THIS play is one of the most pleasing of our author's performances. The scenes are busy and various, the incidents numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as tragedy requires. Here is one of the few attempts of Shakspeare to exhibit the conversation of gentlemen, to represent the airy sprightliness of juvenile elegance Dryden mentions a tradition, which might easily reach his time, of a declaration made by Shakspeare, that he was obliged to kill Mercutio in the third Act, lest he should have been killed by him. Yet he thinks him no such formidable person, but that he might have lived through the play, and died in his bed, without danger to the poet. Dryden well knew, had he been in quest of truth, in a pointed sentence, that more regard is commonly had to the words than the thought, and that it is very seldom to be rigorously understood. Mercutio's wit, gaiety, and courage, will always procure him friends that wish him a longer life; but his death is not precipitated, he has lived out the time allotted him in the construction of the play; nor do I doubt the ability of Shakspeare to have continued his existence, thongh some of his sallies are perhaps out of the reach of Dryden; whose genius was not very fertile of merriment, nor ductile to humour, but acute, argumentative, comprehensive, and sublime. The Nurse is one of the characters in which the author delighted he has with great subtility of distinction, drawn her at once loquacious and secret, obsequious and insolent, trusty and dishonest. His comick scenes are happily wrought, but his pathetick strains are always polluted with some unexpected depravations. *) His *) A. W. Schlegel has answered this remark at length, and, as I think, satisfactorily, in a detailed criticism upon this tragedy, published in the Horen, a journal conducted by Schiller in 17941795, and made accessible to the English reader in Ollier's Literary Miscellany. Part 1. In his Lectures on Dramatic Literature (vol. ii. p. 135, Eng. translation), will be found some further sensible remarks upon the conceits' here stigmatized. It should be remembered that playing on words was a very favourite species of wit combat with our ancestors. With children, as well as nations of the most simple manners, a great inclination to playing on words is often displayed; [they cannot therefore be both puerile and unnatural: If the first charge is founded, the second cannot be 80] In Homer we find several examples; the Books of Moses, the oldest written memorial of the primitive world, are, it is well known, full of them. On the other hand, poets of a very cul persons, however distressed, have a conceit left them in their misery, a miserable conceit.*) JOHNSON, tivated taste, or orators like Cicero, have delighted in them. Whoever, in Richard the Second, is disgusted with the affecting play of words of the dying John of Gaunt on his own name, let him remember that the same thing occurs in the Ajax of Sophocles.' S W. S. *) This quotation is also found in the Preface to Dryden's Fables:Just John Littlewit, in Bartholomew Fair, who had a conceit (as he tells you) left him in his misery; a miserable conceit." STEEVENS, HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK. THE PRELIMINARY REMARKS. ME original story on which this play is built may be found in Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian. From thence Belleforest adopted it in his collection of novels, in seven volumes, which he began in 1564, and continued to publish through succeeding years. It was from Belleforest that the old black letter prose Hystorie of Hamblet was translated; the earliest edition of which, known to the commentators, was dated in 1608; but it is supposed that there were earlier impressions. The following passage is found in an Epistle, by Thomas Nashe, prefixed to Greene's Arcadia, which was published in 1589:-'1 will turn back to my first text of studies of delight, and talk a little in friendship with a few of our rival translators. It is a common practice now a-days, among a sort of shifting companions, that ronne through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint [i. c. the law] whereunto they were born, and busie themselves with the endeavours of art, that could scarcely latinize their neck verse, if they should have neede; yet English Seneca, read by candle-light, yeelds many good sentences, as Bloud is a beggar, and so forth and if you entreat him faire in a frosty morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say, Handfuls of tragical speeches. But O grief! Tempus edax rerum-what is it that will last always? The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance be drie; and Seneca, let blond line by line, and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage.' It is manifest from this passage that some play on the story of Hamlet had been exhibited before the year 1589. Malone thinks that it was not Shakspeare's drama, but an elder performance on which, with the aid of the old prose History of Hamblet, his tragedy was formed. In a tract, entitled Wits Miserie, or the World's Madnesse, discovering the incarnate Devils of the Age, published by Thomas Lodge in 1596, one of the devils is said to be a foule lubber, and looks as pale as the vizard of the ghost, who cried so miserably at the theatre, Hamlet, revenge. But it is supposed that this also may refer to an elder performance. Dr Percy possessed a copy of Speght's edition of Chaucer, which had been Gabriel Harvey's, who had written his name and the date, 1598, both at the beginning and end of the volume, and many remarks in the intermediate leaves; among which are these words:The younger sort take much delight in Shakspeare's Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece, and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them to please the wiser sort. Malone doubts whether this was written in 1598, because translated Tasso is named in another note; but it is not necessary that the allusion should be to Fairfax's translation, which was not printed till 1600: it may |