1493-1561] Warburton (ed. 1747): "The two greatest poets of this and the last age, Mr. Dryden, in the preface to Troilus and Cressida, and Mr. Pope, in his note on this place, have concurred in thinking that Shakespeare produced this long passage with design to ridicule and expose the bombast of the play from whence it was taken; and that Hamlet’s commendation of it is purely ironical. This is become the general opinion. I think just otherwise; and that it was given with commendation to upbraid the false taste of the audience of that time, which would not suffer them to do justice to the simplicity and sublime of this production. And I reason, first, from the Character Hamlet gives of the play, from whence the passage is taken. Secondly, from the passage itself. And thirdly, from the effect it had on the audience.

Let us consider the character Hamlet gives of it, (TLN 1480-1488) They who suppose the passage given to be ridiculed, must needs suppose this character to be purely ironical. But if so, it is the strangest irony that ever was written. It pleased not the multitude. This we must conclude to be true, however ironical the rest be. Now the reason given of the designed ridicule is the supposed bombast. But those were the very plays, which at that time we know took with the multitude. And Fletcher wrote a kind of Rehearsal purposely to expose them. But say it is bombast, and that therefore it took not with the multitude. Hamlet presently tells us what it was that displeased them. There was no salt in the lines to make the matter savoury; nor no matter in the phrase that might indite the author of affection; but called it an honest method. Now whether a person speaks ironically or no, when he quotes others, yet common sense requires he should quote what they say. Now it could not be, if this play displeased because of the bombast, that those whom it displeased should give this reason for their dislike. The same inconsistencies and absurdities abound in every other part of Hamlet’s speech, supposing it to be ironical: but take him as speaking his sentiments, the whole is of a piece; and to this purpose, The play, I remember, pleased not the multitude, and the reason was, its being wrote on the rules of the ancient drama; to which they were entire strangers. But, in my opinion, and in the opinion of those for whose judgment I have the highest esteem, it was an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, i.e. where the three unities were well preserved. Set down with as much modesty as cunning, i.e. where not only the art of composition, but the simplicity of nature, was carefully attended to. The characters were a faithful picture of life and manners, in which nothing was overcharged into farce. But these qualities, which gained my esteem, lost the public’s. For I remember one said, There was no salt in the lines to make the matter savoury, i.e. there was not, according to the mode of that time, a fool or clown to joke, quibble, and talk freely. Nor no matter in the phrase that might indite the author of affection, i.e. nor none of those passionate, pathetic love scenes, so essential to modern tragedy. But he called it an honest method, i.e. he owned, however tasteless this method of writing, on the ancient plan, was to our times, yet it was chaste and pure; the distinguishing character of the Greek drama. I need only make one observation on all this; that, thus interpreted, it is the justest picture of a good tragedy, wrote on the ancient rules. And that I have rightly interpreted it appears farther from what we find in the old quarto, An honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine, i.e. it had a natural beauty, but none of the fucus of false art.

2. A second proof that this speech was given to be admired, is from the intrinsic merit of the speech itself: which contains the description of a circumstance very happily imagined, namely, Ilium and Priam’s falling together, with the effect it had on the destroyer, ’The hellish Pyrrhus, &c. To, —Repugnant to command. The unnerved father falls, &c. To, —So after Pyrrhus’ pause. Now this circumstance, illustrated with the fine similitude of the storm, is so highly worked up, as to have well deserved a place in Virgil’s second book of the Æneid, even though the work had been carried on to that perfection which the Roman poet had conceived.

3. The third proof is, from the effects which followed on the recital. Hamlet, his best character, approves it; the player is deeply affected in repeating it; and only the foolish Polonius tired with it. We have said enough before of Hamlet’s sentiments. As for the player, he changes colour, and the tears start from his eyes. But our author was too good a judge of nature to make bombast and unnatural sentiment produce such an effect. Nature and Horace both instructed him, Si vis me flere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi; tunc tua me infortunia loedent, Telephe, vel Peleu. Male si mandata loqueris, Aut dormitabo aut ridebo. And it may be worth observing, that Horace gives this precept particularly to shew, that bombast and unnatural sentiments are incapable of moving the tender passions, which he is directing the poet how to raise. For, in the lines just before, he gives this rule, ’Teleus & Peleus, cum pauper & exul uterque, Projicit Ampullas, & sesquipedalia verba.’ Not that I would deny, that very bad lines in bad tragedies have had this effect. But then it always proceeds from one or other of these causes.

1. Either when the subject is domestic, and the scene lies at home: the spectators, in this case, become interested in the fortunes of the distressed; and their thoughts are so much taken up with the subject, that they are not at liberty to attend to the poet; who, otherwise, by his faulty sentiments and diction, would have stifled the emotions springing up from a sense of the distress. But this is nothing to the case in hand. For, as Hamlet says, ’What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’

2. When bad lines raise this affection, they are bad in the other extreme; low, abject, and groveling, instead of being highly figurative and swelling; yet, when attended with a natural simplicity, they have force enough to strike illiterate and simple minds. The tragedies of Banks will justify both these observations.

But if any one will still say, that Shakespear intended to represent a player unnaturally and fantastically affected, we must appeal to Hamlet, that is, to Shakespeare himself in this matter; who, on the reflection he makes upon the player’s emotion, in order to excite his own revenge, gives not the least hint that the player was unnaturally or injudiciously moved. On the contrary, his fine description of the actor’s emotion shews, he thought just otherwise: ’—this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit, That from her working all his visage wan’d: Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice,’ &c. And indeed had Hamlet esteemed this emotion any thing unnatural, it had been a very improper circumstance to spur him to his purpose.

As Shakespear has here shewn the effects which a fine description of nature, heightened with all the ornaments of art, had upon an intelligent player, whose business habituates him to enter intimately and deeply into the characters of men and manners, and to give nature its free workings on all occasions; so he has artfully shewn what effects the very same scene would have upon a quite different man, Polonius; by nature, very weak and very artificial [two qualities, though commonly enough joined in life, yet generally so much disguised as not to be seen by common eyes to be together; and which an ordinary poet durst not have brought so near one another] by discipline, practised in a species of wit and eloquence, which was stiff, forced, and pedantic; and by trade a politician, and therefore, of consequence, without any of the affecting notices of humanity. Such is the man whom Shakespeare has judiciously chosen to represent the false taste of that audience which had condemned the play here reciting. When the actor comes to the finest and most pathetic part of the speech, Polonius cries out, This is too long; on which Hamlet, in contempt of his ill judgment, replies, It shall to the barber’s with thy beard [intimating that, by this judgment, it appeared that all his wisdom lay in his length of beard,] Pry’thee, say on. He’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry [the common entertainment of that time, as well as this, of the people] or he sleeps, say on. And yet this man of modern taste, who stood all this time perfectly unmoved with the forcible imagery of the relator, no sooner hears, amongst many good things, one quaint and fantastical word, put in, I suppose, purposely for this end, than he professes his approbation of the propriety and dignity of it. That’s good. Mobled queen is good. On the whole then, I think, it plainly appears, that the long quotation is not given to be ridiculed and laughed at, but to be admired. The character given of the play, by Hamlet, cannot be ironical. The passage itself is extremely beautiful. It has the effect that all pathetic relations, naturally written, should have; and it is condemned, or regarded with indifference, by one of a wrong, unnatural taste. From hence (to observe it by the way) the actors, in their representation of this play, may learn how this speech ought to be spoken, and what appearance Hamlet ought to assume during the recital.

That which supports the common opinion, concerning this passage, is the turgid expression in some parts of it; which, they think, could never be given by the poet to be commended. We shall therefore, in the next place, examine the lines most obnoxious to censure, and see how much, allowing the charge, this will make for the induction of their conclusion. ‘Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide, But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword The unnerved father falls.’ And again, ‘Out, out, thou strumpet fortune! All you gods, In general synod, take away her power: Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel, And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven, As low as to the fiends.’

Now whether these be bombast or not, is not the question; but whether Shakespeare esteemed them so. That he did not so esteem them appears from his having used the very same thoughts in the same expression, in his best plays, and given them to his principal characters, where he aims at the sublime. As in the following passages.

Troilus, in Troilus and Cressida, far outstrains the execution of Pyrrhus’s sword, in the character he gives of Hectors: ‘When many times the cative Grecians fall Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword, You bid them rise and live.’

Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra, rails at fortune in the same manner: ‘No, let me speak, and let me rail so high, That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel, Provok’d at my offence.’

But another use may be made of these quotations; a discovery of the author of this recited play: which, letting us into a circumstance of our author’s life (as a writer) hitherto unknown, was the reason I have been so large upon this question. I think then it appears, from what has been said, that the play in dispute was Shakespeare’s own: and that this was the occasion of writing it. He was desirous, as soon as he had found his strength, of restoring the chasteness and regularity of the ancient stage; and therefore composed this tragedy on the model of the Greek drama, as may be seen by throwing so much action into relation. But his attempt proved fruitless; and the raw, unnatural taste, then prevalent, forced him back again into his old Gothic manner. For which he took this revenge upon his Audience.”

Steevens (ed. 1773): “The praise which Hamlet bestows on this piece, is certainly dissembled, and agrees very well with the character of madness, which, before witnesses, he thought it necessary to support. The speeches before us have so little merit, that nothing but an affectation of singularity could have influenced Dr. Warburton to undertake their defence. The poet, perhaps, meant to exhibit a just resemblance of some of the plays of his own age, in which the faults were too many in number to permit a few splendid passages to atone for a general defect. The player knew his trade, and spoke the lines in an affecting manner, because Hamlet had declared them to be pathetic; or might be in reality a little moved by them: for, ‘There are less degrees of nature (says Dryden) by which some faint emotions of pity and terror are raised in us, as a less engine will raise a less proportion of weight, though not so much as one of Archimedes’ making.’ The mind of the prince, it must be confessed, was fitted for the reception of gloomy ideas, and his tears were ready at a slight solicitation. It is by no means proved, that Shakespeare has employed the same thoughts cloathed in the same expressions, in his best plays. If he bids the false huswife Fortune break her wheel, he does not desire her to break all its spokes; nay, even its periphery, and make use of the nave afterwards for such an immeasureable cast. Though if what Dr. Warburton has said should be found in any instance to be exactly true, what can we infer from thence, but that Shakespeare was sometimes wrong in spite of conviction, and in the hurry of writing committed those very faults which his judgment could detect in others? Dr. Warburton is inconsistent in his assertions concerning the literature of Shakespeare. In a note on Troilus and Cressida, he affirms, that his want of learning kept him from being acquainted with the writings of Homer; and, in this instance, would suppose him capable of producing a complete tragedy written on the ancient rules; and that the speech before us had sufficient merit to intitle it to a place in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid, even though the work had been carried to that perfection which the Roman poet had conceived.

Had Shakespeare made one unsuccessful attempt in the manner of the ancients (that he had any knowledge of their rules remains to be proved) it would certainly have been recorded by contemporary writers, among whom Ben Jonson would have been the first. Had his darling ancients been unskilfully imitated by a rival poet, he would at least have preserved the memory of the fact, to shew how unsafe it was for any one, who was not as thorough a scholar as himself, to have meddled with their sacred remains.

‘Within that circle none durst walk but he.’ He has represented Inigo Jones as being ignorant of the very names of those ancients, whose architecture he undertook to correct: in his Poetaster he has in several places hinted at our poet’s injudicious use of words, and seems to have pointed his ridicule more than once at some of his descriptions and characters. It is true that he has praised him, but it was not while that praise could have been of any service to him; and posthumous applause is always to be had on easy conditions. Happy it was for Shakespeare, that he took nature for his guide, and, engaged in the warm pursuit of her beauties, left to Jonson the repositories of learning: so has he escaped a contest which might have rendered his life uneasy, and bequeathed to our possession, the more valuable copies from nature herself.”

428-94 Well... whose] Gentleman (1770, p. 21): “When Polonius enters to tell him of the comedians, the Prince again assumes his stile of equivocating repartee, and indeed is pleasingly witty with the verbose old statesman; his welcome to the Players is well adapted to the mode of behaviour he has put on but his hint to the lady of her voice ‘like a piece of uncurrent gold being cracked in the ring;’ not commendably delicate: requiring a taste of their quality, and making a mistake in the first line of that passage he points out respecting Pyrrhus, very pleasing and natural circumstances, though of most minute kind.”

1494-1506 the rugged Pirrhus...Priam seekes;] Seymour (1805): “Though few people, I beliee, will be found agreeing in Dr. Warburton’s notion, that Shakespeare had any thoughts of writing a play on the model of the Greek drama, or of departing from his own Gothic manner, yet the judgment which that critic has pronounced upon this episodic drama, will probably be considered as better founded than what Mr. Steevens has advanced. There can hardly be a serious doubt that the praise bestowed on it by Hamlet himself is sincere; and he must needs be mad, not in craft, but reality, if he had deliberately selected, for the purpose of probing the king’s conscience, a composition that was nothing but contemptible bombast. I am pretty clearly of opinion, that the piece in question is the work of Shakespeare himself, and a good deal of it does him no discredit: but he seems to have thought it proper to make a distinction in the style of it, from that which prevails generally in the tragedy itself.”

1494 the rugged Pirrhus, he whose sable Armes] Verplanck (ed. 1847): “Schlegel is acute and right in his remark, that” [quotes Schlegel]. “This criticism is confirmed by the comparison of the original Hamlet with the revised play, showing the deliberate rejection of flowing and elegant lines, and the substitution of others of a more buskined elevation, so as to mark the distinction between the interlude and the drama itself. Thus, the Duke (or Player King) began — ‘Full forty years are past, their date is gone, Since happy time joined both our hearts as one; And now the blood that fill’d my youthful veins, Runs weakly in their pipes; and all the strains Of music which whilome pleased mine ear, Is now a burthen that age cannot bear.’ This the poet rejected, and substituted the lines beginning — ‘Full thirty times has Phœbus’ cart gone round,’ — inferior in themselves, but contrasting better with the other dialogue.”

1493-1506 Hudson (ed. 1856): [Cites Schlegel] “Schlegel observes, that ’this speech must not be judged by itself, but in connexion with the place where it is introduced. To distinguish it as dramatic poetry in the play itself, it was necessary that it should rise above the dignified poetry of that in the same proportion that the theatrical elevation does above simple nature. Hence Shakespeare has composed the play in Hamlet altogether in sententious rhymes, full of antithesis. But this solemn and measured tone did not suit a speech in which violent emotion ought to prevail; and the Poet had no other expedient than the one of which he made use, overcharging the pathos.’"

1494 MacDonald (ed. 1885): “The poetry is admirable in its kind—intentionally charged, to raise it to the second stage-level, above the blank verse, that is of the drama in which it is set, as that blank verse is raised above the ordinary level of speech. 143 The correspondent passage in 1st Q. Runs nearly parallel for a few lines.”

1493-4 to 1505 Wilson (ed. 1934): “There seems no basis either in Vergil or Marlowe for this description. The nearest to ll. [(1496-99)] we have is Aen. ii. 551 ‘in multo lapsantem sanguine nati,’ which refers to Priam not Pyrrhus. It is noteworthy that Dryden clearly had Sh.’s lines in mind in translating Vergil’s account of Pyrrhus.”

1493-1559 Jenkins (ed. 1982): “The Player’s speech has occasioned much controversy. Its primary function is of course to lead on to Hamlet’s plot against the King and to give prominence to the players in preparation for their crucial role in it. At the same time it provides occasion for the contrast, elaborated in the soliloquy of ll. 543 ff., between the Player’s reaction to a fictional calamity and Hamlet’s reaction to a real one. Even more remarkably, though less remarked, Shakespeare takes the opportunity of the Player’s speech to introduce in another key many of the motifs of his own play. The ’common theme’ of ’death of the fathers’ (I. ii. 104) is exemplified in the archetypal figure of Priam (who had fifty sons). The ’tale’ of his ’slaughter’ thus lights up the fall of a ’father’ (l. 470) in the ’murder’ (457) of a king. His deathsman Pyrrhus, ’trick’d’ in ’total gules’ (453), appears as the blazon of a killer. As a type he is, like Lucianus, ambivalent, embodiment at once of the murderer and (as the son of Achilles) of the avenging hero. In this second aspect his vehemence is the opposite of Hamlet’s inactivity. Yet in that he ’stood’, with drawn sword frozen, and for a whole line ’did nothing’ (478), he temporarily images Hamlet, before his ’aroused vengeance’ (484) re-establishes their antithesis. Then the outcry against the ’strumpet Fortune’ (489) both echoes Hamlet’s earlier reflections (225-36; 359-62) and states a theme for later variations (III. i. 57-60; III. ii. 67-71, 195-208; IV. iv. 49-52). The destruction of Fortune’s wheel anticipates another passage on the fall of a king (III. iii.17-22). And finally the description of the mourning queen (498-505), with its resounding climax (511), stresses by its contrast the short-lived grief of Queen Gertrude (I. ii. 149-56; III. ii. 124-9). The question whether such passages are quotation or original composition, which Kittredge thought ’insoluble’, has surely an obvious answer. It is strange that distinguished critics have ever seriously maintained that Shakespeare lifted from some old tragedy, his own or another’s, a speech so manifestly designed for the place it has in Hamlet. Its reproduction of the play’s basic motifs in exaggerated form is also of course the clue to its much-debated style. Dryden, who declined to think it Shakespeare’s objected to its metaphorical excesses (Essays, ed. Ker, i. 224-6), and many, following Pope, have regarded it as pillorying bombast. By contrast, Coleridge thought its ’epic pomp’ superb (i. 25, 37). Argument has centred on whether the speech is serious or satiric, whether it burlesques or emulates the style of earlier tragedy, and especially Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, which like it tells ’Aeneas’ tale’ (II. i. 126-288) and which it seems to echo at one or perhaps two points, though I think not more. (See l. 454 n., 469-70 LN; 476 LN, 515-16 LN; Intro., p. 103.) But identity of subject does not conceal an essential difference of purpose : the speech in Shakespeare has to stand out from the drama which surrounds it and which is already removed from ordinary life; and this, as Schlegel so well saw (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 1815, ii. 197), demands a style which rises above normal theatrical elevation as the latter does above natural speech. This is the simple justification of the hyperbole and high-astounding terms. It is not necessarily incompatible with an element of parody, but the speech stands in too close a relationship to the tragedy which contains it for ridicule to be accepted as a dominant note. Its style, as well as being proper to its kind (as tragedy-within-tragedy), is inseparable from its content and from its purpose in the whole dramatic composition. Extravagance in the language reflects a fine excess in the subject. Priam, Pyrrhus, Hecuba are figures in an inset which exhibits in their most striking and extreme form the attitudes and gestures (of slaughter, vengeance, sorrow, hesitation, etc.) which belong to a larger work in which it is placed. See Intro., p. 145. There is an unfortunate tendency toward criticism to seek to relate the speech to Hamlet’s motivation; but it belongs less to the hero’s design than to the dramatist’s. For detailed examination of the speech see Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 413-19; Levin, The Question of Hamlet, pp. 138-64; A. Johnston, ’The Player’s Speech in Hamlet’, SQ, XIII, 21-30."