We have experienced the same feeling in seeing the most approved representations of Hamlet; and doubtless Goëthe had felt the same, since he produces upon the stage that which
the tyro player Wilheim Meister takes for a real ghost.
No
person to act the part had been provided, and something mar vellous had been mysteriously promised ; but he had forgotten it, probably intending to dispense with the appearance. When it came, “the noble figure, the low inaudible breath, the light movements in heavy armour, made such an impression on him that he stood as if transformed to stone, and could only utter in a half-voice, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us.' He glared at the form, drew a deep breathing once or twice, and pronounced his address to the Ghost in a manner SO confused, so broken, so constrained, that the highest art could not have hit the mark so well.” Besides the part it takes in the development of the plot, the rôle of the Ghost is to account for, if not to produce, a high-wrought state of nerve in the hero; and in the acting play to produce the same effect in lesser degree on the audience. Fielding has described this, when Tom Jones takes Partridge to see Garrick in the cha racter of Hamlet. The life-like acting of the English Roscius, combined with the superstition of the schoolmaster, produces so thorough a conviction of the actual presence of the Ghost, that the result is one of the drollest scenes ever painted by that inimitable romancist.
Hamlet is from the first moment represented in that mood of melancholy which vents itself in bitter sarcasm: “A little more than kin, and less than kind.”
He is “too much i'the
sun.” Sorry quips truly, but yet good enough for the hypo
critical King, who wishes to rejoice and to lament at the same moment :
“With one auspicious and one drooping eye, With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole.”
