In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain.”
To these words Forrest imparted an expression loaded with the whole darkening and dislocating effect which the vision and injunction of his father had exerted on him and was thenceforth to exert. For he was changed beyond the power of recovery. He now moves through the mysteries of the play, himself the densest mystery of all, at once shedding and absorbing night, his steady purpose drifting through his unstable plans, and his methodical madness hurrying king, queen, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, and himself to their tragic doom. The load of his supernatural mission darkens every prospect; yet his royal reason rifts the darkness with its flashes, the splendor of his imagination flings rainbows around him, and the native tenderness of his heart contrasts with his hard and lonely fate like an Alpine rose springing from the crags and pressing its fragrant petals against the very glacier. He was unhappy before, because his faculties transcended his conditions, his boundless soul chafed under the trifles of every-day experience, and his nobleness revolted from the hollow shams and frivolous routine which he saw so clearly. But now that the realm of the dead has opened on him, filling him with distressful doubts and burdening him with distasteful duty, revealing murder on the throne and making love and joy impossible, his miserable dejection becomes supreme. He seeks to escape from the pressure of his doom in thought, conversation, friendship, sportive wit. Embittered by his knowledge, he turns on the shallow and treacherous praters about him with a sarcastic humor which seems not part of his character but elicited from him by accidents and glittering out of his gloom like lamplight reflected on an ebony caryatid, or like a scattered rosary of stars burning in a night of solid black.
Forrest endeavored to represent in their truth the rapid succession of transitory and contradictory moods of Hamlet and yet never to lose the central thread of unity on which they were strung. That unity was imaginative intellectuality, introspective skepticism, profound unhappiness, and a shrinking yet persistent determination to avenge the murder of his father. The great intelligence and skill of the actor were proved by his presenting both the variety and the unity, and never forgetting that his portraiture was of a refined and scholarly prince and a satirical humorist who loved solitude and secrecy and would rather be misunderstood than reveal himself to the crowd. Among the many delicate shadings of character exemplified in the impersonation one of the quietest and best was the contrast of his sharp lawyer-like manner of cross-examining Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and detecting that in the disguise of friends they were really spies, with the thoughtful and gracious kindness of his dealing with the players. Seated part of the time, he spoke to the poor actor like an old friend, and called him back, when he was retiring, to add another thought, and finally dismissed him with a sympathetic touch on his shoulder and a smile.
The closet scene with the queen-mother, as Forrest played it, was a model of justness. He began in a respectful and sorrowing tone. Gradually, as he dwelt on her faithlessness to his father, and her loathsome sensuality, his glowing memory and burning words wrought him up to vehement indignation, and he appeared on the point of offering violence, when the ghost reappeared with warning signal and message. The suddenness of change in his manner—pallor of face, shrunken shoulders, fixed dilatation of eyes—was electrifying. And when in response to the queen’s