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To the Editor of the Argus.

Sir—So many queries have been addressed to me, both personally and by letter, with respect to Mr. Montgomery's Hamlet, that I will venture, with your permission, to reply to them through the columns of the Argus.

Let me premise that every Hamlet of note I have ever seen has been largely affected by, if it has not faithfully reflected, the temperament of the actor. Mr. Montgomery's Hamlet is no exception to the rule. It is essentially lymphatic. The portrait he presents to us is that of an amiable, affectionate, self-indulgent, plaintive, and somewhat lachrymose Prince. He brings out in strong relief the vacillating, wayward, irresolute, and half-hearted traits in Hamlet's character, He shows him to be unstable as water, as variable as the clouds, as inconstant as the moon. His melancholy is not so deeply seated as to render him incapable of fugitive moods of cheerfulness. He can be diverted from his purpose by trivial incidents, and find a pretext for procrastination in dreamy reveries. His grief is the indulgence of a weak mind, and not an influential principle of action operating upon a strong page 4 one. It is content to expend itself in "the windy suspiration of forced breath." When it should serve as a goad or a spur, it is found to restrain him like a curb. Were his nature less gracious his manner less urbane, and his speech less gentle, we should be provoked to despise him as a poor shiftless creature, who is always "letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,' like the poor cat i' the adage." He exhibits none of the "stern effects" of which Hamlet speaks, and which actors of greater vigour have been accustomed to display; but, on the other hand, he reveals to us—which some of them do not—the deep undercurrent of affection which he supposes the Prince to entertain for Ophelia, the mental pang which he imagines that Hamlet experiences on discovering her prevarication, and the profound reluctance, which he conceives the Prince must feel in renouncing, from a sense of duty and in disregard of the dictates of his heart, the passion he has cherished for her. Mr. Montgomery's is an eminently agreeable and thoroughly artistic Hamlet. It is most effective where other representatives of the character have been least so; and it is comparatively unimpressive in those scenes—the interview with the Ghost, and the closet scene, for example—in which previous actors, and Mr. Anderson especially so, have made their strongest points, and produced their most powerful impressions. In both these instances Mr. Montgomery presents us with a striking picture of mental abstraction when, as I think, it should be one of mental absorption. His mood of mind is subjective, when it should be objective. He is occupied with his own meditations when every nerve might be supposed to be strung to the highest tension, and every faculty wholly engrossed by the awful apparition, the hour, the place, and the astounding nature of the revelation made to him by the "dread corse." Thus much is obvious from the text; and it derives additional sanction from the traditions of the stage, handed down to us from the time in which Shakspeare played the Ghost in his own tragedy, and is reported to have instructed Burbage in the part of Hamlet, and reproved Kemp for his "villanous" gagging. How Garrick bore himself in presence of the spirit we know from Partridge's ingenious page 5 remark in Tom Jones; and I think we may accept Shakspeare and Garrick as high authorities on this point; and may be justified, in this wise, for disputing the wisdom and propriety of innovations which have nothing to recommend them beyond the fact of their novelty. If the foundations of Hamlet's reason are not—as two such experts as Drs. Bucknill and Conolly assert they are—overthrown by the appalling revelation which has been just made to him by the Ghost; if he does not join together—as Coleridge, as M. Villemain, and as nearly all the great critics, English, German, and French, declare he does—"the light of reason, the cunning of intentional error, and the involuntary disorder of the soul," his mind was unquestionably unsettled; while, physically, he appears to have been in a state of hysteria. Not otherwise can we account for the unfilial and scoffing language which he employs towards his father, which are so significant of Hamlet's state of mind, and which Mr. Montgomery, strange to say, altogether omits. They are these:

Ham.

—Ha, ha, boy! say'st thou so? Art thou there, Truepenny?
Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellarage.

And again—

Well said, old mole! Canst work i' the earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer.

So, too, in the play scene. Mr. Montgomery cuts out whole passages which are not less demonstrative of a disordered intellect, and not less important aids to the spectator, who is anxious to divine the true condition of the Prince's mind. The lines excised are these:—

Ham.—Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers (if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me), with two Provencal roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir? Hor.—Half a share. Ham.—A whole one, ay.

Fur thou dost know, O Damon dear,
This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself, and now reigns here
A very, very—peacock.

This extravagance of conduct and language, it will be observed is exhibited when none but Horatio is present, and when no page 6 necessity exists for acting the madman; while the flightiness of the couplet—

For if the King like not the comedy,
Why, then, belike—he likes it not, perdy—

resembles that of many of Madge Wildfire's crazy speeches.

In the purely colloquial passages of the play Mr. Montgomery is very happy; and while, in the "business" of the piece, he does not refuse to adopt what has been engrafted upon it by his predecessors, he gives proof of originality of conception, and endeavours, indeed, to clear up some obscurities of the text by the light which his action projects upon them. Thus, he mitigates the apparent harshness of Hamlet's language and conduct to Ophelia in the first scene of the second act, by conveying to the audience, as explicitly as possible, the assurance of the fact that the King and his Chamberlain are eaves-dropping behind the arras; while he also renders broadly manifest the shock communicated to the Prince's moral nature when he discovers Ophelia to have paltered with the truth by declaring that her father is at home at the very moment she is aware of his being an ear-witness of all that passes in her interview with her royal lover. Mr. Montgomery represents Hamlet as actuated by conflicting emotions throughout the entire scene—grieved and exasperated by Ophelia's complicity in the espionage to which he is exposed, but still yearning towards her with a tenderness that transforms wrath into pity, and that converts the injunction, "Get thee to a nunnery," into a loving admonition, springing either from the conviction that there she would find a haven of security and repose, or from the selfishness which would prompt him to debar others from winning that place in her affections which he had held, and had voluntarily, but reluctantly, vacated. Elegant and agreeable, however, as this is, there is nothing either in the text or the stage directions to warrant it; and harsh, violent, and cruel as Hamlet's language and demeanour are towards Ophelia, they are strictly natural, and are perfectly appropriate to his state of mind. Shakspeare well knew that in cases of mental disease or distemper, the sufferer hates and distrusts, upbraids and abuses, those whom, in mental health, he has page 7 loved and esteemed; just as—to digress for a moment—pureminded women, if they become insane, will indulge in the lewdest conversation. And hence the dramatist, with a rare knowledge of intellectual disorder, puts snatches of coarse ballads into the mouth of the mad Ophelia. Therefore any display of tenderness towards her in the particular scene referred to, any softening down of his brutality, must be, as Dr. Conolly justly observes, "an unauthorised departure from the delineation of his character by Shakspeare." I think that experienced physician's criticism of this part of the play is one of the best ever penned; and it derives the utmost weight from his professional experience. "Hamlet's expressions," he writes, "from the commencement of his directly addressing Opheia, are all of the tissue of a madman's talk, with no clearly determined application to immediate circumstances, and addressed by a disturbed mind and heart to the empty air, or to the shadows of images crowding among his troubled thoughts. They contain unconnected allusions to himself, broken reflections unconsciously wounding Ophelia, starts of general suspicion, and sudden threats which flash and disappear, but which would have been carefully refrained from if there had been only deception intended to make the path to vengeance clear. If we would unravel all these mingled expressions, we find that it is scarcely of Ophelia that Hamlet is speaking thus wildly, but of his mother, of her detested marriage, and of his own conscious imperfections; all these things are tinging his discourse, but giving it no true colour."

Furthermore, Mr. Montgomery is wrong, I conceive, in his delivery—graceful and pleasing though it is—of the well-known soliloquy, "To be, or not to be;" which is not the philosophical speculation of a Cato or a Seneca, but the passionate utterance of a soul at war with life, but dreading death, and agonised by the struggle between these two sentiments. With these abatements, and with the general objection that Mr. Montgomery does not allow Hamlet to exhibit that "exaggerated energy under provocation" of which mild and sensitive natures like his are peculiarly capable, and in which the Prince indulges as often as his indigna- page 8 tion gets the better of his indecision, the portraiture is graphic consistent, and harmonious; deficient in power, but careful in finish and delicate in detail. If I were to borrow an illustration from a sister art, I should liken the picture to a clever watercolour drawing, lacking the depth and solidity of an oil-painting, but compensating for the absence of these by the presence of other qualities—by airiness of tone, simplicity of treatment, transparency of colour, lightness of touch, and a certain sobriety of effect—a pleasant twilight, equally removed from the gloom of evening and the garishness of the afternoon.

In brief, Mr. Montgomery tones down the roughness and violence of the poet's Hamlet, and presents IBM to us en beau. It is not Hamlet the moody, with a wildness that is half false, and a madness that is half real; the misanthropical, the vindictive, with a thin crust of courtly culture overlying the fundamental coarseness of his race, and broken up by fitful eruptions of fiery and ungovernable passion; but Hamlet the lover, Hamlet the dawdling dreamy fainéant Hamlet the débonnaire, Hamlet with a large infusion of Werther. I am indisposed to disparage it on that account. It is the actor's own conception of the character, and he is to be commended for thinking it out, and for embodying it in a concrete and consistent form. Let us be just to him, and let us be equally just to other actors who offer us the fruits of their genius, their study, their observation, and experience, even although we differ from them in the reading of a passage or the idea of a part.

James Smith.