10 MAY 1873, Page 9

"HAMLET" AT THE CRYSTAL PALACE.

Mll. TOM TAYLOR'S chief difficulty in the great attempt he is making with so much ability and spirit to represent Shakespeare's plays adequately at the Crystal Palace, will arise not from himself or from his troupe, but from the intrinsic dis- advantages of an afternoon performance, from which the audience melts away for train-catching and engagement-keeping purposes before the play is over. This is an annoyance which damps the spirit of the actors, because it breaks up the collective spirit of the audience, and therefore cools their enthusiasm. The difficulty is almost insuperable as regards the representation of Shakespeare's plays, very few of which can be presented under three hours, while Hamlet takes nearly four, quite too long for an audience which has still duties in prospect before it sleeps. Again, the theatre at the Crystal Palace is in an acoustic point of view an exceedingly imper- fect structure, and that deficiency also tends to make the audience feel less indisposed to leave before the play is over. In spite of these great difficulties, no one who has more than once seen Hamlet as it is put on the stage at the Crystal Palace,—the first representation last Saturday was by no means up to those of the present week,—will doubt that he has seen, on the whole, by far the best 'Hamlet' of our own time. We do not mean that Mr. MacKaye,—though he has indisputable genius, and acts much better than Mr. Fechter in several critical scenes,—has as much fire and life as Mr. Fechter, but that the costumes and scenery of the play are admirable ; that the intellectual interpretations of ob- scure points,—like the sudden "Where's your father ?" in the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, —even when they are somewhat doubt- ful, are pointed and telling, and that the whole drill of the actors is better than in any rendering of Hamlet, or indeed of Shakespeare, that has been seen since Macready's time at least, and in our opinion, in a better school of taste than Macready's. The surmise of some of our contemporaries that the actors had been drilled out of all originality and presence of mind by a too anxious and literary drill- master, has really nothing at all to support it except the high a priori ground of reasoning, that with such a manager it was a result not unlikely. We suspect Mr. Taylor, like a wise manager, has worked more by influence than authority,—indeed, on the first representation we caught Horatio quite enjoying himself during Hamlet's address to his father's ghost, till he suddenly recollected that he too ought to share the awe his Prince was expressing. There was assuredly no sign in the actors of high-pressure intel- lectual pedagogism, while the supervision of a finely cultivated taste was visible in all the finesse of gesture and action. For instance, Hamlet's abrupt action in taking from Ophelia the book which Polonius had put into her hands merely to lend colour to her loneliness, gives the key-note to the scene, by marking at once his rough distrust of women's unreal artifices, and his deliberate intention to overdo for his own purposes the cynical mood of mind to which he is sufficiently inclined. Of such well-conceived aids to the interpretation of the feeling of the different scenes there are not a few in this Hamlet, as Mr. Tom Taylor has arranged it. Thus, the rough stage put up by the strolling players in the third act for their performance before the King helps us to realise better the crudeness of Hamlet's allies in his elaborate setting of "the mousetrap," and so impresses on us afresh Shakespeare's evident intention to paint Hamlet's elaborate and admirable comment on players and their florid, ranting art, as merely one of his unconscious expedients for getting a respite from the resolve which overetrained his nature ; since, evidently enough, nothing depended on the good or bad acting of these stroll- ing players,—who, indeed, speak speeches so stilted and affected, that stilted and affected acting would be more in keeping with it than the simplicity and naturalness Hamlet enforces at so much length. It is impossible to ignore in this version of Hamlet, that the wise and thoughtful instructions to the players are utterly mal- U-propos, and mere diversions for Hamlet's high-strung nerves.

Mr. MacKaye's Hamlet is, in the great soliloquies, much the finest which the present writer has ever seen. Mr. Fechter failed terribly in the soliloquies. He could not let his mind drift. He made eddies of passion of them, which they are hardly ever, and reveries of zealous purpose, which they are never. Mr. Fechter's greatness was in the princely dialogue,—for instance, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the flute-scene, when he laughs to scorn their attempt to play upon him,—and in the dialogue with the Gravedigger, and with Horatio over the open grave that was to receive Ophelia. These are scenes in which Mr. MacKaye acts finely, especially in the former,—the spirit ebbs away from most of the actors towards the end, under the discouragement of a dwindling audience,—but hardly with the full imperious scorn and abounding life of Mr. Fechter, who made Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to

shrink into nothingness before him. Mr. MacKaye's tone in this scene has perhaps a thought too much of moral indig- nation at his old companions' treachery, and too little of the profound scorn, which he, nevertheless, gives so admirably where Hamlet deliberately asks the traitors, "Have you any further, — trade,—with us ? " Hamlet in his cynical mood, once convinced of any one's falsehood, is incapable of moral indignation ; he i all scorn. Still the scene, as Mr. MacKaye plays it, is exceedingly fine, and has greatly improved since the first representation. But his highest point was in some of the reveries. Nothing can be finer than the dreamy, ghostly voice in which he says to himself that

"the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourne No traveller returns, puzzles the will."

His imagination seems to be losing itself in the chill twilight of an unknown world, and to thrill him with a vague shiver of awe. Again, in the soliloquy on the passion which the player can affect for a mere actor's purposes, there are some fine points. Mr. MacKaye, for instance, made the present writer see for the first time that Hamlet was evidently hoping that the play would make the King confess his own guilt, and so perhaps take all the trouble of vengeance off hi a own shoulders,— a new and most expressive point in the rendering of the character.

He gives,—

"I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They hare proclaimed their malefactions," with a sense of relief and a prospect of the unburdening of his heart, as he pronounces the last line, that tells at once the hope of much more than a mere confirmation or disproof of the ghost's story,—a final end to his self-imposed responsibililies through the self-accusation of his uncle. And that strikes us as a touch of real genius in the evolution of Hamlet's irresolute character. But Mr. MacKaye concludes the grand soliloquy badly. Clearly, when Hamlet says, with a deep sense of relief at a new postponement and possibly quittance of his responsibilities,—

"the play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the Bing,"

the last three words are quite unemphatic, and have no right to the false rhyming stress he lays upon them. It is not the con- science of the King he is thinking of, but the trap for the conscience, and the possible result of the trap. He has discovered a new chance of evading the responsibility of setting to rights the disjointed times, and throws himself into the hope with a sigh of inexpressible relief. The conscience of the King' is the mere modes operandi, and his mind is already drifting away beyond it among the possible results. Mr. MacKaye is not quite so effective in the ghost scenes, where he is, we think, too violent. Here and there his rendering even in these scenes is extremely fine ; for instance, the faint, vague, inward fashion in which, not addressing Horatio, though answering, to himself, Horatio's expostulations against following the ghost, he says,—

"Why, what should be the fear? I do not set my life at a pin's foe :— And for my soul, what can it do to that, Being a thing immortal as itself ?"

You see that he does feel the fear, and is arguing himself, not Horatio, out of it. And again, when he first bids Marcellus hold off his hand, he does it with the absorbed inward air of one not yet roused, and not doubting that a word will be enough, but who is still arguing with himself, and is only awakened by Horatio's seizing the other arm, and betraying, therefore, a serious intention of using force. The gradations of feeling here are admirably marked. But in other parts of the same scene he is clearly too violent. "Oh, my prophetic soul ! mine uncle !" should not be shrieked,—it is the mere verification of his own suspicion ; and again, the " Horrible, most horrible !" when the ghost complains of being sent to the other world with all his imperfections on his head and no time for penitence, is far too frenzied, and not under the control of the awe which should continue till the ghost vanishes and the unnatural flush of excitement succeeds. Mr. MacKaye has real genius. His only fault is a too restless action, —this he has already mended greatly, —and to our mind a too great multiplica- tion of the passages where he falls "raving like a very drab," though we believe Shakespeare intended many of them for dreamy reverie. On the other hand, the intense excitement caused in Hamlet by the effect of the represented murder on the King,— while he is half hoping, we suspect, to hear of the King's confes- sion,—and the almost horrid glee with which he compares notes with Horatio, is very finely given.

Of the other actors, Polonius is much the best, and the best Polonius we remember to have seen. That the old man is a courtier, and a courtier of the Elizabethan age, who thinks tropes and con- ceits especially suitable in addressing kings and queens, is obvious enough. But it is also perfectly obvious that he is meant for a shrewd, though worldly man, to whom both his children were pro- foundly attached, and that the fooling representations of him are utterly mistaken. The part could hardly be better given than it is given by Mr. Flockton. The parts of the King and Queen are both well acted till they come to their great testing scenes, and then neither of them is equal to it. The King's soliloquy of re- morse is extremely tame and poor. When he asks,—

" May we be pardoned and retain the offence ?" he seems to be asking, solely, as Miss Dartle would say, "for in-

formation's sake," and not because the question has the least bearing on his own case. Nor is the Queen's emotion good in the scene with Hamlet in her own bedroom. It is too much of the gasping order so greatly affected by actresses who do not feel their parts,— a fault which is but too prominent also in Miss Carlisle's Ophelia. The scene in which Hamlet bids her go to a nunnery is exceed- ingly difficult,—far more difficult than the scene of madness,— and she cannot be said to act it well. Her emotion is artificial, and she passes from it into reflections on the noble mind which is "here o'erthrown " which at first flavour more of Miss Edge-

worth, than of a wounded heart. Still, in spite of all these defects, take the play as a whole, we doubt whether Hamlet has in our generation ever been put so effectively on the stage.

Certainly the dreaminess of Hamlet himself has never been so well given, and the fitful impulse never better. Nor have the general effects of the greatest play in the English, or perhaps any other language, ever been placed with so much brilliancy and force before the spectators.