The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Ii Part 26

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go,--

O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wis.h.i.+ng and willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self remains!

'Ib.' sc. 4.

'Ham'. A b.l.o.o.d.y deed;--almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

'Queen'. As kill a king?

I confess that Shakspeare has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide?

Act iv. sc. 2.

'Ros'. Take you me for a spunge, my lord?

'Ham'. Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities, &c.

Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had pa.s.sed through his mind before;--in fact, in telling home-truths.

Act. iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother concerning the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, pa.s.sion, murder itself--she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of a.s.sociation is instanced in the close:--

My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel.

'Ib.' Gentleman's speech:--

And as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every ward-- They cry, &c.

Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of judgment in Shakspeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, 'rational and consequential,' reflection in these lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions.

'Ib.' King's speech:--

There's such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but peep to what it would, Acts little of his will.

Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspeare never intended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so.

'Ib.' Speech of Laertes:--

To h.e.l.l, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!

Laertes is a 'good' character, but, &c. (WARBURTON.)

Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh scene of this act;--

I will do it; And for this purpose I'll anoint my sword, &c.

uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet;--

He being remiss, Most generous, and free from all contriving, Will not peruse the foils.

Yet I acknowledge that Shakspeare evidently wishes, as much as possible, to spare the character of Laertes,--to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery;--and to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a probable stimulus of pa.s.sion in her brother.

'Ib.' sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of Shakspeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an essential part of the plot;--but here how judiciously in keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of pa.s.sion!

'Ib.' sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally points it by--

Sir, this report of his Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!--

'Ib.' King's speech:

For goodness, growing to a _pleurisy_, Dies in his own too much.

Theobald's note from Warburton, who conjectures 'plethory.'

I rather think that Shakspeare meant 'pleurisy,' but involved in it the thought of _plethora_, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood; otherwise I cannot explain the following line--

And then this _should_ is like a spendthrift sigh, That hurts by easing.

In a st.i.tch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that 'hurt by easing.'

Since writing the above I feel confirmed that 'pleurisy' is the right word; for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the pleurisy is often called the 'plethory.'

Ib.

'Queen'. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes.