Even letting this be the case, Shakespeare studied an actor more than the reputation of his first work. Then he is so poetical and wanting in action, so unable to grapple with the wicked things of this world.
Oh! is he. When the king ships him to Britain, he puts the names of his false friends where his own stood, so that the British king has them beheaded and not Hamlet.
Now for the Queen, and Laertes, and the King. Of a sudden, like acted upon by a magician’s wand, they turn bad all at once. It even worries and bothers Hamlet. He can’t understand why his mother should have taken so queer a fancy as to prefer his uncle to his far handsomer father. And Laertes who gives such nice advice to his sister, and for his cad-like conduct receives a very proper rebuke from her, turns from a seemingly-virtuous young gentleman to a mean and despicable assassin. And Ophelia, that beauteous and correct damsel, is easily made to act as a spy upon her lover. And this without one word of caution to him, or the least expression of regret for such, at the mildest, unlady-like, unwoman-like, and altogether unchristian-like conduct.
Other minor faults and absurdities occur, as Hamlet’s remark after he had seen his father’s spirit:—
‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’
This Hamlet may in some shadowy way or other forecast our life here and what the majority of us do in it—nothing. Leave all to the crack of doom and then down we go all together. Our talking as angels, some of us, and acting like fools, most of us, may be all here parabled out.”
As Mr. Wilson Barrett’s revival of Hamlet was a success, it was quite in the order of things that it should be burlesqued, and that he and the members of his company should be caricatured.