3906 Steevens (ed. 1773): “The last observation of the same author [Voltaire] has no greater degree of veracity to boast of; for now, says he, all the actors in the piece are swept away, and one Monsieur Fortenbras is introduced to conclude it. Can this be true, when Horatio, Osrick, Voltimand, and Cornelius survive? These, together with the whole court of Denmark, are suppose to be present at the catastrophe, so that we are not indebted to the Norwegian chief for having kept the stage from vacancy.

“Monsieur de Voltaire has since transmitted, in an epistle to the Academy of Belles, Lettres some remarks on the late French translation of Shakspeare; but alas! no traces of genius or vigour are discoverable in this crambe repetita, which is notorious only for its insipidity, fallacy, and malice. It serves indeed to show an apparent decline of talents and spirit in its writer, who no longer relies on his own ability to depreciate a rival, but appeals in a plaintive strain to the queen and princes of France for their assistance to stop the farther circulation of Shakspeare’s renown.

“Impartiality, nevertheless, must acknowledge that his private correspondence displays a superior degree of animation. Perhaps an ague shook him when he appealed to the public on this subject; but the effects of a fever seem to predominate in his subsequent letter to Monsieur D’Argenteuil on the same occasion; for such a letter it is as our John Dennis (while his frenzy lasted) might be supposed to have written. ‘C’est moi qui autrefois parlai le premier de ce Shakspeare; c’est moi qui le premier montrai aux François quelques perles quels j’avois trouvé dans son enorme fumier.’ Mrs. Montague, the justly celebrated authoress of the Essay on the genius and writings of our author, was at Paris, and in the circle where these ravings of the Frenchman were first publicly recited. On hearing the illiberal expression already quoted, with no less elegance than readiness she replied—’C’est un fumier qui a fertilizé une terre bien ingrate.’—In short the author of Zayre, Mahomet, and Semiramis, possesses all the mischievous qualities of a midnight felon, who, in the hope to conceal his gain, sets the house he has robbed on fire.

As for Messieurs D’Alembert and Marmontel, they might safely be passed over with that neglect which their impotence of criticism deserves. Voltaire, in spite of his natural disposition to vilify an English poet, by adopting sentiments, characters, and situations from Shakspeare, has bestowed on him involuntary praise. Happily, he has not been disgraced by the worthless encomiums or disfigured by the awkward imitations of the other pair, who ‘follow in the chace not like hhounds that hunt, but like those who fill up the cry.’ When D’Alembert declares that more sterling sense is to be met with in ten French verses than in thirty English ones, contempt is all that he provokes,—such contempt as can only be exceded by that which every scholar will express, who may chance to look into the prose translation of Lucan by Marmontel, with the vain expectation of discovering either the sense, the spirit, or the whole of the original. Steevens.”

3904 exeunt] gentleman (apud bell, ed. 1773) : “the fifth act of this play is by no means so good as we could wish; yet it engages attention in public, by having a good deal of bustle, and, what English audiences love, many deaths.”

3906 Wesley (typescript of ms. notes in ed. 1785): “Well said, Maister Steevens! By my fay, thou hast rarely belaboured these French (poxt) malapert monkies.”

3903 amisse] Boswell (ed. 1821, 21:Glossary): “misfortune.”

3906 Boswell (ed. 1821): “The manner in which he [Hamlet] escapes from the plot, which was formed against him by his uncle, has drawn forth the heaviest censure of Mr. Steevens [see n. 3848-49] that from Shakespeare’s drama no proofs the guilt of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can be drawn. Mr. Malone [see n. 3848-49]has produced the old black letter history as expressly asserting their participation in the usurper’s plans, and Hamlet’s knowledge of that act. To this it is replied that a critick and a juryman are bound to form their opinions on what they see and hear in the cause before them: and Mr. Steevens goes on to assert that it is not a commentator’s office to interpet the plays of Shakspeare according to the novels o which they are founded. How far this position is well founded, may be a question with those who recollect how often the poet has left circumstances to be supplied by his readers, who were supposed to be familiarly acquainted with those popular story-books or histories from which in general his plots were derived. But even if we were to recognise Mr. Steevens’s new code of poetical justice, it appears to me, that there is sufficient evidence in the play itself to satisfy the minds of good criticks and true. Hamlet has, I think, very clearly intimated that he knew of their being engaged in some conspiracy against him, although he was unacquainted with its precise object till he had discovered it by an inspection of the letters which they conveyed. He speaks of them as ‘adders fanged,’ a term which would scarcely be applied to them if they were merely sycophants. ‘—’’tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petar.’ This could not be saif of the king, for he does not suffer from his own treachery being turned against him. What follows is still more explicit: ‘—it shall go hard, But I will delve one yard below their mines, And blow them to the moon.’

“The rapidity with which their execution is directed to take place, not shriving time allowed, is remarked by Mr. Steevens as ‘another proof of Hamlet’s christian-like disposition.’ The answer is, that his own safety required it. If any delay had bee allowed, the truth would probably have come out. The ambassadors might have had other crdentials; but at all events, the story which they would have had to tell, would at once, by its evident probability, hve overthrown that which it was necessary for Hamlet to produce. It might well be credited that the King of Denmark might wish the next heir to his crown to be secretly taken off; but it would have been hard to elieve, if time ahd been allowed for consideration, that he should send an embassy of which his own nephew formed a part, with no higher object than the destruction of two obscure individuals. I need scarcely remind the reader that Hamlet’s contrivance was formed when he expected to continue his voyage, which was only presvntd by the attack from pirates. His conduct at the grave of Ophelia, has, I think, been much misunderstood. It appears to have been the first intelligence he had received of his mistress’s death; the tumult of feelings which oppress him at that time. put him into ‘a towering passion,’ a frenzied state of excitement, which is evinced by the tumour of his language, so different from his usual style of speech, which, in general, as Johnson has truly observed, is not strained by poetical violence above the natural sentiments of man. At such a moment we cannot be surprised if the hasty insult offered to him by Laertes, should urge him to adopt conduct which he afterwards candidly and kindly regrets. I cannot entirely pass over the scene of the grave-diggers, which shows, in a strikig point of view, his good-natured affability. The reflections which follow afford new proofs of his amiable chaacter. The place where he stands, the frame of his own thoughts, and the objects which surround him, suggest the vanity of all human pursuits; but there is nothing harsh or caustick in his satire; his observations are dictated rather by feelings of sorrow than of anger; and the sprightliness of his wit, which misfortune has repressed, but cannot altogether extinguish, has thrown over the whole a truly pathetic cast of humourous sadness. Thos gleams of sun-shine, which serve only to show us the scattered fragments of a brilliant imagination, crushed and broken by calamity, are, to me at least, muc more affecting than along uninterrupted train of monotonous woe. Mr. Steevens concludes by saying, that it must be obvious to the most careless spectator or reader, that he kills the king at last to revenge himself, and not his father. If this be so, I must be careless indeed, for I cannot perceive it. When he finds that he is poisoned by his uncle’s contrivance, he knows that if the present opportunity of revenging his father’s death is not seized upon, it will be lost for ever; and the pressing emergency supplies, as I have before observed, that stimulus which is necesary to rouse him into exertion. Not one word of repraoch escapes him against the treachery of Laertes, which he would naturally have inveigned against had his own fate been uppermost in his mind; and in his dying address to Horatio, no regret is expressed for the loss of life, but only an anxiety belonging to an honourable and lofty spirit lest he should leave behind him a wounded name. . . . Boswell.”

3906 Verplanck (ed. 1844): “Coleridge remarks that ‘The character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy; that the character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of nature, may be assumed from the fact that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered.’ Besides the vexed question of the nature and degree of his mental malady, the intellectual peculiarities, and the moral cast of his character and conduct, have also afforded matter for much discussion. They have been flippantly assaield by Stevens, and dogmatically pronounced by Schlegel to exhibit a strange mixture of constitutional decit , and hypocrisy, and universal skepticism; while they have been analyzed in a higher mood of feeling and eloquence by Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Mrs. Jameson, Hallam, the Pictorial editor [Knight], and several anonymous critics of almost equal ability. The very fact and nature of these differing opinions, and the manner they are entertained by readers according to their own several habits of thought and life,—all equally attest the truth and reality of the character which is thus examined, not as a figment of the imagination, which may be ever so incongruous, but as a real personage, out of and far above the common class of minds, upon whose principles, motives, and actions, different men may come to different conclusions. It is not a character of ideal perfection, either moral or mental: but, while it commands our admiration by brilliant qualities and lofty intellect, it is brought down to the level of our sympathy, and even of our compassion, by no common share of human weakness, error, and suffering.

Goethe has pointed out the leading characteristic of Hamlet, upon which the interest of the whole drama mainly depends.

“He says—’It is clear to me that Shakespeare’s intention was to exhibit the effects of a great action, imposed as a duty, upon a mind too feeble for its accomplishment. In this sense, I find the character consistent thoughout. Here is an oak planted in a china vase, proper to receive only the most delicate flowers: the roots strike out, and the vessel flies to pieces. A pure, noble, highly moral disposition, but without that energy of soul which constitutes the hero, sinks under a load which it can neither support nor resolve to abandon altogether. All his obligations are sacred to him; but this alone is above his powers. As impossibility is required at his hands; not an impossibility in itself, but that which is so to him. Observe how he shifts, turns, hesitates, advances, and recedes; how he is continually reminded and reminding himself of his great commission, which he, nevertheless, in the end, seems entirely to lose sight of; and this without every recovering his former tranquility.’

“Coleridge’s theory of Hamlet’s character cannot be omitted. Without assenting to his intimation that Shakespeare drew it with any direct intent to inculcate a lesson of intellectual discipline, still we must allow the original and profound truth of the criticism; the truce, we believe, and the more striking, because the critic drew his theory from his own character and experience.

“Shakespeare, painting from nature, (perhaps from himself,) has given to his hero the endowments and the defects common, in various degrees or proportions, to one of the nobler classes of human intellects; and to that very class Coleridge himself belonged. He says—

‘In Hamlet, he (Shakespeare) seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necesity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our mediation on the workings of our minds,—an equilibrium between the real and imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions,-and his very perceptions, instantly passing though the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and colour not naturally their own. Hence, we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in circumstances under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment:—Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve.’”

3903-06 Strachey (1848, pp. 102-3): <p. 102>“In conclusion let me observe, that Hamlet (like every other of Shakspeare’s characters) is a man,—rather than a hero of the Grecian drama. His features do not show the more than human beauty and repose of the tragic mask,nor does he tread the stage with the more than human height and stateliness of the tragic buskin:—he is a man, with the passions, the frailties, and the weaknesses of common men, no less than with their high thoughts, and noble and resolute endeavours. Yet for this very reason—because he has the same flesh and blood, and human heart, as ourselves, we have a deeper sympathy with Hamlet than with any hero, and feel that he may compare with any. Perhaps Milton (as I have before observed) has sliown us the hero of the classical drama in his highest dignity, in the Samson Agonistes, in which</p. 102><p. 103> the statue-like form and lineaments of the Greek tragedy have been quickened with living fire from the Hebrew altar, and clothed with English robes, and taught to speak with English tongue,—’—The elements So mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up, And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’— And yet in the grand final eulogy in which Manoah mourns, or rather triumphs in, the death of his son, there is not a thought nor word, which way not be applied to the death of Hamlet without the charge of exaggeration. I, at least, never quit.that bloody ball in the palace of Elsinore, without repeating,

Find courage to lay hold on the occasion;

dispraise or blame, nothing but well and and fair,

And what may quiet us in a death so noble. “</p. 103>

3904 Exeunt] Elze (ed. 1857, 264): <p. 264>"QA hat am Schlusse gar keine Bühnenweisung, QB folgg. nur: Exeunt." ["Q1 has for the conclusion not even a stage direction. Q2ff only ’Exeunt.’"

3906 Collier (ed. 1858) : “Another ‘tag’ is added afterwards, of a very poor and inanimate character, most unlike the language of Shakespeare, which, it seems, the performer of the part of Horatio was also to deliver when the piece was abbreviated: it is as follows:— ‘While I remain behind to tell a tale, That shall hereafter turn the hearers pale.’ Although the conclusion is hastened in this way, the old annotator has continued his corrections to the end of the tragedy, as it has come down to us; but from what source he derived his information we know not: perhaps he had at one time witnessed the performance in its entirety, and had remedied defects from the recitation of the actors.”

3906 Delius (ed. 1854) : “Damit wäre die Musterung aller Verbesserungen, welche Hamlet den Bemühungen des alten Correctors verdankt, beendigt, und das Resultat ist, dass sämmtliche Emendationen, soweit sie nicht aus den Qs. und den Conjecturen der Herausgeber längst bekannt waren, den von dem competentesten jetzt lebenden Englischen Shaksperekritiker, Alexander Dyce, für den alten Corrector, aufgestellten drei Kategorien der ‘unwissenden, geschmacklosen und muthwilligen Aenderungen’ anheimfallen, während andererseits dieses Drama wenigstens keine der gelegentlich vorkommenden Verbesserungen darbietet, ‘die sich ohne weitere Autoritätat dem gesunden Menschenverstande von selbst empfehen.’*)

<n>* “My opinion is, that while it (Mr. Collier’s volume) abounds with alterations ignorant, tastless, and wanton, it also occasionally presents corrections which require no authority to recommend them because commmon sense declares them to be right.” </n> [Thus, the review of all the emendations, which Hamlet owes to the pains of the old Corrector, may be concluded, and the conclusion is that the collected emendations, so far as they were not known long ago from the Qs. and from the conjecture of the editor, is left to that of the most competent living Shakespearean critics of the old Corrector, Alexander Dyce, [relegated] into three categories of the ‘ignorant, tastless, and wanton correntions; while, on the other hand, this drama offers at least nothing than occasional, apparent improvements, ‘which, without further authority, recommend themselves from a healthy understanding itself.’]

3905-6 Exeunt] Delius (ed. 1872) : “Exeunt . . . off]] Die Bühnenweisung ist ungefähr die der Fol.; die Qs. haben wie Q.A. [Q1] nur Exeunt.” [The stage direction [as DEL4 prints them] is approximately that of the Folio; the Qs, as Q1, have only Exeunt.”]

3904 Exeunt] A dead march . . . shot off]] The concluding stage direction is Capell’s. The quartos have ‘Exeunt.’ The folios, with slight variations, ‘Exeunt Marching: after the which, a Peale of Ordenance are shot off.’”

3904ff] Moberly (ed. 1873): “Hamlet has gained the haven for which he longed so often; yet without bringing guilt on himself by his death; no fear that his sleep should have bad dreams in it now. Those whom he loved, his mother, Laertes, Ophelia, have all died guiltless or forgiven. Late, and under the strong compulsion of approaching death, he has done, and well cone, the inevitable task from which his gentle nature shrank. Why, then, any farther thought, in the awful presence of death, of crimes, conspiracies, vengeance? Think that he has been slain in battle, like his Sea-King forefathers; and let the booming cannon be his mourners.”

3904ff] Moberly (apud Furness, ed. 1877):

3904 Exeunt] A dead march . . . shot off]] Neil (ed. 1877, Notes): “Might we not almost fancy that the following lines were written as an epilogue for Hamlet, to the music of this dead march? ‘Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’errread; And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead; You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men’—Sonnets, lxxxi.”

3904 MacDonald (ed. 1885): “The end is a half-line after a riming couplet—as if there were more to come—as there must be after every tragedy. Mere poetic justice will not satisfy Shakspere in a tragedy, for tragedy is life; in a comedy it may do well enough, for that deals but with life-surfaces—and who then more careful of it! but in tragedy something far higher ought to be aimed at. The end of this drama is reached when Hamlet, having attained the possibility of doing so, performs his work in righteousness. The common critical mind would have him left the fatherless, motherless, loverless, almost friendless king of a justifiably distrusting nation—with an eternal grief for his father weighing him down to the abyss; with his mother’s sin blackening for him all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven and earth; and with the knowledge in his heart that he had sent the woman he loved, with her father and her brother, out of the world—maniac, spy, and traitor. Instead of according him such ‘poetic justice,’ the Poet gives Hamlet the only true success of doing his duty to act at last—then sends him after his Ophelia—into a world where true heart will find true way of setting right what is wrong, and of atoning for every ill, witting or unwittingly done or occasioned in this.

“It seems to me most admirable that Hamlet, being so great, is yet outwardly so like other people: the Poet never obtrudes his greatness. And just because he is modest, confessing weakness and perplexity, small people take him for yet smaller than themselves who never confess anything, and seldom feel anything amiss with them. Such will adduce even Hamlet’s disparagement of himself to Ophelia when overwhelmed with a sense of human worthlessness [1777-85], as proof that he was not hero! They call it weakness that he would not, foolishly and selfishly, make good his succession against the king, regardless of the law of election, and careless of the weal of the kingdom for which he shows himself so anxious even in the throes of death! To my mind he is the grandest hero in fiction—absolutely human—so troubled, yet so true!”

3903 field] Craig (ed. 1931): “i.e. of battle.”

3903 field] Parrott (ed. 1938): “battle-field.”

3903 showes] Kittredge (ed. 1939): “appears.”

3906 Ordenance Kittredge (ed. 1939): “ordnance.”

3903 amisse] Kittredge (ed. 1939, Glossary):

3903 field] Neilson & Hill (ed. 1942): “battlefield.”

3903 field]

3903 Evans (ed. 1974): “befits the battlefield, but appears very much out of place here.”

3903 field]

3904 Spencer (ed. 1980): “This again reminds us, unhappily or ironically, of Claudius’s partiality for gunshot ((I.2.124-8, I.4.8-12, and V.2.269-72)).”

3905-6 Jenkins (ed. 1982): “Writing to Ellen Terry about Robertson’s Hamlet on 8 Sept. 1897, Shaw said, ‘I gave Forbes a description of what the end ought to be like. Fortinbras with a winged helmet and Hamlet carried off on the shields with the “ordance shot off within” just as the wily William planned it . . . ‘.”

3906 Ordenance Edwards (ed. 1985): “a salute of guns.”

3903 field]

3903 field]

3903 field]

3903 field]

3905-6 Peale Dessen & Thomson(1999): Òa discharge of guns or cannon producing a volley of loud sound; the peal is used especially as an expression of joy or for a salute, usually in a military context, as when Fortinbras commands [quotes 3904] and ‘a Peal of Ordinance are shot off’ . . . .";

3904 Edelman (2000): “Only two of Shakespeare’s plays end with a half-line [Ham. being one; Tim. the other], and in each case it is uttered by a general, ordering the start of a military funeral. [ . . .] Denmark’s transfer of authority to a Norwegian military regime is brought home with great force by Fortinbras’s terse ‘Go bid the soldiers shoot’ [3904]; in a sense the line is finished by the ‘peal of ordinance [3906] from the off-stage chambers.”

“Fortinbras pointedly awards Hamlet a high honour in his rite of war by having ‘four captains [3895], not just any soldiers, take up his body. This is confirmed by reference to [Cor. 5.6.149 (0000)] where Aufidius needs only three captains for the body of his great foe [quotes]. Aufidius’s next order, ‘trail your steel pikes [5.6.150 (0000)] evokes the funeral of the Elizabethan hero, Sir Philip Sidney.”

3904 shoote] Edelman (2000): “The final moments of Hamlet depend upon several “shots’ to achieve their full dramatic effect.”