“O Hamlet, thou hast rent my heart in twain!”
he said,—
“O throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half.
Good-night: but go not to my uncle’s bed:
Assume a virtue if you have it not,”—
he compressed into his utterance, in one indescribable mixture, a world of entreaty, command, disgust, grief, deference, love, and mournfulness.
The scene in the church-yard was one full of felicitous design and execution. Entering slowly with Horatio, he seemed, as he looked about, invested with a religious reverence. Then he sat down on a tombstone, and entered easily into conversation in a humorous vein with the clown who was digging a grave. At the same time he kept up an even flow of understanding with Horatio. He so bore himself that the audience could reach no foregone conclusion to withdraw their absorbed attention from the strange funereal phantasmagoria on which the curtain was soon to sink like a pall. Over the skull of Yorick, in quick transition from the bantering with the clown, his reminiscences, not far from mirth, his profound yet simple moralizing, so heartfelt and natural, were naïve and solemn and pathetic to the verge of smiles and awe and tears. When he learned that Ophelia was dead, and that this grave was for her, he staggered, and bent his head for a moment on the shoulder of his friend Horatio. Though so quickly done, it told the whole story of his love for her and his enforced renunciation.
Of all who have acted the part no one perhaps has ever done such complete justice to the genius of Hamlet as Forrest did in his noble delivery of the great speeches and soliloquies, with full observance of every requirement of measure, accent, inflection, and relative importance of thought. Some admired actors rattle the words off with no sense whatever of the fathomless depths of meaning in them. In the famous description by Hamlet of the disenchanting effect of his heavy-heartedness the voice of Forrest brought the very objects spoken of before the hearer,—the goodly frame, the earth; the most excellent canopy, the air; the brave overhanging firmament; the majestical roof fretted with golden fire. And when, turning from the beauty of the material universe to the greater glory and mystery of the divine foster-child and sovereign of the earth, man, he altered the tone of admiration to a tone of awe, his speech stirred the soul like the grandest chords in the Requiem of Mozart, thrilling it with sublime premonitions of its own infinity.
Forrest thoroughly understood from the combined lessons of experience and study the irremediable unhappiness and skepticism of the great, dark, tender, melancholy soul of Hamlet,—how sick he was at heart, how nauseated with the faithless shallowness of the hangers-on at court, how weary of life. He comprehended the misery of the affectionate nature that had lost all its illusions and was unable to reconcile itself to the loss,—the unrest of the ardent imagination that could not forego the search for happiness though constantly finding but emptiness and desolation. And he made all this so clear that he actually startled and spell-bound the audience by his interpretation of the wonderful soliloquy wherein Hamlet debates whether he had not better with his own hand seize that consummation of death so devoutly to be wished, and escape