the same kind of melancholy interest with which we hear the sighing of the autumnal breeze through the limbs and leaves of the trees, we are willing that the finisher of all earthly sorrows should come. There is no method in her madness; no quips and cranks of a morbidly active ingenuity surprise and gratify the curious beholder, and no bursts of passion such as madness alone can excite fall on his astonished ear. Like one who walks in his sleep, her mind is still busy, but the sources of its activity are within. Heedless of everything else, her mind wanders among the confused and broken recollections of the past, deserted by the glorious light of the Divinity that stirs within us, but which is soon to be rekindled with unquenchable brightness.

W. W. LLOYD (1856)

(Critical Essay on Hamlet, contributed to SINGER'S Second Edition. London, 1856, p. 332.)—Whether the boundaries of sanity are really over-passed by Hamlet, whether the very warning he gives of his purposed simulation may be but one of the cunningnesses of the truly insane, are questions that belong to a class most difficult to treat, whether in life or literature. I confess to be inclined to take the latter view, which by no means excludes the recognition of a main stream of sanity running through the action, and comprising very much that was really but the simulation of madness. But some such extremity of excitement seems to form part of the supernaturalism of the play; such an effect was ordinarily ascribed to apparitions, and in this sense Horatio alludes to it; and it is noteworthy that Hamlet's manner is already changed, and he has already given signs of an antic disposition without obvious motive, before he has given notice that at some time thereafter he should probably think meet to affect eccentricity as a disguise. His susceptibility of irritation has received a wrench, and although he professes to his mother with every appearance of conviction to be merely mad in craft, a suspicion of something more is intimated in his thought that possibly the Ghost may have been but diabolical abuse of weakness and melancholy,-ever subject to such ill influence; and when he excuses his injuries to Laertes on the ground of madness, distractions, it would be, I think, unworthy of him to suppose that his apology was a mere and conscious fabrication. Some palliation, moreover, must be borrowed hence for his treatment of Ophelia, which otherwise more than verges on the brutal.

[Page 333.] Whatever energy in action, therefore, is manifested by Hamlet is in the form of passionate outburst, or reply to sudden provocation, or the impulse of the moment, and his liability to such accesses of excitement appears to have been increased by the excitement of the apparition,-itself, from another point of view, a consequence of the excitability, till it carries his mind over the balance that gives fair claims to sane composure.

[Page 335.] Hamlet is ever reminded of the charge laid upon him by the Ghost, to recognize it with a pang, to find some excuse for deferring,-now mistrust of the Ghost, now inaptness of an opportunity,-to accuse himself of dullness and tardiness, even to declare a resolution, but immediately to diverge into the generalities of a philosophical deduction, and allow himself to be carried away from any definite design entirely. He has the means, the skill, the courage, and what should be sufficient motive, but the active stimulus is unequal to the contemplative inertia that opposes it, and never thoroughly masters and possesses his nature; it gains no perma

nent hold on his attention; his spirit is soon wearied and oppressed by the uncongenial intrusion, and he relapses into the vein more natural to him; it is cursed spite to be called upon to bring back to order an unhinged world,-we may believe from his manner that he finds no great hardship or disgrace either in having lost the chance of governing the kingdom, of the foreign affairs of which at least he has not cared to inform himself, and there is such entire absence of expressions of regret for his frustrate love that I am not sure he does not feel some relief in getting rid of an importunate and interrupting passion. Hamlet's mind is certainly unhinged, and I would prefer to say unsettled. He is two entirely different Hamlets in different scenes, and we see him in constant alternation of hurried and lucid intervals. If we could assume for a moment that his madness is entirely feigned, we should stumble over the inconsistency that it is so carried out as to answer no reasonable purpose, excites suspicion instead of diverting it, covers not, and is not fit to cover, any secondary design, and would amount at best to a weak and childish escapade of ill-humor and spleen. This is the really difficult aspect of Hamlet's character, and it is here, perhaps we may say alone in the play,-that the poet has left us to our own resources, has placed the picture of nature before us, and called upon us to read and interpret it with no aid from him of marginal interpretation. It is here that the genius of a great Shakespearian actor, if ever such arise again, may be displayed, in so rendering these equivocal scenes as to blend them harmoniously with those portions that in themselves are perfectly illuminated and defined, and bring home enlightenment and conviction at once to the understanding and the heart.

[Page 339.] The players find nothing attractive in Fortinbras, and are too happy to retrench the character and extirpate all possible allusions to him, but there is a worse evil in this than the curtain falling on an unking'd stage, with four princely corpses, and Osric and Horatio only left alive; these foreign incidents give range to the thought that relieves them in this longest of all the plays, that renders the voyage and return of Hamlet less abrupt and remote and exceptional, and the idea which they communicate of the Norwegian prince,-the young and tender leader of an adventurous expedition,—remains in the mind insensibly from essential congruity with the theme of the play, so that his appearance and mastery at last is satisfying as the closing in of a grand outlying circuit and the fulfilment of an expectation.

DR BUCKNILL (1859)

(The Mad Folk of Shakespeare, London, 1859. Second edition, 1867, p. 60.)— [‘My tables! meet it is I set it down,' &c.] We regard this climax of the terrible in the trivial, this transition of mighty emotion into lowliness of action, as one of the finest psychological touches anywhere to be found in the poet.

[Page 61.] When the mind is wrought to an excessive pitch of emotion, the in stinct of self-preservation indicates some lower mode of mental activity as the one thing needful. When Lear's passions are wrought to the utmost, he says: 'I'll do! I'll do! I'll do! But he does nothing. Had he been able, like Hamlet, to have taken out his note-book, it would have been good for his mental health. Mark the effect of the restraint which Hamlet is thus able to put upon the tornado of his emotion. When the friends rejoin him, he is self-possessed enough swiftly to turn their curiosity aside.

[Page 67.] His conduct to Ophelia is a mixture of feigned madness, of the sel

fishness of passion blasted by the cursed blight of fate, of harshness which he assumes to protect himself from an affection which he feels hostile to the present purpose of his life, and of that degree of real unsoundness, his unfeigned 'weakness and melancholy,' which is the subsoil of his mind.

[Page 69.] Hamlet's letter to Ophelia is a silly enough rhapsody; of which, indeed, the writer appears conscious. It reads like an old letter antecedent to the events of the drama. The spirit it breathes is scarcely consistent with the intense life-weariness under which its author is first introduced to notice. The signature, however, is odd: 'Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him;' and agrees with the spirit of Hamlet's materialist philosophy, which is so strongly expressed in various parts of the play, and which forms so strange a contrast with the revelations from the spirit-world of which he is made the recipient.

[Page 78.] Hamlet is not slow to confess his melancholy, and indeed it is the peculiarity of this mental state, that those suffering from it seldom or never attempt to conceal it. A man will conceal his delusions, will deny and veil the excitement of mania, but the melancholiac is almost always readily confidential on the subject of his feelings. In this he resembles the hypochondriac, though not perhaps from exactly the same motive. The hypochondriac seeks for sympathy and pity; the melancholiac frequently admits others to the sight of his mental wretchedness from mere despair of relief and contempt of pity.

[Page 90.] The true melancholy and the counterfeit madness are strangely commingled in this scene [with Ophelia, III, i].

[Page 94.] When the crisis has come, and the King's guilt has been unkennelled, and Hamlet is again left alone with Horatio, before whom he would not feign, his real excitement borders so closely upon the wildest antics of the madness he has put on in craft, that there is little left to distinguish between the two.

[Page 105.] The ideas which almost exclude from Hamlet's thoughts the wrong he has done Polonius now become expressed with a vehemence inconsistent with a sound mind. . . . . Although he succeeds in his purpose of turning the Queen's eyes into her very soul, and showing black and grained spots there, it must be admitted that this excessive vehemence is not merely so much out of the belt of rule as might be justified by the circumstances, but that it indicates a morbid state of emotion; and never does Hamlet appear less sane than when he is declaring: 'That I essentially am not in madness, But mad in craft.'

[Page 111.] Hamlet, therefore, offers as tests of his sanity that his pulse is temperate, that his attention is under command, and his memory faithful; tests which we are bound to pronounce about as fallacious as could well be offered, and which could only apply to febrile delirium and mania. The pulse in mania averages about fifteen beats above that of health; that of the insane generally, including maniacs, only averages nine beats above the healthy standard; the pulse of melancholia and monomania is not above the average. That a maniac would gambol from reproducing in the same words any statement he had made is true enough in the acute forms of the disease; but it is not so in numberless instances of chronic mania, nor in melancholia or partial insanity. The dramatic representations which are in vogue in some asylums prove the power of attention and memory preserved by many patients; indeed, the possessor of the most brilliant memory we ever met with was a violent and mischievous maniac. He would' quote page after page from the Greek, Latin, and French classics. The Iliad, and the best plays of Molière in particular, he seemed to have at his fingers' ends. In raving madness, however, the two VOL. II.-14

symptoms referred to by Hamlet are as a rule present. The pulse is accelerated, and the attention is so distracted by thick-flowing fancies, that an account can scarcely be given of the same matter in the same words. It is, therefore, to this form alone that the test of verbal memory applies.

[Page 116.] Alas, for Hamlet! What with his material philosophy and his spiritual experiences, there was contention enough in that region of the intellect which abuts upon veneration to unhinge the soundest judgement,―let alone the grief and shame and just anger, of which his uncle's crimes and his mother's frailty were the more than sufficient cause in so sensitive a mind.

[Page 127.] Although we arrive at the conviction that Hamlet is morbidly melancholic, and that the degree to which he puts on a part is not very great; that, by eliminating a few hurling words, and the description which Ophelia gives of the state of his stockings, there is little either in his speech or conduct that is truly feigned; let us guard ourselves from conveying the erroneous impression that he is a veritable lunatic. He is a reasoning melancholiac, morbidly changed from his former state of thought, feeling, and conduct. He has 'foregone all custom of exercise,' and longs to commit suicide, but dares not. Yet, like the melancholiacs described by Burton, he is of profound judgement in some things, excellent apprehensions, judicious, wise, and witty; for melancholy advanceth men's conceits more than any humour whatever.' He is in a state which thousands pass through without becoming truly insane, but which in hundreds does pass into actual madness. It is the state of incubation of disease, in which his melancholy sits on brood,' and which, according to the turn of events or the constitution of the brain, may hatch insanity or terminate in restored health.

[Page 130.] Hamlet's character presents the contrast between his vivid intellectual activity and the inertness of his conduct. To say that this depends upon a want of the power of will to transmute thought into action is to do no more than to change one formula of words into another. There must be some better explanation for the unquestionable fact that one man of great intellectual vigor becomes a thinker only, and another a man of vehement action. That activity of intellect is in itself adverse to decisiveness of conduct is abundantly contradicted by biography. That activity of intellect may exist with the utmost powerlessness, or even perversity of conduct, is equally proved by the well-known biographies of many men, 'who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one.' The essential difference of men who are content to rest in thought, and those who transmute it into action, appears not to consist in the presence or absence of that incomprehensible function, that unknown quantity of the mind, the will; but in the presence or absence of clearly-defined and strongly-felt desire, and in that power of movement which can only be derived from the exercise of power, that is, from the habit of action. It is conceivable, as Sir James Mackintosh has well pointed out, that an intellectual being might exist examining all things, comparing all things, knowing all things, but desiring and doing nothing. It is equally conceivable that a being might exist with two strong desires, so equally poised that the result should be complete neutralization of each other, and a state of inaction as if no emotional spring to conduct whatever existed. Hence, inaction may arise from want of desire, or from equipoise of desire.

DR CONOLLY (1863)

(A Study of Hamlet, London, 1863, p. 22.)—This first soliloquy seems distinctly to reveal both Hamlet's mental constitution and the already existing disturbance in his feelings, amounting to a predisposition to actual unsoundness.

[Page 23.] The circumstances are not such as would at once turn a healthy mind to the contemplation of suicide, the last resource of those whose reason has been overwhelmed by calamity and despair. . . . . No thought of feigning melancholy can have entered his mind; but he is even now most heavily shaken and discomposed, indeed so violently that his reason, although not dethroned, is certainly wellnigh deranged.

[Page 43.] The balance of his mind is lost; the sovereignty of his reason is really gone, as Horatio feared it might, in the retired colloquy with the spirit of his father, so lately hearsed in death. He is left incapable of steady and defined

purpose.

[Page 51.] It is generally overlooked that the interpretation [of Hamlet's eccentricity subsequent to the communication with the Ghost as mere acting] can scarcely extend to the eccentricity previously manifested, or explain his conduct or language before he had heard anything of the appearance of his father's ghost. Among his confused resolves, that of feigning madness seems suddenly to have suggested itself, either as subsidiary to some equally obscure plan of revenging his father's death, or merely to account for the wild words he had been uttering. The suggestion might have arisen in his mind in the short interval between the departure of the Ghost from his sight and his rejoining his friends. We shall find that it is never acted upon as a part of a consistent plan, but recurs to him now and then, and fitfully, and is at such times acted upon, not as a deliberately planned conduct, but as something lost sight of amidst the real tumult of a mind unfeignedly disordered.

[Page 53.] It certainly appears to me that the intention to feign was soon forgotten, or could not steadily be maintained, in consequence of a real mental infirmity; that it subsequently recurred to Hamlet's thoughts only in circumstances not productive of much emotion, but became quite unthought of in every scene in which his feelings were strongly acted upon, and that in such scenes a real and lamentable mental disorder swept all trivial considerations away.

[Page 54.] The very exhortations to secrecy, shown to be so important in Hamlet's imagination, are but illustrations of one part of his character, and must be recognisable as such by all physicians intimately acquainted with the beginnings of insanity. It is by no means unfrequent that when the disease is only incipient, and especially in men of exercised minds, that the patient has an uneasy consciousness of his own departure from a perfectly sound understanding. He becomes aware that, however he may refuse to acknowledge it, his command over his thoughts or his words is not steadily maintained, whilst at the same time he has not wholly lost control over either. He suspects that he is suspected, and anxiously and ingeniously accounts for his oddities. Sometimes he challenges inquiry, and courts various tests of his sanity, and sometimes he declares that in doing extravagant things he has only been pretending to be eccentric, in order to astonish the fools about him, and who he knew were watching him.

The young Hamlet has suddenly become a changed man. The curse of madness, -ever fatal to beauty, to order, to happiness,-has fallen upon him; deep vexation