HAMLET.
The clear good sense, the trained professional skill, and the deep personal experience of Forrest gave him an accurate perception of the general character of Hamlet. There will always be room for critical differences of judgment on the details. But he could not commit the gross blunders illustrated by so many noted actors who have exhibited the enigmatical prince either as a petulant, querulous egotist morbidly brooding over himself and irritable with everybody else, or as a robustious, periwig-pated fellow always in a roaring passion or on the verge of it. Forrest saw in the mind and heart of Hamlet sweet and noble elements of the courtier, the scholar, the philosopher, the poet, and the lover, but joined with a sensitive organization whose nerves were too exquisitely strung not to be a little jangled by the harsh contact of the circumstances into which he was flung. He regarded him as naturally wise, just, modest, and affectionate, but by his experience of wrong and fickleness in others, and of disturbed health in himself, led to an exaggerated self-consciousness profoundly tinged with mournfulness and easily provoked to sarcasm. In the melancholy young Dane was embodied the sad malady of the highest natures, the great spiritual disease of modern life,—an over-excited intellectuality dwelling with too much eagerness and persistence on the mysteries of things; allured, perplexed, baffled, vainly trying to solve the problems of existence, injustice, misery, death, and wearying itself out with the restless effort. Thus there is produced a tendency of blood to the head, which leaves the extremities cold, the centres congested, and the surface anæmic. The fevered and hungry brain devours the juices of the body, the exhausted organic and animal functions complainingly react on the spiritual nature or conscious essence with a wretched depression, everything within is sicklied over with a pale cast of thought, and everything without becomes a sterile and pestilent burden. The strong and gentle nature, finely touched for fine issues, but too delicately poised, is stricken with the disease of introspective inquiry, and, not content to accept things as they are and wholesomely make the best of them, keeps forever probing too curiously into the mysterious cause and import of events, until mental gloom sets in on the lowered physical tone. Then the opening of the supernatural world upon him, revealing the murder of his father and imposing the duty of vengeance, hurries him in his weakened and anxious condition to the edge of lunacy, over which he sometimes purposely affects to pass, and sometimes, in his sleepless care or sudden excitement, is really precipitated. Such was the conception which Forrest strove to represent in his portraiture of Hamlet. And in rendering it he did all he could to neutralize the ill-adaptedness of his stalwart person and abounding vigor for the philosophical and romantic sentimentality of the part by a subdued and pensive manner and a costume which made his figure appear more tall and slender. He laid aside the massive hauteur of his port, and walked the stage and conversed with the interlocutors as a thoughtful scholar would walk the floor of his library and talk with his friends. Even when he broke into passionate indignation or scorn a restraining power of culture and refinement curbed the violence. Still, the incongruity between his form and that of the ideal Hamlet was felt by the audience; and it abated from the admiration and enjoyment due to the sound intelligence, sincere feeling, beautiful elocution, and just acting which he displayed in the performance.
G H Cushman
EDWIN FORREST AS
HAMLET.
Most players of Hamlet, in the scene where he first appears among the courtiers before the king and queen, have taken a conspicuous position, drawing all eyes. Forrest, with a delicate perception that the deep melancholy and suspicion in which he was plunged would make him averse to ostentation, was seen in the rear, as if avoiding notice, and only came forward when the king called him by name with the title of son. He then betrayed his prophetic mislike of his uncle by the dark look and satirical inflection with which he said, aside,—
“A little more than kin and less than kind.”
His reply to the expostulation of his mother against his grief seeming so particular and persistent,—
“Seems, madam: nay, it is: I know not seems.
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,”—