... This not to do,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you, swear.
GHOST [beneath]. Swear.
HAM. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!"
The sensitive organization which makes Hamlet what he is has been too rudely handled: the machine, too delicate for the rough work of every-day life, breaks down, under the strain. The horror of the time—beginning with Horatio's story of the apparition, and growing more fearful with every moment of reflection, until Hamlet longs for the coming of the dread hour—reaches a point beyond which human nature has no power to endure. If he could share his burden with his friend Horatio,—but Marcellus thrusts himself forward, and he checks the half-uttered confidence, and struggles to put aside their curiosity with trifling words. Anything, to be alone and free to think on what he has heard and what he has to do. And then,—as he is swearing them to secrecy before escaping from them,—there, from under their feet and out of the solid earth, comes the voice whose adieu is yet ringing in his ears. In terror they hurry to another spot; but the awful voice follows their steps, and its tones shake the ground under them. What wonder, if, broken down by all this, Hamlet utters words which would be irreverent in their levity, were they not terrible in their wildness? Have you never marked what pathos there is in a very trivial phrase used by one so crushed down by grief that he acts and speaks like a little child?
It is wonderful that a great actor should neglect a passage that paints with one touch Hamlet's half-hysterical state. Given as it might be given, it would curdle the blood in your veins. I asked the best Hamlet it has been my fortune to see, why he left out these lines. "I have often thought I would speak them; but I don't know how." That was his answer, and a very honest one it was. But such a reason is not worthy of any man who dares to play Hamlet,—much less of one who plays it as —— does.
It is curious to observe how persistently the players, in making up the stage-travesties of Shakespeare's plays, have followed the uncertain lead of the quartos, where they and the folio differ. It almost seems as if the stage-editors found something more congenial in a text made up from the actors' recollections, plentifully adorned with what we now call "gag." They appear to forget one capital fact: that Shakespeare was at once actor, author, and manager,—that he wrote for the stage exclusively, producing plays for the immediate use of his own company,—and that his plays may therefore be reasonably supposed to be "adapted to representation" in their original state. Does Mr. Crummles know better than Master Shakespeare knew how "Romeo and Juliet" should be ended with the best effect,—not only to the ear in the closet, but theatrically on the stage? The story was not a new one; and the dramatist deliberately followed one of two existing versions rather than the other. In Boisteau's translation of Bandello's novel, Juliet wakes from her trance before Romeo's death; in Brooke's poem, which the great master chose to adopt as his authority, all is over, and she wakes to find her lover dead. Garrick must needs know better than Shakespeare, the actor-author; and no stage Romeo has the grace to die until he has, in elegant phrase, "piled up the agony" with lines like these:—
"JULIET. ... Death's in thy face.
ROM. It is indeed. I struggle with him now:
The transports that I felt,