HARPER'S
Monthly Magazine
"Hamlet"
CRITICAL COMMENT BY THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
PICTURES BY EDWIN A. ABBEY, R.A.
HOW is it that upon this one play of Shakespeare's, so vast has been the body of criticism, that it forms a literature, and that, so various has it been, it may be said to express the opinions and also the whims and idiosyncrasies of the entire writing-fraternity of the British Empire, of Europe, and of America? How is it, that, if all the printed words that have been scattered over it in the various languages of the modern world were inscribed upon a tape, that tape would form a black scroll of printer's ink reaching from the earth to the moon? And again, how is it that, notwithstanding all this industry, no editor, from Heminge and Condell downwards, has been able to give us a sensibly arranged text? Take, for instance, so elemental a matter as the dividing of the play into acts. Although the earliest authentic quarto, that of 1604, is not divided into acts at all, Shakespeare's artistic intent in regard to a proper sense-pause is in every case rendered clear enough by the very nature of the subject matter. No one will deny that—scenery or no scenery—a modern play (having no chorus) is properly divided into acts. This, at least, Heminge and Condell knew, and into acts they began to divide it; but after Act II. they got tired of their task and left in one huge act the whole of the remainder of the play. It was not till the eighteenth century that an editor divided this matter into Acts III., IV., and V. And then how did that editor go to work? Of course it is the first principle of all literary art, whether in verse or in prose, that the artistic arrangement of the matter is as important as the matter itself. Even Carlyle, to whom matter was so much more than form, knew this, for he said of Hamlet, give a poet the subject matter of Hamlet, and it would still require a Shakespeare's genius to mould it into the play, or something to that effect. But this eighteenth-century editor, as my distinguished friend Professor Lewis Campbell has admirably pointed out, was governed in his principle of arrangement not by the sense-pauses indicated by Shakespeare, but by the inch measure. The letter-press left undivided by Heminge and Condell measured so many inches. "Divide these inches into three approximately equal parts," said this editor to himself, and there you are, "Acts III., IV., and V. Instead of making a
Copyright, 1904, by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved
