which I have remarked could not, as it appears in the play as it at present stands, be the origination of this design. III. 2. HAMLET. And my imaginations are as foul As Vulcan's STITHY. Smithy must rather have been the word. III. 2. KING. HOW FARES our cousin Hamlet? HAMLET.-Excellent, i'faith; of the cameleon's dish; I eat the air, promise-crammed; you cannot feed capons so. Perhaps I may be but stating what is obvious to every reader, an error into which commentators are too apt to fall, when I remark that here we have the two senses of the word fare, which, like est, means both is and eat. The king inquires in the first sense, Hamlet answers in the second. III. 2. HAMlet. "For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot." This line of an old song is also introduced in Love Labours Lost; and I am happy in being able to supply a copy of a stanza in a song in which something very like it occurs. It is found among Weelks' Madrigals, 1608, No. xx. Since Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Little John are gone-a The Hobby-horse was quite forgot when Kemp did dance He did labour a home-a: After the tabor For to dance Then into France For he took pains To skip, to skip, to skip it, in hope of gains, of gains, Diddle, diddle, diddle, do. III. 2. The Dumb Show. To represent the story of a play in Dumb Show when the play itself is going to be performed, appears a most extraordinary mode of procedure, and nothing like it has been traced in the usages of the English theatre, or, I believe, in the theatres of the more polished nations of Europe. What approach nearest to it, and may by some be mistaken for it, are the Dumb Shows in Sackvile's Gorboduc and Gascoign's Jocasta. But whoever considers these shows attentively will perceive that they are something essentially different from the exhibition of the very action which is immediately to follow with the accompanying dialogue. They are, in fact, but so many moralizations, resembling the choruses of the Greek drama, the moral lessons being read in action, rather than in words. I do not recollect any other English play with a dumb show even of this kind; and Ophelia's question "What means this, my love?" and "Will he tell us what this show means?" prove that shows such as these made no part of the common dramatic entertainments of England. But to shew how utterly unlike are the Dumb Shows in Jocasta to the Dumb Show of Hamlet, I shall transcribe Gascoign's own instructions respecting the dumb show by which one of the Acts is introduced, only premising that neither Sesostris, nor Curtius, whose story is the subject of another of these shows, are characters of the drama, or have anything whatever to do with it. First, before the beginning of the first Act, did sound a doleful and strange noise of viols, cythren, bandarion, and such like; during the which there came in upon the stage a King with an imperial crown upon his head, very richly apparelled; a sceptre in his right hand, a mound with a cross in his left hand, sitting in a chariot very richly furnished, drawn in by four kings, in their doublets and hosen, with crowns also upon their heads, representing unto us ambition by the history of Sesostris, king of Egypt, who being in his time and reign a mighty conqueror, yet not content to have subdued many princes and taken from them their kingdoms and dominions, did in like manner cause those kings whom he had so overcome to draw in his chariot like beasts and oxen, thereby to content his unbridled ambitious desire. After he had been drawn twice about the stage and retired, the music ceased, and Jocasta the Queen issued out of her house, beginning the first Act as followeth, &c. The shows in Gorboduc are of the same kind. Of these Mr. Warton speaks thus: Every Act is introduced, as was the custom in our old plays, with a species of machinery called the “Dumb Show," shadowing by an allegorical exhibition the matter that was immediately to follow. In the construction of this spectacle, and its personifications, much poetry and imagination were often displayed. It is some apology for these preparations, that they were commonly too mysterious and obscure to forestall the future events with any degree of clearness and precision. Not that this mute mimicry was always typical of the ensuing incidents. It sometimes served for a compendious introduction of such circumstances as could not commodiously be comprehended within the bounds of the representation. It sometimes supplied deficiencies, and covered the want of business. Hist. of English Poetry, 8vo. 1840, III. 293. It is evident then that these shows are something essentially different from the show which we have in Hamlet. No one has hitherto hit upon the true origin of the show in Hamlet. It seems that such strange and unsuitable anticipations were according to the common practice of the Danish Theatre. I first became acquainted with this fact, which appears to explain what without it appears to carry absurdity as far as it will go, when reading an unpublished diary of the seventeenth century, the writer of which relates that about the close of the year 1688 there landed at Hull about six thousand Danish soldiers, who were dispersed in the neighbouring towns. Some of them were quartered at the little town of Hatfield, near Doncaster, near to which the writer of the diary lived, who, having given some general account of their habits, proceeds thus:-" Many of them while they stayed here acted a play in their language, and they got a vast deal of money thereby. The design of it was Herod's Tyranny, the Birth of Christ, and the Coming of the Wise Men. They built a stage in our large court-house, and acted the same thereon. I observed that all the postures were shewn first, namely, the king on his throne, his servants standing about him; and then, the scenes being drawn, another posture came, the barbarous soldiers murdering the infants, and so on; and when they had run through all so, they then began to act both together. All which time they had plenty of all sorts of music of themselves, for [one] soldier played on one sort, and one another. I heard some of them say that some of these players belonged to the King of Denmark's play-house that was set a fire and burnt when most of the nobles were beholding a play several years ago." The writer of this diary was Abraham de la Pryme, and it is the same diary to which we owe a remarkable notice of Sir Isaac Newton, and many other biographical and topographical facts no where else preserved. III. 2. PLAYER QUEEN. And women's fear and love hold quantity; In neither aught or in extremity. I believe the passage should be printed thus: And women's fear and love hold quantity In neither: : - aught or in extremity. that is, nothing, or in excess. An aught is the common name of the cypher in Warwickshire and elsewhere. III. 2. KING. Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in it? This seems to be an oversight, for the King is represented as being present at the dumb show, which would make him well acquainted with the argument; and the only wonder is, that he could bear to allow the play to proceed when he had seen the show. The Mouse-trap. III. 2. HAMLET. Marry how? Tropically. This play is the image of a murder done in Vienna: Gonzago is the Duke's name; his wife Baptista. Hamlet calls the play The Mouse-trap, with reference to the design with which it was performed. It was to catch the conscience of the King. Tropically is trapically in the earliest quarto, an idle, unmeaning word, except that we may see a faint shade of meaning in the play being a figurative representation of an actual deed, and this, combined with the opportunity of playing on the word trap, is the true reason that we meet with this word thus oddly introduced. Gonzago is here a duke, but everywhere else he is a king. How is this? The original quarto explains it. The character was a duke throughout as the play was originally written, and when king was to be substituted for duke this passage remained by some accident uncorrected. Shakespeare has been censured for giving the name Baptista to a woman. I have seen a few instances in which the name was borne by women in England. Shakespeare was not solicitous about it. It had a feminine termination: that was enough. He has given it to a man in The Taming of the Shrew. III. 2. OPHELIA. You are keen, my lord, you are keen. There is no appropriateness in this as a reply to what Hamlet had said, and it is in fact an observation on something said by him that is now transposed to another part of the play. This we collect from the first quarto, |