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Which are Hamlet’s ‘ Dozen
or Sixteen Lines ’ ?
By
W. T. MALLESON, B.A.,
UNIV. COLL., LONDON,
AND
J. R. SEELEY, M.A.,
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE’ UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, ONE OF THE
VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE NEW SHAKSPERE SOCIETY.
PAPERS READ BEFORE
THE NEVE SHHKSPERE SOCIETY,
AT ITS
ffilefeenti; JHietinfl,
FRIDAY, DECEMBER n,
I
AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.
i
874,
�PUBLICATIONS
OF THE
NEW SHAKSPERE SOCIETY.
Series I. Transactions. Part I, containing 4 Papers, and editioflb
of the genuine parts of Timon, and Pericles, by the Rev. F. G-.
Fleay, M.A., with Discussions on the Papers.
Series II. Plays. The First two Quartos of Pomeo and Juliet,
1597 and 1599, in a. simple Reprints; b. Parallel Texts,
arranged so as to show their Differences, and with Collations
of all the Quartos and Folio ; all edited by P. A. Daniel, Esq.
[6. was presented to the Society by UP. IT. Prince Leopold,
one of its Vice-Presidents.^
Series IV.
Shakspere Allusion-Books.
Part I. 1592-8 A.n.
(Greenes Groatesworth of Wit [written in 1592], 1596 ; Henry
Chettle’s 4 Kind-Harts Dreame ’ [written in 1593]; 4 Englaudes
- Mourning Garment ’ [1603] ; A Mourneful Dittie [1603] ;
five sections from Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, 1598, &c.
&c.) ; edited by C. Mansfield Ingleby, Esq., LL.D.
Publications of the New Shakspere Society now at Press.
Series I. Transactions. Part II, containing Papers- by J. W.
Hales, Esq., M.A., the Rev. F. G. Fleay, M.A., and Richard
Simpson, Esq., B.A.; with Discussions on the Papers.
Series II. Pomeo and Juliet, c. a Revised Edition of the Quarto
Text of 1599, collated with the other Quartos and the Folio ;
edited by P. A. Daniel, Esq., with Notes and Introduction.
-Uenry V., a. Reprints of the Quarto and Folio; b. Parallel Texts
of the Quarto and Folio ; c. a Revised Edition, with Notes and
Introduction; the whole edited by Dr Brinsley Nicholson.
Series III. Originals and Analogues. Part I. a. The Tragicall
Historye of Romeus and Juliet, written first in Italian by
Bandell, and nowe in Englishe by Ar[thur] Br[ooke], 1562 ;
edited by P. A. Daniel, Esq. b. The goodly hystory of the
true and constant loue between Rhomeo and J ulietta; from
Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, 1567; edited by P. A. Daniel,
Esq.
Series VI. Shakspere’s England. William Harrison’s Pescription
of England, 1577, 1587, edited from its two versions by F. J.
Furnivall, M.A.
Publications Suggested.
Series . II. 1. The Two Noble Kinsmen, to be edited by Harold
Littledale, Esq. 2. Cymbeline, to be edited by W. J. Craig,
Esq., M.A., Trinity College, Dublin.
Parallel Texts of the Imperfect sketches of b. Hamlet and its
�WHICH ARE HAMLET’S
‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
BY W. T. MALLESON, B.A., UNIV. COLL., LONDON,
AND
J. R. SEELEY, M.A., PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIV.
OF CAMBRIDGE.
�466
XII.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
BY W. T. MALLESON, B.A., UNIV. COLL., LONDON,
AND
J. R. SEELEY, M.A., PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OE
CAMBRIDGE.
{Read. at the eleventh Meeting of the Society, Friday, Fee. 11, 1874.)
[In the following discussion, the suggestion that Hamlet’s ‘ dozen or sixteen lines ’
occur in the long speech of the player-king is spoken of as if it were a new one.
It occurred to me independently : and though I could scarcely believe that no one
had thought of it before, yet the editions that happened to be within my reach
knew nothing of it, and I found it to be new to all my Shaksperian friends, I now
find that I was right in thinking that it could not possibly have been reserved
for me to make such a discovery, and that the credit of it belongs to Mr and Mrs
Cowden Clarke, who published it long since in their annotated edition of Shakspere.
I am happy to have learned this in time to save myself from even a momentary
appearance of claiming what does not belong to me. Mr and Mrs Cowden Clarke
have also anticipated some of my arguments, as will be seen by their note, which
I now reprint.—J. R. Seeley, March 10, 1875.
Act III. Sc. ii. Speech of the player-king : * Purpose is but the slave to memory,’
to ‘ their ends none of our own.’
„We have an idea that this is the passage ‘ of some dozen or sixteen lines ’ which
Hamlet has proposed to ‘ set down and insert ’ in the play, asking the player
whether he could ‘ study ’ it for the occasion. The style of the diction is markedly
different from the remainder of the dialogue belonging to this acted play of ‘ The
Murder of Gonzago ’ ; and it is signally like Hamlet’s own argumentative mode.
‘ This world is not for aye,’ the thoughts upon the fluctuations of ‘ love ’ and
‘ fortune,’ and the final reflection upon the contrary current of ‘ our wills and
fates,’ with the overthrow of our ‘devices,’ and the ultimate diversity between
our intentionsand their ‘ends,’ are as if proceeding from the prince himself. His
motive in writing these additional lines for insertion, and getting the player to
deliver them, we take to be a desire that they shall serve to divert attention from
the special passages directed at the king, and to make these latter seem less
pointed. We have fancied that this is Shakespere’s intention, because of the em
phatic variation in the style just here. Observe how very different are the myth
ological allusions to ‘ Phcebus,’ ‘ Neptune,’ ‘ Tellus,’ ‘ Hymen,’ ‘ Hecate,’ and the
stiff sentential inversions of ‘ about the world have times twelve thirties been,’
‘ discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must,’ &c.; and, moreover, observe how
exactly the couplet commencing the player-king’s speech, ‘ I do believe,’ &c., and
the couplet concluding it, * To think thou wilt,’ &c., would follow on conjoinedly,
were the intervening lines (which we suppose intended to be those written by
Hamlet) not inserted.’—From Cassell's Illustrated Shakespere, edited by Charles
and Mary Cowden Clarke, Vol. III. p. 415.]
�XJI. 1.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ ?
467
I. MR MALLES ON'S ARGUMENT.
Ha/mlet. Dost thou hear me, old friend ; can you play the murther of
Gtonzago?
1 Player, Ay, my lord.
Ha/mlet. We’ll have’t to-morrow night. You could, for a need, study a
speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down, and insert in’t ?
could you not ?
1 Player. Ay, my lord.—Hamlet, Act II. Sc. ii. (lines 562-9).
A short time ago appeared in the Academy, a statement written
by Mr Purnivall, that Professor Seeley had suggested that the
* dozen or sixteen lines,’ inserted by Hamlet in the sub-play of the
‘ Murder of Gonzago,’ might be found in the following speech of
the Player-King, Act III. Sc. ii. :—
I do believe, you think what now you speak ;
But, what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory ;
Of violent birth, but poor validity :
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree;
But fall unshaken, when they mellow be.
Most necessary ’tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt :
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy;
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament,
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye ; nor ’tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change ;
For ’tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark, his favourite flies ;
The poor advanc’d makes friends of enemies.
,
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend :
For who not needs shall never lack a friend ;
And who in want a hollow friend doth try
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But, orderly to end where I begun,—
Our wills and fates do so contrary run,
That our devices still are overthrown :
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own :
So think thou wilt no second husband wed ;
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is de^.
196
199
203
207
211
215
219
223
225
These are very interesting lines, bnt they reflect, as Gervinus
points out, not upon the murdering usurping King, but upon Hamlet
himself; if they are those Hamlet wrote, we find him turning aside
�468
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ ?
XII. 1.
from the immediate purpose of the player’s performance, which was
to ‘ catch the conscience of the King,’ in order to brood over his own
character, and in words of his own to point the moral of the play of
Hamlet:—
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory ;
Of violent birth, but poor validity.
And again:—
Our wills and fates do so contrary run,
That our devices still are overthrown :
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
One must confess, that there would be nothing foreign to Ham
let’s character in thus suddenly putting aside action for disquisition ;
yet when he is eagerly ordering the performance of the Murder of
Gonzago for ‘to-morrow night,’ the earliest possible time, and adds
‘ You could for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines
which I would set down and insert in’t ? ’, it is difficult to believe
that he is only anxiously seeking an opportunity of dissertating upon
man’s feebleness of purpose :—What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending doth the purpose lose.
And on this point we are not left to conjecture only; the
terrible soliloquy beginning, ‘Now I am alone, 0 what a rogue
and peasant slave am I,’ immediately follows his interview with the
players, and shews clearly what was in his mind, when he proposed
his addition to the play.
About my brains 1 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 have proclaimed their malefactions ;
For murther, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murther of my father,
Before mine uncle : I’ll observe his looks ;
I’ll tent him to the quick ; if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil : and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy
(As he is very potent with such spirits),
�XII. 1.
WHICH ARE hamlet’s 1 DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
469
Abuses me to damn me : I'll have grounds
More relative than this : The play’s the thing,
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
The plot of this play already resembled the black crime that had
been revealed to Hamlet alone, and his hope was that his lines might
drive the dreadful resemblance home to the very heart of the mur
derer, so that the guilty creature sitting at the play might if possible
be driven to proclaim aloud his ‘ malefaction,’ or, if not that, at
least so to lose self command as to betray his guilt to the eyes which
would be ‘rivetted to his face.’
How important, for this end, the speech was, we may learn from
Hamlet’s special instructions to the players for its delivery:—
Speak the speech, I pray you, as Ipronounced it to you, trippingly on the
tongue : but if you mouth it, as many of you players do, I had as lief the
town-crier had spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much—your hand
thus : but use all gently : for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say)
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may
give it smoothness. 0, it offends me to the soul, to see a robustious periwigpated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the
groundlings ; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable
dumb shows and noise : I could have such a fellow whipped for o’er-doing
Termagant; it out-herods Herod : pray you, avoid it.
From this, too, we may gather something of the nature of the
lines; there was in them for certain the torrent, tempest, and whirl
wind of passion, a passion which Hamlet was very anxious that no
robustious periwig-pated actor should be allowed to tear to tatters;
and if this be, as I think, beyond a question, let the reader consider
whether in the philosophic lines suggested by Professor Seeley, even
the most 1 robustious ’ fellow could find anything of passion, with
which 1 to split the ears of the groundlings.’
Take now the conversation with Horatio just before the play
commences.
Hamlet says :—
There is a play to-night before the king ;
One scene of it comes near the circumstance
Which I have told thee of my father’s death.
I prithee, when thou seest that act a foot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe mine uncle : if his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
�470
XII. 1.
WHICH ARE hamlet’s ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
As Vulcan’s stithe. Give him heedful note :
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face ;
And, after, we will both our judgments join
To censure of his seeming.
If the remainder of the play of Hamlet had by some calamity
been lost and it stopped here, wrould any one have doubted that this
‘ one speech ’ in this ‘ one scene ’ must have been the speech of
Hamlet’s writing 1
When the time of the representation approaches, Hamlet, in
terrible suppressed excitement, lies down among the audience at
Ophelia’s feet, and seems to relieve the tension of his mind by gross
and bitter jesting. Such words from Hamlet, the prince and scholar
to poor Ophelia, who had 1 sucked the honey of his music vows,’
appear at first almost inexplicable. It is quite insufficient to say that
the license of that age admitted expressions which would be shocking
now ;—No other lover in Shakspere uses such language; Rosalind,
Juliet, Miranda are quite otherwise addressed. Nor can I endure
to find here any support for Goethe’s theory, that the strong defence
of perfect purity was at all wanting to her who had been Hamlet’s
‘ soul’s idol.’ We must remember that at this moment Hamlet’s
heart is full of the infidelity of his mother as well as of the murder
of his father. Even before he had learnt from the Ghost the full
measure of his mother’s guilt, he had said in his anguish at her
marriage within a month—‘ a little month’—after his father’s death,
‘ Frailty thy name is, woman; ’ and when the Ghost has left him he
first apostrophises her, ‘ 0 most pernicious woman,’ and puts the
murderer, ‘ the smiling damned villain,’ in the second place. His
mother has destroyed his faith in every woman, he believes virtue
to be ‘ as wax,’ he separates from Ophelia, and bids her enter a
nunnery; and now, when in spite of himself he feels her attractions
and lies down at her feet, he reminds himself by insults and coarse
jokes of the frailty and corruption of women.
But let us go on to the performance itself; it begins, as did the
old moralities, with a dumb show:—
Enter a King and a Queen, very lovingly ; the Queen embracing him.
She kneels and makes show of protestation unto him. He takes her up, and
declines his head upon her neck ; lays him down upon a bank of flowers; she,
�XII.
1. WHICH ARE hamlet’s ‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
471
seeing him asleep, leaves him. Anon comes in a fellow, takes oft his crown,
kisses it, and pours poison in the King’s ears, and exit. The Queen returns ;
finds the King dead, and makes passionate action. The poisoner, with some
two or three mutes, comes in again, seeming to lament with her. The dead
body is carried away. The poisoner woos the Queen with gifts ; she seems
loath and unwilling awhile, but, in the end, accepts his love. (Exeunt.)
‘ Anon conies in a fellow, takes off his crown, kisses it, and pours
poison in the King's ears.' Here beyond doubt we have the “ one
scene ” coining near the circumstance of the death of Hamlet’s father
as the Ghost describes it:—
‘ Sleeping within mine orchard,
My custom always in the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of mine ears did pour
The leprous distilment.’
Ill fact the parallel is so exact as to make one suspect that
Hamlet altered the manner of the murder in the old play to make it
tally precisely with the awful secret fact. If not, it is strange that
so odd, if not impossible, a way of committing murder should have
occurred in both the plays.
Here then I believe we should look for Hamlet’s addition, the “ one
speech,” the crisis of his plot, and it is here during the representation
that his excitement becomes painfully intense, and almost uncon
trollable, so that, when Lu cianus the murderer enters, Hamlet at
Ophelia’s feet strangely interrupts, calling aloud :—
This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King.
Although interruptions of ‘ poor players ’ by gallants of the
Court and great people were in those times common enough, one can
hardly help pausing to commiserate the actor thus unexpectedly
greeted by his patron at the important moment of his first entrance.
Lucianus is the principal character of the piece, the Villain on whose
daring crime and ready smooth-faced plausibility the plot turns, and
is doubtless the part that would have been given to the leading
tragedian, probably to the very actor who had previously so finely
recited JEneas’ description of the rugged Pyrrhus, and of whom
Hamlet, an excellent judge of acting, said that he
�472
XII.
1. WHICH ARE HAMLET’S i DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
Could force his soul so to his own conceit,
That from her working all his visage wanned ;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit.
Well, Lucianus, recovering as he best might from the abrupt
announcement of his name and quality, proceeds with the business
of his part, taking off the crown (as above) from the sleeping king,
kissing it, and exerting himself so to force his soul that all his visage
might wear a murderous aspect, when Hamlet, now in the very agony
and fever of his impatience, interrupts him again, with :—
Begin, murderer ; leave thy damnable faces and begin.
The croaking raven
Doth bellow for revenge.
Come ;—
Then Lucianus, thus adjured, with all the self-possession he can
retain, does begin :—
Thought black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing ;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing :
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life usurp immediately.
{Pours the poison into the sleeper's ears.)
Hamlet {interrupting again).
He poisons him i’ the garden for his estate. His name’s
Gonzago ; the story is extant, and writ in choice Italian :
You shall see anon, how the murtherer gets the love of
Gonzago’s wife.
Ophelia. The king rises.
Hamlet. What! frighted with false fire !
Queen. How fares my lord ?
Pol. Give o’er the play.
King. Give me some lights—away !
All. Lights, lights, lights !
{Exeunt all but Hamlet and Horatio
Hamlet. Why let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play ;
For some must watch, while some must sleep;
So runs the world away.
Would not this, Sir, and a forest of feathers (if the rest of my fortunes tuna
Turk with me), with two Provincial roses on my razed Shoes, get me a fellow
ship in the cry of players, Sir ?
Horatio. Half a share.
Hamlet. A whole one,—ay.
�XII. 1.
WHICH ARE hamlet’s i2
DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
473
And then again :—
Hamlet. 0 good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand
pound. Didst perceive ?
Horatio. Very well, my lord.
Hamlet. Upon the talk of the poisoning.
Horatio. I did very well note hiin.
It is of course to the startling dramatic success of his play
altering in piercing the King’s conscience that Hamlet refers when he
jestingly says that it would get him a fellowship in a cry of players.
The playwright who would tinker old plays as well as write new,
was in Shakspere’s time a very valuable member of a company of
players, and certainly the interpolated passage containing 4 the talk
of the poisoning ’ had had a wonderful effect.
I submit then that Hamlet’s addition to the play begins with the
speech of Lucianus. It contained probably more than the half
dozen lines which were all Lucianus was able to deliver before
Hamlet a third time interrupted him, and the King rose frighted
with false fire. After the murder, and before the entrance of the
Player Queen, was Lucianus perhaps to drop some words hinting at
his next aim, the seduction to a sudden second marriage of that
4 seeming virtuous queen 1 ’ Were perhaps fear and horror at finding
himself at last an actual murderer to take possession of his soul ?
Whence are those strange words of Hamlet, 4 The croaking raven
doth bellow for revenge,’ which he seems to utter as a sort of
cue to Lucianus, and yet they are not in Lucianus’ short speech ?
Were they part of Hamlet’s own lines, which were to be subse
quently uttered, but which came whirling first to their author’s
excited brain 1 If so, even if it were certainly so, it would be 4 to
consider too curiously’ to endeavour to reconstruct any of the neverdelivered portion of the speech. But wherever the words come from1
- from Hamlet’s unspoken lines, or, as is more probable, from some
1 Mr F. J. Furnivall thinks these words may be an allusion to the Old
Hamlet noticed in Lodge’s Wits Miserie, 1596, ‘the ghost which cried so
miserably at the theater like an oister wife, “ Hamlet revenge," ’ and says the
player would catch the reference at once. Mr Richard Simpson, on the other
hand, considers the allusion to be to two lines in the old play, The True
Tragedy of Richard III., ‘ The screeking Raven sits croking for Revenge ;
Whole heads of beasts comes bellowing for Revenge.’
2
�474
XII. 1.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S (DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
old play in the Pistol vein, known to the public then, lost now—what Hamlet means by them is plain enough. The Ghost is again
present to his mind. The Spirit whom he has doubted cries out once
more for revenge. In a moment the murderer will be put to the
question, to moral torture, all will be clear, and Hamlet ‘ know his
course.’ At such a crisis the actor’s delay, however artistic, is intol
erable ; he shouts to him to begin, that he may be certain of his
Uncle’s guilt and sweep to his revenge.
Hemember, too, that the Raven is the Danish typical bird, and
therefore no unfit emblem of ‘the majesty of buried Denmark;’—as
fitting at any rate, one might urge, if driven hard, as ‘ True penny,’
‘ Old Mole,’ and ‘Fellow in the Cellarage.’
The plot succeeds, the murderer discloses himself, the ghost is
believed; but Hamlet fails, and in the next scene but one the Ghost
re-appears visibly to his ‘ tardy son ’:—
Do not forget; this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
Lastly, is there in the lines themselves anything to make us say,
‘ Not by Hamlet ?’ The style is certainly stiff, cumbrous, and loaded
with adjectives, but Hamlet would naturally try to imitate the stilted
style of the rest of the play as in its first lines:—
Player King. Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round
Neptune’s salt wash, and Tellus’ orbed ground;
And thirty dozen moons with borrow’d sheen,
About the world have times twelve thirties been ;
Since love our hearts, and Hymen did our hands,
Unite commutual in most sacred bands.
And one may even add that Hamlet himself in his letter ‘to
the celestial and my souls idol the most beautified Ophelia,’ shows
that he did not use to shrink from a string of adjectives even when
they led him to so ill a phrase as ‘ most beautified.’
Of one thing we may be certain, that the great Master did not
write at random, and that since he lays so much stress upon Ham
let’s inserted lines, refers to them so often, and makes so much of
the plot turn upon them, his own intention in the matter must have
been perfectly clear to himself.
If this be so, they ought with due patience to be discoverable by
�XII. 2.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ ?
475
us. I shall be glad if I am thought to have contributed something to
the true solution of a little problem which if not important is at
least interesting.
W. T. Malleson.
II. PROFESSOR SEELEY’S COMMENTS ON MR MALLESON'S
PAPER, AND ON THE PLA Y.
My dear Furnivall,
You will remember that I did not pronounce any particular
passage in the sub-play to be the ‘ 12 or 16 lines ’ of Hamlet. What I
did was simply to say, in conversation with you, that I thought I knew
which the lines of Hamlet were, and to ask you to try whether you
could not identify them also. You did try, and laid your finger at
once upon the very lines I had in view.1 I mention these facts for
two reasons. First, because I think my identification of secondary
importance, compared to my observation that here is a Shaksperian
problem which has been overlooked,2 that Shakspere evidently
meant us to ask which the ‘ 12 or 16 lines’ were, and that appa
rently no one (except Mr and Mrs C. Clarke) has thought of doing
so. Secondly, the identification gains a good deal of probability
from the fact that two persons—who did not know of Mr and Mrs
C. Clarke’s note—made it without any concert.
I acknowledge a good deal of weight in some of Mr Malleson’s
objections, but I think I can answer them, and they have not shaken
my opinion.
Let me begin by stating the case in favour of the ‘ 12 or 16 lines’
being some of those which make up the long speech of the FlayerKing that begins:—
I do believe you think what now you speak 1
In all such discussions there is great danger of running too much
into mere speculation and conjectural interpretations of character.
1 This was mainly because Professor Seeley had also told me that the lines
contained Hamlet’s explanation of his own character.—F. J. F.
2 Except by Mr and Mrs Cowden Clarke ; see p. 466.
�476
XII. 2.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’’'!
For this reason I think it most important at the outset to consider
what characteristics the inserted speech we are in search of must
necessarily have in order that we may not have recourse to conjecture
at any rate sooner than is necessary.
There are two such characteristics, then.
(1) It must consist of some 12 or 16 lines.
(2) Being an insertion, it must be such a speech as can be removed
without affecting the action of the play.
Now these two characteristics belong to the passage above
referred to, and to that passage alone. The speech of the PlayerKing consists in all of 30 lines. The next longest speech, that
beginning ‘ So many journies may the sun and moon,’ consists of
only twelve.
It is evidently part of the plan that the sub-play
should be written in short speeches, for Hamlet is made to
ridicule the extreme shortness of the prologue, ‘ as brief as woman’s
love ! ’
This single long speech is therefore conspicuously exceptional.
It cannot all be spared—the Player-King must by the necessity of
the position say something to the same effect—and if it could all be
spared it could hardly be the insertion, for it would be too long,
30 lines instead of 12 or 16. But it is quite easy to spare about
that number of lines from the middle of it, and such a retrench
ment would bring the speech to about the average length of the
speeches in the sub-play.
As this passage not only answers the conditions, but is the only
passage which does, it might seem unnecessary to add another word.
But this assumes that Hamlet’s insertion is actually to be found at
full length in the sub-play as it is acted. Now of course it is pos
sible, as the sub-play is interrupted in the acting, that the passage in
question belongs either entirely to the part which was unacted, or
partly so, that is, that the speech which was interrupted by the
rising of the King would, if it had not been so interrupted, have ex
tended to 12 or 16 lines. This latter is Mr Malleson’s theory, and as
I admit it to be not impossible, we must look for additional evidence.
This brings us to the question, whether the passage whose claims
I support answers the other probable conditions as well as I have
�XII. 2.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OH SIXTEEN LINES ’ I
shown that it answers the two necessary conditions.
477
Is it such
aa insertion as Hamlet would be likely to make either from
the object he has in view, or, if we must enter into that, from his
character ?
Now one part of this question, and that the most difficult part,
we can fortunately answer at once. It is admitted by Mr Malleson
that the lines in question are strikingly in the character of Hamlet,
so strikingly that, in fact, he calls them a dissertation on Hamlet’s
character. I do not think they are that ; I think they are a disserta
tion on his mother’s character ; but, then, they are just such a disserta
tion as Hamlet would write, for they explain her weakness by those
general reflections about the changeableness of human purpose, and
the feebleness of human conviction, which are so usual with him. I
think there can be no doubt that if we wished to select from the
sub-play the lines most characteristic of Hamlet we should fix on
these without a moment’s hesitation.
But the speech may answer very well to Hamlet’s general cha
racter, and yet not be such as to serve the particular purpose with
which he inserts a speech.
This is the main point in Mr Malleson’s argument, and it seems
at first sight a strong objection—‘ Hamlet’s object in inserting a speech
is to charge the King with murder, to draw the moral of the play,
and drive it home upon the King’s conscience. The speech in
question, however in other respects it may be suitable to Hamlet’s
character, cannot be the speech inserted by him, because it does
nothing of this kind.’
Now it is evident enough that Hamlet’s object in having the play
acted is to work upon the King’s conscience and bring out his guilt ;
but how does it appear that this is the object with which he inserts
the speech?
Mr Malleson says, ‘ The plot of the play already resembled the
black crime that had been revealed to Hamlet alone, and his hope
was that his lines might drive the resemblance home to the very
heart of the murderer.’ Certainly Hamlet hoped that the play would
have this effect ; but where does Mr Malleson find that he hoped 7zZa
lines would have this effect ?
Mr Malleson puts this as if it were a
�478
XII. 2.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S 1 DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
matter of course, but if he will reflect I think he will find, that he
has taken it for granted without any reason.
I cannot imagine how it could occur to Hamlet that there was
any occasion for inserting a speech with this object. The play might
surely be trusted to do its own work. The King’s conscience was to
be worked upon by a representation of an action of which not only
the results and motives were similar, but which was in itself actually
identical with that committed by himself.
He had. murdered his
sleeping brother by pouring poison into his ear; he is now to see
poison poured into the ear of a sleeping uncle on the stage. I can
not imagine how any speech could make the application plainer. The
hint was surely broad enough; in fact, it seems a little too broad, for it
is difficult to understand how the King could allow matters to go so
far, and why he did. not break up the play as soon as the dumb show
had informed him what the action was to be.
Has Shakspere, then, said anywhere that the inserted speech had
this object? Mr Malleson quotes one expression, which looks no
doubt a little like it:—
If his occulted guilt
Do not itself discover in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen, &c.
This 1 one speech ’ does no doubt remind us of the f speech that
I would set down and insert in it,’ but after all why should it be this
particular speech more than any other ? I confess I think it can be
shown not to be by the method of ‘reductio ad absurdum.’
For
this 1 one speech ’ in which the King’s guilt discovers itself is the
speech beginning :—
Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing.
Now it is impossible that this speech, at least as it stands, can be
the inserted speech, for it satisfies none of the conditions. It is not
12 or 16 lines, but only six; it is not an inserted speech, but it
belongs essentially to the action, and the play could not exist
without it. Mr Malleson, seeing this, tries to represent these six
lines, not exactly as the inserted speech of Hamlet, but as the
beginning of it, and supposes that the rest would have followed had
�' XII.
2. WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ ?
479
not the King broken up the play. It is impossible to suppose exactly
this, for the six lines in question form only one sentence, and must
therefore belong entirely to the play itself in its original form, unless
we suppose, what I think no one will suppose, that the murder was
to be done in dumb show. We must therefore imagine, not part of
Hamlet’s inserted speech, but the whole of it, to have been broken
off by the King’s rising, and if so it turns out after all that the King’s
guilt is not discovered by Hamlet’s inserted speech, but by lines
coming just before it. This seems to me a conclusive proof that the
‘ one speech ’ in the passage above quoted is not to be identified with
the ‘speech of 12 or 16 lines, which I would set down and insert
in it.’
Thus there remains no reason at all for supposing that the object
of Hamlet’s inserted speech was to work upon the King’s conscience.
Mr Malleson seems to have been led to take it for granted by the
rout Hamlet makes about his anxiety to be quite sure of the King’s
guilt, to be quite sure that the ghost is not a tempter. He pictures
Hamlet as in a state of wild excitement throughout the scene, as
having his thoughts intensely fixed upon this question of the murder,
and therefore he thinks it revoltingly improbable that in this state
of mind Hamlet should write a speech not about the murder at all,
but on his mother’s fickleness. But surely I am not singular in
believing that these professions of Hamlet are not to be taken
seriously. His misgivings that the ghost may be a tempter, that the
King may not be guilty after all, are just like his resolution later in
the play, not to kill the King at a moment when he will be likely to
go to heaven, mere pretences intended to excuse delay and inaction.
He is no doubt interested in watching the effect of his experiment
upon the King’s mind, and very triumphant when it proves success
ful, but I do not believe that his thoughts are absorbed by that sub
ject in the way Mr Malleson supposes. In fact I take a very different
view of the state of his mind.
It seems to me that Shakspere
takes great pains to impress upon us that the uncle’s guilt and the
duty of punishing it are an annoying subject with Hamlet, that
they weigh upon his mind without interesting it, and that his only
desire is to postpone and keep at arm’s length everything connected
�480
XII. 2.
with them.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’ ?
Hamlet complains that he cannot feel proper resent
ment for ‘ a dear father murdered/ that the player is more interested
in an imaginary Hecuba than he in such a dreadful reality, and he
tries to rouse himself into a passion by violent abuse of his uncle.
But you see how artificial the language is, and that his real feeling
for his uncle is only contempt, that he regards him simply as a
vulgar knave, whom there is no satisfaction in thinking about, and
no comfort even in hating.
So far from supposing that the inserted
speech ought by rights to be about this uncle, I should be very
much puzzled to find that Hamlet’s private reflections had been so
much occupied about him, as would be implied in his writing 12 or
16 lines about him, to make clear what was already as clear as the
day, or to 1 bring home,’ as Mr Malleson says, what was brought
home already.
But is there no subject about which Hamlet feels strongly
in which we can believe him to be so much interested as to
write verses on it ?
Certainly there is, and it is precisely the
subject with which the lines I identify with [Hamlet’s inserted
speech deal; namely, the conduct of his mother.
It is this
which really fills his mind, and it is because he is so intensely
pre-occupied with this, that he is so languid about what he feels
ought to engage his attention more. Before even he suspected
his uncle’s guilt, before the appearance of the ghost, he is shown to
us so much depressed as to think of suicide on account of his
mother’s levity; and when he has his mother face to face with him
he shows an energy and vehemence we might have thought foreign
to his character. As Mr Malleson very truly says, it is his mother
who, by putting him out of humour with all women, causes him to
behave so strangely to Ophelia, and the coarseness of his language
to her in this very scene shows that he is brooding on the subject at
this particular moment. It is, then, I maintain, a, priori, most likely,
from what we know of Hamlet’s feelings, that this would be the
subject of his inserted speech.
But we must consider Shakspere’s objects as well as Hamlet’s.
Supposing the speech to be on the subject of the murder, even if it
answered Hamlet’s purpose, it was of no use to the poet. It would
�XII. 2.
WHICH ARE HAMLEt’s ‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
481
be merely an additional means, very superfluous as I think, of
exposing the King’s guilt; about Hamlet’s character and views, it
would tell us nothing that we did not know before j it would not
help the poet forward at all in his difficult exposition. Quite other*
wise if the speech dealt with the mother, not with the uncle; then
it has point; then we understand why the poet introduces it.
It is
a broad hint to the reader, and it was important to multiply such
hints as much as possible, that we are not to trust Hamlet’s profes*
sions, that the experiment of the play, with all its parade of in
genuity and the vengeance which is to follow the King’s exposure, is
a mere blind by which he hides both from himself and from Horatio
that he does not intend to act at all, and that he means to go on as
he has begun, brooding interminably upon the frailty of his mother,
the probable frailty of Ophelia, and the worthlessness of all
women.
Notice that when the speech which I call Hamlet’s insertion and
the Player-Queen’s short answer to it have been delivered, Hamlet
turns to his mother and says, ‘Madam, how like you this play?’
This I take to be Sliakspere’s quiet hint to the reader that he is to
mark these speeches especially, and that there is something particular
in them.
To sum up, then, my case is this :—
(1) In the long speech of the Player-King may be found a
passage of ‘ 12 or 16 lines.’
(2) This passage can be omitted without damage to the action.
(3) No other such passage can be found in the sub-play, so that
those who reject this passage are driven to the shift of supposing that
Shakspere after promising us such a passage and leading us to expect
it has not given it.
(4) The passage suits Hamlet’s general character better than any
other in the sub-play. This is admitted by Mr Malleson.
(5) It suits Hamlet’s views and feelings at the moment, which
are occupied only secondarily with his uncle’s guilt, primarily with
his mother’s misconduct.
(6) The insertion of it serves an object of the poet by showing
more clearly the doubleness of Hamlet’s conduct, and that while he
3
�482
XII. 3.
WHICH ARE hamlet’s ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
was forced reluctantly by a sense of duty in one direction, his feel
ings and reflections were flowing irresistibly in another.
Sincerely yours,
J. R. Seeley.
III. 3/22 MALLESONS REJOINDER TO PROF. SEELEY’S
COMMENTS.
My
dear
Furnivall,
Mr Seeley’s reply to my paper is a striking one, but I
cannot give way, so you must allow me a brief reply.
Mr Seeley says that there are two ‘ necessary ’ characteristics for
the speech; it must consist of some 12 or 16 lines; and being an in
sertion it must be such a speech as can be removed without affecting
the action of the play.
I think this is somewhat strained.
Hamlet
never says he has written a passage of so many lines and inserted it.
If he had said so the matter would be simpler. We only know that
he intended to write and insert some lines of the number of which
he was not himself certain, ‘12 or 16.’ When he sat down with
the play before him he may have written 20 or 26, and indeed, if I
accepted the Player-King’s speech as partly Hamlet’s, I should claim
for him all of it, except only the two first and two last lines, which,
omitting the intervening 26, still go fairly together:—
I do believe you think what now you speak
But what we do determine oft we break.
So think thou wilt no second husband wed,
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.
1
2
28
30
And altho’ Mr Seeley says that it is quite easy to spare about 12 or
16 lines from the middle of this speech, he does not tell us, as I
think he should do, which lines he fixes upon, that we might judge
how far they do bear upon the conduct and character of Hamlet’s
mother.
Again, I do not see why the inserted lines must be such as can
be removed without affecting the action of the play; may not
Hamlet have inserted his lines in substitution for others which he
�XII. 3.
WHICH ARE hamlet’s f DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
483
struck out 1 If so Mr Seeley’s argument against ‘ Thoughts black,
hands apt, etc.,’ because necessary to the action of the piece, will fall
to the ground.
But the most important part of Mr Seeley’s paper, to my mind,
is his defence of the passage he has selected on the ground that it
refers to the guilt of Hamlet’s mother, and describes her character.
He believes Hamlet to have been intensely pre-occupied with this
subject, to the exclusion of that duty of revenging his murdered
father, as to which he had sworn that it alone should live within
the book and volume of his brain unmixed with baser matter. Now
let us look at the lines to test this view of them. We may dismiss,
as above, the two first and two last lines on Mr Seeley’s own theory.
The next eight,1 from ‘ Purpose is but the slave to memory,’ describe
feebleness and vacillation of purpose. What men propose to them
selves under the influence of passion they forget when the passion is
over, and do not execute. Where in Hamlet’s mother do we find this
feeble vacillation ? Morally weak she certainly was, but not, I
think, one of the cowards of conscience. Having allowed her love
to he won by her husband’s brother during her husband’s life-time,
she suppresses any outward sign of the agonies of conscience, and
continues quietly with her betrayed but unsuspecting lord until his
sudden death (she is not privy to the murder), and then, within a
month of the funeral, without any vacillation at all, gives her hand
to her paramour. And just as no outward sign of flattering or
remorse on her part awakened suspicion in her first husband, so
now to all appearance she was prepared to lead a serene respectable
dignified life, had it not been for the moodiness and melancholy of
Hamlet. An easily led woman she appears to me, not introspective,
not given to searchings of conscience; the very reverse of her son,
whom the description so well fits.
1 Purpose is but the slave to memory ;
Of violent birth, but poor validity ;
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree ;
But fall unshaken, when they mellow be.
Most necessary ’tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt:
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
�484
XII. 3.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S 1 DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ ?
The next four1 lines, ‘ The violence of either grief or joy,’ etc.,
describe satirically how easily men pass from joy to grief, or from
grief to joy, on slender accident. They deal, we should remember,
with joy and grief really felt, although shallow, not with feigned
feeling. The application is to the Player-Queen, whose future the
dumb show has sketched for us. It does not at all fit the case of
Hamlet’s mother, whose grief at the death of his father could not, as
Hamlet now well knew, have been violent; she may have followed bis
body like Niobe, all tears, but her sorrow was feigned, her thoughts
upon the new marriage. Had Hamlet wished to launch a dart at her,
he would have satirized the vice of hypocrisy, not the quick change
from violent grief to joy. The 102 succeeding lines, beginning,
This world is not for aye ; nor ’tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change,
deal with changes of love, and the subject at first seems appropriate
to the Queen. But the method of treatment is pointedly not so.
Again, it suits the Player-Queen, not the real queen. The burden is,
that love follows fortune. This hits off the lady, who having loved
and lost one royal husband, is ready at short notice to take another.
It does not touch what -was rankling in Hamlet’s mind—his mother’s
gross infidelity to her lord and king. Her falling off, her declining
from her first gracious husband upon the wretch whose natural gifts
were poor, is altogether a mystery, a terrible story; but at least her
love had neither been lead nor mislead by fortune. The remaining
four lines,
1 The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy ;
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament,
Grief joys, Joy grieves, on slender accident.
2 This world is not for aye ; nor ’tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change,
For ’tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark, his favourite flies ;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend ;
For who not needs shall never lack a friend ;
And who in want a hollow friend doth try
Directly seasons him his enemy.
�XIX. 8.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
485
But orderly to end where I begun,—
Our wills and fates do so contrary run,
That our devices still are overthrown ;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own,
femind one of Hamlet himself, as I have said before, but do not
apply to the Queen at all.
I find, then, nothing in all this passage to catch the conscience of
the Queen, nothing with any special reference to her, and accordingly
she is perfectly unmoved by it. When Hamlet, shortly after (but
not immediately after) the Player-King’s speech, asks the question,
which Mr Seeley remarks upon, ‘ Madam, how like you this play 1 ’
the Queen entirely ignores the speech which Mr Seeley believes was
inserted to affect her, but refers to what the Player-Queen has just
pointedly said against second marriages, and with admirable self-pos
session answers simply, 1 Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’
I am persuaded that if Hamlet, as Mr Seeley imagines, wrote his
verses with the Queen in his mind, he would not have made them,
when regarded with reference to her, so pointless and beside the
mark.
The success of these lines at least was not such as to win Hamlet
a fellowship in a cry of players, a point in my first paper which Mr
Seeley lets go by, as he does also the intimation from Hamlet him
self that his lines contained the torrent tempest and whirlwind of
passion.
But it is indeed remarkable how little the Queen is affected by
tire play; she is indeed thrown into a ‘most great affliction of spirit,’
and desires at once to see Hamlet in her closet, but it is entirely upon
her husband’s account; she is troubled because Hamlet has so much
offended him, and is prepared to scold him well, to ‘ tax him home,’
for having done so. Then indeed Hamlet does arouse her conscience,
and turns her eyes into her very soul, effecting at once easily
directly and completely in this scene the very purpose that Mr
Seeley supposes him to have ineffectually attempted just before by
the round-about method of the play.
Mr Seeley, who at the commencement of his paper rather wishes
to put on one side conjectural interpretations of Hamlet’s character,
nevertheless, towards its close, supports his choice of the passage we
�486
XII. 3.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S 1 DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’1?
are disputing about by the striking theory that the experiment of
the play is a mere blind by which Hamlet hides from himself and
Horatio that he does not intend to act at all, but will go on as he has
begun, 1 brooding interminably upon the frailty of his mother, the
probable frailty of Ophelia, and the worthlessness of all women.’
In these last words a part seems to me substituted for the
whole; deeply as Hamlet felt about his mother and Ophelia, he is
much more than an injured son and a love-sick Romeo, in doubt of
the fidelity of his Juliet, put together. His philosophical, speculative
spirit would have survived both shocks, had not there weighed upon
him that too heavy duty—and yet to his mind that religious duty—
of revenge upon his uncle for the murder of his father.
A horrible
work for his tender, thoughtful, dreaming nature.
He was one troubled with thoughts that lie beyond the reaches of
our souls, so accustomed to detach himself from his surroundings,
that he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of
infinite space. He has an inward life of keen observation and subtle
thought, apart from the life of loves, hates, fears, changes, duties,
which he lives with others. He moves through the play, to my mind,
like a being of a different world, tied indeed to that of his fellows
by many links,—the most delightful of which had become the most
painful,—but sympathizing with and trusting no one but Horatio,
who belonged also to his other world of subtle, wide-reaching
speculation.
Passage after passage—I need not quote—will occur to the student
of Hamlet, in which he pauses even in the most exciting moments
to generalize, to moralize, or even to note an observation. Coleridge
says, 11 Hamlet’s character is the prevalence of the abstracting and
generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage,
skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking ;
and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet,
who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by
mere accident to effect his object.” Coleridge adds, “ I have a smack
of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.”
I have but little more to add. Mr Seeley asks me to point out
where I find that Hamlet’s lines were to refer to the King’s guilt. In
�XII. 3.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
487
addition to the reasons already given, I may add this—that it is at
the very moment when he has just commanded the play, in order, as
every one admits, to catch the King, that he also proposes to add his
lines; and why should we cast about for another purpose 1 Mr
Seeley says that the play was already sufficiently pointed.
So be it;
but in Hamlet’s state of excitement there would be nothing unnatural
in his wishing to make assurance doubly sure.
The question whether his father’s murder or his mother’s mis
conduct is uppermost in Hamlet’s mind I need not now enter upon;
as I have endeavoured to show that the lines Mr Seeley contends
for refer as little ter the latter as to the former; but it is going some
what far to say that ‘ before Hamlet even suspected his uncle's guilt,Qi)
before the appearance of the ghost, he is shown to us so much de
pressed as to think of suicide on account of his mother’s levity.’ He
is certainly also shown to us as weighed down by his father’s death,
his grief does not ‘ seem ’, it ‘ is ’; the very form of his father is
vividly present to his mind’s eye when speaking with Horatio,
before he has heard of the apparition of the ‘ Spirit in arms.’ Then
his previously latent suspicions take form at once, he doubts ‘ some
foul play,’ and when the ghost is beginning the fearful revelation,
Hamlet breaks in upon it with—
O my prophetic soul! mine uncle!
There is no doubt, however, that Mr Seeley is right when he says
that his lines suit Hamlet’s character better than any others in the
sub-play. I go further, and say they describe Hamlet’s character.
How, then, do they come there ? Hamlet had no object to attain by
describing himself, but Shakspere had in describing Hamlet, and
throughout the play he seems to seize every occasion to throw a
needed light upon his enigmatical character. If, then, the sub-play
ever really existed independently, 1 extant ’ as Hamlet assures us it
was, and ‘ writ in choice Italian,’ Shakspere may have added this
passage to elucidate the meaning of the larger play ; or if it was all
Shakspere’s, written in imitation of such brief performances, he may
have introduced the lines for the same purpose.
�488
XII. 4.
WHICH ARE hamlet’s ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
However, this difficulty comes not near my conscience, it does
not touch my argument. I have not to defend all or any of the queer
little play, so wordy and yet so brief, with its short speeches and
quick action. I need only say, if any one
——like not the comedy,
Why then, belike, he likes it not, perdy.
Yours faithfully,
W. T. Malleson.
IV. PROF. SEELEY’S FINAL REMARKS.
I must add one or two words before the controversy is closed.
First, I hope Shaksperian students will not forget what Mr
Malleson has pointed out in his first paper; namely, that Shakspere
did not mean us to think of Hamlet’s intention to insert a dozen or
sixteen lines as a mere passing fancy, that it is this inserted speech
which Hamlet has in view when he gives his celebrated instruction
to the players, and that therefore, unless’ something strange has
happened to the play, the insertion clearly ought to be discoverable.
Unless, then, we suppose an alteration of the play to have taken
place in which the insertion has disappeared, while all that leads us
to expect the insertion has by some unaccountable negligence been
allowed to stand, we have to choose between my view and Mr
Malleson’s, for I do not think any third can be suggested.
I have urged against Mr Malleson’s view that the speech he
chooses cannot be removed without affecting the action of the play,
and therefore has not the character of an insertion. Mr Malleson
now answers that Hamlet “ may have inserted his lines in substitu
tion for others which he struck out; ” but I submit that this is an
unnatural interpretation of the words, and that, at least, a passage
plainly removable answers Hamlet’s description much better than
one which is not.
It may be urged—Mr Malleson seems half-inclined to urge it—
that I am bound to mark exactly the beginning and end of the
passage which I consider to be the insertion. As I have said, there
�XII. 4.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ Î
489
is no difficulty in omitting a good long passage from the middle of
the player-king’s speech, and this is actually done now at the
Aycewn; for, I take it, the length of that speech will always seem
intolerable to actors who do not’see the importance of it; but I
admit that the omission might be made in two or three different
Wyt, and that I do not profess to know for certain which is the
way. I hardly think that Shakspere knew himself. When he
Wne to compose the speech I imagine he said to himself : ‘ it must
eummence with a general text, which is to be considered as be
longing to the original play, “what we do determine oft we break
then must follow Hamlet’s sermon upon it.’ But, as Shakspere was
in reality author of both text and sermon, he wove them together so
much, that, though I think he left it quite clear that Hamlet’s copy
of verses is here, yet he did not make it possible to say with abso
lute certainty where it begins. I believe that any one who tried
in this way to write a poetical speech with a mock-insertion in it
would be almost sure to make the join not quite distinct enough.
Mr Malleson accuses me of letting go by his observation that
Hamlet declares that the success of his lines might “win him a fellow
ship in a cry of players.” But it is a mere guess of Mr Malleson’s
that Hamlet is speaking of the success of his inserted lines and not
of that of the play in general. If a player were the same thing as a
dramatic writer I should think the guess plausible. A player might,
HO doubt, as in Shakspere’s own case, write verses, but it was not as
a player that he did so. Hamlet considers his success to be that of
a player, not that of a poet. I cannot see, then, that in this passage
there is any reference whatever to the inserted lines. Hamlet boasts
that he has selected a play so happily, and brought it out with such
success, as to show a genius for the business of a manager.
Again, Mr Malleson accuses me of leaving unanswered his obSWvation that, according to the instructions to the players these lines
“ contained the torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion,” whereas
the lines I point to are not passionate, but meditative.
I quite admit that Hamlet’s instructions suggest a speech that is
in ftome sense passionate, but any one who reads those instructions
will see that Hamlet is taking the occasion of a particular speech to
�490
XII. 4.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S 1 DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
give a general lecture on the art of elocution.
He is speaking
generally of the way in which passion should be expressed, and he
says that, even where it is most intense, there should be a temperance
or smoothness in the rendering of it. This remark is evidently sug
gested by a passionate speech, but it may easily be supposed to go
beyond the speech that suggested it, and to contemplate much higher
degrees of passion than are to be found there. But I believe also that
the generalities about feebleness of purpose which strike Mr Malleson
as not passionate, seemed to Hamlet very much so, and that he would
have wished to hear those lines recited with a kind of despairing
melancholy. For Hamlet’s mind runs on generalities of this kind,
and they inspire him with feelings so strong as to approach madness.
It is the Weltschmerz of Werther and Faust.
Again, Mr Malleson urges that if Hamlet’s object was to catch
the conscience of the queen he certainly does not succeed, for the
queen keeps her self-possession perfectly. This shows me that I have
not succeeded in explaining what my view is.
Mr Malleson evi
dently thinks that I wish to maintain that Hamlet’s object in the
play is really to catch the conscience of the queen, and only ostensibly
to catch the conscience of the king. Not at all. I hold that his
object is just what he professes that it is, and that when he triumphs
so loudly and boasts of deserving a fellowship in a cry of players, it
is because he has succeeded in this object, that is, has caught the
conscience of the king. But for this purpose no insertion was
needed ; the play itself did its own work. The notion that the play
required to be altered to make it suit the circumstances more exactly
is not supported by anything in Shakspere. Prosaically, no doubt,
it is true; that is, it is not likely that a play could be found so
minutely corresponding to the facts of the king’s murder; but what
was the use of calling attention to a mere difficulty of detail, which
the reader could safely be left to overcome in his imagination as he
pleased ? My view, then, is that the insertion has a different object,
and is introduced to tell us something about Hamlet that we should
not have known so well otherwise. Is this object, then, to catch the
conscience of the queen? Not exactly; I should not express it so;
I do not imagine that Hamlet was disappointed when he saw that
�XII. 4.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
the queen remained undisturbed. But we have seen
the beginning of the play brooding over his mother’s
quantity of reflection on the subject of inconstancy,
purpose, &c., has been accumulating in his mind. He
491
Hamlet from
conduct. A
feebleness of
is a person of
a literary turn, given to reading, to writing verses, to thinking about
the drama. I imagine, then, that when he has hit upon the happy
compromise between his public duty and his private taste which the
play offers, he thinks with great delight of the opportunity it
affords him of relieving himself of the weight of feeling that has
been oppressing him so long by putting it into verse. He will write
a poem on his mother, and insert it in the play. It may not produce
much effect on her when she hears it; indeed, he probably knows
too well already how unimpressionable she is; but his object will
be gained if he only writes it, for it will be a relief to his feelings.
And if Hamlet’s object will be gained, still more will Shakspere’s.
For he will have at the same time thrown new light on the dreamy,
unpractical character of Hamlet, and made us aware of the private
train of thought which Hamlet is pursuing all the while that he
professes to be intent upon detecting his uncle’s guilt.
But Mr Malleson says the speech I point to is not a description
of Hamlet’s mother, but of himself. He says, “ The eight lines from
‘Purpose is but the slave to memory’ describe feebleness and
vacillation of purpose. What men propose to themselves under the
influence of passion they forget when the passion is over, and do not
execute. Where in Hamlet’s mother do we find this feeble vacil
lation]” We find it surely in the fact that, having loved Hamlet’s
father, she allowed her affections to be drawn away by the con
temptible uncle. Read Hamlet’s first soliloquy. It all turns on
the incredible levity and fickleness of his mother. Mr Malleson’s
point seems to be, that the revelation of the ghost must have changed
his view, for the ghost ‘seems to say that the queen had been un
faithful to her husband in his lifetime, so that Hamlet ought now
to charge her, not with mere vacillation, but with actual sin and
breach of marriage faith. But this does not affect the fact that she
had displayed ‘ feeble vacillation; ’ only it shows that the vacillation
had appeared earlier than Hamlet knew, and had gone further. He
�492
XII. 4.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN TANKS ’ 1
might dwell upon her feebleness or her sin, as either might happen
to strike him most , forcibly, for in her conduct there was both.
But
as a matter of fact he is most struck by her feebleness, and this even
after the ghost’s revelations. We see this from the language he
holds in his interview with his mother.
So little does he say to his
mother about actual sin or breach of faith, that one might read that
whole Scene, as, in fact, I for a long time did, without discovering,
what I now think is clear from the language of the ghost, that she
had done anything worse than take up with a contemptible husband
after having lost a noble one. It is true, Hamlet begins by charging
her with being guilty of a monstrous crime, but when he comes to
say what it is, we find not a word about breach of faith, violation of
the marriage vow; he simply presses upon her the revolting contrast
between her two husbands, and asks how she could have eyes to
tolerate her second after her first. Now, it is evident that from the
purely moral point of view the comparative merits of the two men
do not concern the matter, and yet Hamlet’s language is such as
almost to imply that if they had presented themselves to her in the
reverse order, her conduct would have been as admirable as it was
disgraceful. I point out this to show, that if the speech in the sub
play is on vacillation, and not on adultery or hypocrisy, it suits all
the better with the tenour of Hamlet’s reflections on his mother’s
conduct, for it is on vacillation that he harps, both in his first
soliloquy and also in the interview with his mother after he has
learnt all that the ghost has to tell.
In Mr Malleson’s assertion that the lines describe Hamlet’s own
character, there is no doubt a grain of truth. Hamlet cannot de
scribe a vacillating character without in some degree describing
his own; and it is quite in his vein of moralizing to say, “ We
are all such weaklings and I am one myself! ” But in the
first instance the speech refers to Hamlet’s mother, not to Hamlet
himself, for it refers to a wife tempted to marry again, and Hamlet,
was not such a person.
I think I have now answered all Mr Malleson’s objections. I
only wish to add, that whatever may be the truth about the “ dozen
or sixteen lines,” I am strongly of opinion that critics have not
�XXI.
4. WHICH ARE
hamlet’s
1 DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ ?
493
sufficiently understood the true nature of the retarding influence" in
the play of Hamlet. Hamlet is made irresolute, not merely by his
natural character, but by the intense pre-occupation of his mind by
the subject of his mother. He himself excuses his delay by passion—
“ Who lapsed in time and passion, lets go by The important acting of
your dread command.” Critics, it seems to me, have not understood
the full importance of the lines of the Ghost at the beginning of the
play
“ But howsoever thou pursu’st this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught.”
The early critics noticed the nobleness of the passage; but to see
the importance of it, we must compare it with what happens at
Hamlet’s interview with his mother. There the Ghost appears again.
What can be the meaning of such a startling incident ?
He says,
“The visitation is but to whet thine almost blunted purpose.” But
the reason evidently is, because Hamlet is • forgetting the former
admonition. His rage against his mother is passing all bounds. And
to make this plainer, Shakspere has carefully contrasted it with his
behaviour towards the uncle. Two scenes are put side by side. In
the first Hamlet overhears his uncle’s soliloquy; in the second he
talks to his mother. In the first his irresolution overpowers him.
He loses his opportunity through a scruple which would be utterly
monstrous if it were not evidently artificial. In the second he rises
to a height of passion which we should not have thought belonged
to his nature, and actually startles the dead king from his grave to
Watch over the wife he still remembers with tenderness.
Between these two appearances of the Ghost, Shakspere’s con
trivance to show us the pre-occupation of Hamlet’s mind with his
mother, is the story of his behavioqr to Ophelia. I agree with Mr
Malleson in the explanation he gives of the coarseness of Hamlet’s
language to her.
But the same explanation applies, not to that
acene only, but to all the scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia.
Hamlet has generalized in his fashion from the conduct of his mother
to that of all women, and so casts Ophelia off. But more is wanted ;
in fact, when we consider how little all this has actually been under
stood, we see that much more was wanted.
�494
XII.
4. WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
The contrivance, then, of “ the dozen or sixteen lines ” was not
superfluous. In the lively satire of the conversation with the
players and in the tumult of the play-scene there was danger
that we should forget what Hamlet’s mind is really brooding
over. This danger could only be avoided by giving additional
importance to that part of the sub-play which concerned the queen.
This is done by the insertion. That that insertion should refer to
the queen, and not the king, seems, I know, to most persons prima
facie improbable, but I believe that if they will begin by weighing
what I have urged as to the real nature of the retarding influence in
this play they will see that the prima facie probability is in favour
of it.
Mr Furnivall:—It seems to me that technically Professor
Seeley’s position is very strong ; but that ‘ on the merits ’ he breaks
down : he has a capital case at Law, but none in Equity. After he
first put the inserted-speech point to me, in the course of a long after
noon’s walk in the country, I was able to pick out the lines in the
Player-King’s, Speech, not because they had much to do with the
Queen or King, but because they describd—as Prof. Seeley told me they
did—the character. of Hamlet. On further consideration, I cannot
resist Mr Malleson’s argument that Hamlet’s inserted speech is the one
speech in which he tells Horatio the King’s occulted guilt is to unken
nel itself. To me, at any rate, fair criticism requires the identification of
the two. But I hold very strongly that Lucianus’s speech, “ Thoughts
black,” &c., is not this speech; and that, in fact, the speech is notin
the printed play. Either the King’s conscience was more quickly
stung than Hamlet anticipated,—that is, than Shakspere meant it to
be before he got to the scene,—and so the written speech was never
needed; or, (as Mr Matthew has suggested) Shakspere contented him
self with showing us (or letting us assume) that Hamlet alterd the
Play, and put his “ dozen or sixteen lines ” into action instead of
words. Hamlet at first resolvd to “ have these players play some
thing like
murder of my father before mine uncle.” Then he
made them play a play exactly like the murder; and took credit to
himself for the whole affair : “ would not this get me a fellowship in
a cry of players 1 ” If he hadn’t modified the play, if it had been all
—like its story—really extant in choice Italian, what credit could
Shakspere have claimd for himself as a play-writer or adapter ?
The inconsistency of Shakspere’s having made Hamlet first talk
so much about inserting one speech, and then having afterwards left
it out, doesn’t trouble me in the least. It’s just what one might fairly
�XII.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES"?
495
expect in til® recast Hamlet, after its really startling inconsistencies
in far more important matters, 1. as to Hamlet’s age, and 2. as t-o
Ophelia’s suicide. We know how early, in olden time, young men of
yank were put to arms ; how early, if they 'went to a University, they
left it, for training in Camp and Court. Hamlet, at a University,
ftouh1 hardly have passt 20; and with this age, the plain mention of
his '“youth of primy nature” (I. iii. 7), and “ nature crescent, . . not
. » alone in thews and bulk” (I. iii. 11-12), “Lord Hamlet . . he is
young” (I. iii. 123-4), &c., by Polonius and Laertes, agrees.
With this, too, agrees the King’s reproach to Hamlet for his
41 intent in going back to school at Wittemberg ; ” and Hamlet’s own
revolt-of-nature at his mother’s quick re-marriage to his uncle. Had
he been much past 21, and had more experience of then women, he’d
have taken his mother’s changeableness more coolly. I look on it as
certain, that when Shakspere began the play he conceivd Hamlet as
quite a young man. But as the play grew, as greater weight of reflec
tion, of insight into character, of knowledge of life, &c., were wanted,
Bhakspere necessarily and naturally made Hamlet a formd man;
and, by the time that he got to the Gravediggers’ scene, told us the
Prince was 30—the right age for him then : but not his age to
Laertes and Polonius when they warnd Ophelia against his blood
that burnd, his youthful fancy for her—1 a toy in blood ’—&c. The
two parts of the play are inconsistent on this main point in Hamlet’s
State. What matter? Who wants ’em made consistent by the
modification of either part ? The ‘ thirty ’ is not in the first Quarto :
yefc^o one wants to go back to that.
2. As Mason notic’t with regard to Ophelia’s death, “ there is not
a single circumstance in the relation [by the Queen] of Ophelia’s
death, that induces us to think she had drowned herself intentionally ”
(Panorum, vii. 460); on the contrary, we are expressly told that the
branch (sliver) broke, and she fell in. Yet directly afterwards (V. i.)
We are told that she sought her death ‘ wilfully ’, “ did with desperate
hand fordo [her] own life ” ; the priest declares her death was doubt
ful, buries her with maimed rites only by the express command of the
King, and says that, but for this command, she’d have been buried in
ground unsanctified (in ‘ the open fieldes ’, Qi). After inconsistencies
like these—and there may be others in the play—what can it matter
whether an actual speech of a dozen or sixteen lines, though often
announct, is really in the play or not? The comparative insignifi
cance of the point is shown by no one having noted it in print before
Mr and Mrs Cowden Clarke.1 But while I say 4 comparative insignificance,’ I only use this phrase to lessen any wonderer’s surprise at my
conclusion that Shakspere should have left the speech out, or turnd his
propos’d insertion into a more important adaptation of the play. I
do not think Prof. Seeley’s bringing the question before us at all
1 Note the funny lucus a non lucendo reason given by these editors for the
insertion of the lines.
�496
XII.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S 4 DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES ’ 1
insignificant: the point is a capital one, just suited for us. I accept it
thankfully as a reproach for having read Hamlet so carelessly be
fore ; and, as formerly,—when Prof. Seeley identified, for the first
time, Chaucer’s Plowman with him of William’s Fmcw,—I gladly
acknowledge the freshness of his view, the keenness and penetration
of his mind, and thank him heartily for raising the question, and Mr
Malleson for showing such good cause against his conclusions.
Mr Eichard Simpson, who could not come to our Meeting, has
sent me the following letter :—
My dear Furnivall,
I think that there is no warrant for assuming that the
lines announced by Hamlet are to be supposed to exist in the sub
play at all. The whole subject of these sub-plays should be
examined into. It is clear that the necessity for abbreviation will
not allow them to contain all the elements of a play, any more than
an historical drama can contain all the events of a reign. And as
the historical drama takes for granted those events which are made
known by previous allusions, so the sub-play generally omits all
those details which have been previously described or alluded to.
Let me refer to two dramas where sub-plays are introduced after
previous preparation. In the Midsummer Night's Dream we have
not only the play as presented before Theseus, but a previous re
hearsal of it in Act iii. sc. 1. * The lines there rehearsed are totally
different from any that come in the play ultimately acted. Again, in
the Histriomastix, the play of the Prodigal Son, acted in the late
portion of the drama, is preceded by the poet’s reading it over to the
actors in an earlier scene. Not a passage in these two presentations
of the same piece agrees. The announcement and expectations raised
by the first recital are not fulfilled in the event.
Again, when a play, imagined to be some thousand lines long, is
compressed into about 70, a speech of a dozen or sixteen lines in it
shrinks, by proportion, into about five words.
Looking both at the practice of the Elizabethan dramatists, and
at the previous likelihoods of the case, I see no reason whatever for
expecting to find that Shakspere would have put into the sub-play
the dozen lines which he makes Hamlet promise. At the end Hamlet
exults over his success as if the whole play had been his own adapt
ation. I don’t believe that the poet ever meant wis to pick out a bit,
and say, This is the plum contributed by Hamlet himself.
E. Simpson.
Dr Brinsley Nicholson : My spoken remarks are here put forth
in somewhat better shape, both because each theorist has since
insisted very strongly on his own peculiar views, and because I did
not ex improviso bring out as I had wished what I take to be the
intent and significance of the advice-to-the-players-speech.
�XII.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
497
Both theories appear to take it for granted that the sub-play is a
real play and not Shakspere’s. The ring-poesie prologue, the short
speeches, the absence of any second plot, and of any but the main
actors of the main plot, the directness with which the plot is opened,
and the occurrence of the chief catastrophe within a few minutes
from the drawing of the curtain, all show that the play is the abridge
ment of an abridgement manufactured for the occasion. That it is
Shakspere’s is also shown by every speech in it, and his art is dis
tinctly manifested in the way in which in so little space he has con
trived in Gonzago’s speech to open out to us Hamlet’s thoughts and
character, and state in brief that moral of the main play which
Hamlet’s character is meant to set forth.
“ Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own ”
£s merely a variant of Hamlet’s own phrase,
“ There’s a divinity that shapes our ends ”,
and both express one of the main ideas of the play. If the sub-play
be stilted and artificial, it is so made on the principle that leads a
painter to paint a picture within a picture rudely and artificially,
namely, that his own presentment may appear more true and life-like.
But, it is said, Hamlet is represented as writing a speech for the
Set purpose of more surely catching the conscience of the king. True,
and sufficient artistic reasons can be given for this. First, if it were
not necessary that Hamlet should rush into action, yet any one in
his position would for naturalness’ sake be represented as trying to
make assurance doubly sure. Secondly, in the feverish activity into
which Hamlet is roused, it is a necessity that he should do somewhat.
Ware he not, this, looked at by his character elsewhere, would have
been a grievous flaw in Shakspere’s delineation of him, and this side
or indirect, and literary and, as it were, meditative action is that most
in keeping. Thirdly, as it tended to destroy the audience ’ belief in
the Hamlet story, that there should be a play so exactly similar in
plot, and manner and place and rewards of poisoning ;—as the Gonzago
play would tend to mar the reality of the Hamlet play, and the Hamlet
play would give rise to the belief that the Gonzago play was evolved
to order—the double result of coincidence was avoided by making
Hamlet appear as an adapter. This, it will be observed, does not trench
fit in any way depend on the question whether any tragedy of ‘The
Murder of Gonzago’ really existed. That there was such a tragedy is
a, perfectly gratuitous assumption; but if there were, then Hamlet’s
expressed intent would bring out more forcibly the difference between
the real tragedy and—not Hamlet’s—but Shakspere’s sub-play adapt
ation. That the audience knew Kyd’s Sdliman and Perseda only
»»akes Hieronimo’s use of the story as a sub-play and bringer about
■of the catastrophe in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy the more natural.
Again, it will be said, admitting these artistic reasons, there still
»remains the fact that Hamlet is represented as writing. But the artistic
�498
XII.
WHICH ARE HAMLET’S ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
reasons being allowed, what reason is there for Hamlet’s writing
when Shakspere had the whole intent of the sub-play in his mind’s
eye, and the whole making of it in his own hands 1 Admit the play
to be Shakspere’s, and admit the reasons for his manner of introduc
ing the play, and the whole raison d'etre of Hamlet’s intent appears,
and the whole raison di être for there being any such speech disappears.
And here comes in fitly and with force Mr R. Simpson’s acute remark
that the description of these sub-plays never answers to their per
formance. Not a word spoken in the rehearsal scene in Histriomastix is spoken in the acted play, neither is there a word of Bottom
and Co.’s rehearsal spoken in the Pyramus and Thisbe presented be
fore Theseus and his bride.
Lastly, it may be said, that in proof of the existence of a Ham
let speech it is again pointedly referred to in Hamlet’s advice to the
players. This is true, and I am content that the question be decided
by this advice. Where in the sub-play is the clown, so animadverted
on by Hamlet! Or if it be said, this latter part of the advice is a
digression into which, as usual, his subject carries him, I ask
where, after the very first words—“ Speak the speech, I pray you, trip
pingly on the tongue,” where is the town-crier speech, where the
speech requiringu a sawing of the air thus ”—where the very torrent,
tempest, and whirlwind of passion—where the robustious periwigpated fellow tearing his passion to tatters—where the o’erdoing Ter
magant and out - heroding Herod 1
The very speech relied on
declares in its opening words, as well as in its closing ones, that it
cannot refer to any speech in the sub-play.
Why then was it introduced? Not simply to keep up the vrai
semblance of the whole contrivance. This was a secondary aim ; but
its true raison d'être is, that Shakspere had something to say on plays
and play-acting which he would not leave unsaid, and took or made
this opportunity of saying it. Just as Hamlet represents a phase in
Shakspere’s life and character more individually than any other of
his characters, so nowhere—unless where he refers to the luces,—
does he, so to speak, break forth as in Hamlet. Thus we have the
outbreak on the tragedians of the city and cry of children. Lor
myself, I have little doubt that there is a reference or references to
Jonson, to whom in 1601 or -2, he had administered a famous dose.
And none can read the diatribe against clowns in the first Quarto,
without perceiving that Shakspere is speaking with personal anger
and bitterness against some particular actor, Kemp, or some other.
Very possibly also there are in the rest of the advice special hits
which were to his then audience palpable enough. But there is more,
and as I take it, a rising above these squabbles, and whether Shak
spere followed the changing taste of the day, or went against it, or
led it, I hold this speech to be his definite protest against the un
naturalness and stilt and rant of the Tamburlaine style of plays where
Marlow was imitated,—but not his poetry,—and against the artificiality
�XII.
WHICH ARE hamlet’s ‘ DOZEN OR SIXTEEN LINES’?
499
and rant of the actors who played in them. Hamlet is the first of
Shakspere’s greatest dramas, and he then, so to express it, found himself, and this speech is the outcome of some of his maturing thoughts.
In it are the suggesting thoughts that led him to give up the more
poetic and fanciful treatment of his subjects observable in the Mid
summer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, and what Mr Hales
well calls the rhetorical style of Henry V. (and Julius Casar), toge
ther with the more heroic-ryme-like verse suited to these styles, in order
to make his mirrors to nature not only more like flesh and blood, but
think and speak more like those on the stage of the world. In one
word, this speech is Shakspere’s own indication of his aims in the
future manipulation of his thoughts and mode of expressing them.1
’ I have since come across the following :—“ The play, acted by the players
before the King, is at first in a bad and antiquated style. I thought it might
be really taken from an old play ; but it is impossible he could have lit upon
a composition which [so ?] suited his purpose ; and in the last speech but one
there is a resemblance to Shakespeare’s fancies, about grief, love, etc., and else
where to his words; and great neatness and care in the composition. It is all
in rhyme. I do not see symptoms of the lines which Hamlet was to insert.”—
C. Bathurst's Remarks on Shakespeare's Versification, 1857, p. 70.
��Quarto 2 (with the Folio and a revised Text), c. Merry Wives
of Windsor, and Folio 1; d. The Contention, and Henry VI,
Part 2, in F 1; The True Tragedy, and Henry VI, Part 3, in
Fl.
Parallel Texts of the following Quarto Plays and their versions
in the First Folio, with collations : Richard III, Q 1; 2 Henry
IV, Q 1; Troilus and Cressida, Q 1; Lear, QI. Of Othello,
four Texts : Q 1, Q 2, F 1, and a revised Text.
Parallel Texts of the two earliest Quartos of Midsummer
Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice.
The First Quartos of Much Ado about Nothing; Loues
Labour’s Lost; Richard II; 1 Henry IV;—from which
the copies in the Folio were printed ;—and Edward III.
Reprints in Quarto of the remaining Folio Plays, with collations.
Series IV.
Shakspere Allusion-Books, Parts II. and III.
Series V. The Contemporary Brama (ed. Richard Simpson. Esq.).
a. The Works of Robert Greene, Thomas Nash (with a selec
tion from Gabriel Harvey’s), Thomas Lodge, and Henry
Chettle.
b. The Arraignment of Paris (Peele’s) ; Arden of Feversham;
George-a-Greene; Locrine; King Edward III (of which
Act ii. is by a different hand, and that, almost certainly
Shakspere’s) ; Mucedorus; Sir John Oldcastle; Thomas
Lord Cromwell; The Merry Devil of Edmonton; The
London Prodigal; The Puritan; A Yorkshire Tragedy;
Faire Em; The Birth of Merlin; The Siege of Antwerp;
The Life and Death of Thomas Stucley; A Warning to
Fair Women.
c. The Martinist and Anti-Martinist Plays of 1589-91; and
the Plays relating to the quarrel between Dekker and
Jonson in 1600.
'
d. Lists of all the Companies of Actors in Shakspebe’s time,
their Directors, Players, Plays, and Poets, &c. &c.
Richard II, and the other Plays in Egerton MS. 1994
(suggested by Mr J. 0. Halliwell).
The Returnefrom Pernassus, 1606, to be edited by the Rev.
A. B. Grosart.
Series VII. Mysteries, fyc. Ancient Mysteries, with, a Morality,
from the Digby MS. 133, re-edited from the unique MS. by
the Rev. W- W. Skeat, M.A.; The Towneley Mysteries, reedited from the unique MS. by the Rev. Richard Morris, LL.D.
Series VIII. Miscellaneous. Autotypes of the parts of the Play
of Sir Thomas More that may possibly be in young Shakspere’s
handwriting, from the Harleian MS. 7368. Thomas Rymer’s
‘Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined’, 1673,
1692 ; and his ‘A short View of Tragedy of the last Age ’, 1693.
�ï
THE
NEW SHAKSPERE SOCIETY.
"Soeietie (saith the text) is the happinesse of life»"—Loues Labour's lost, iv. Î.
Meeting at University College, Gower St, London, W.C., on the 2nd Friday of every
month (except at Easter and during July, August, and September), at 8 p.m. Sub
scription, One Guinea a year, due on 1st January, and payable to the Hon. Sec., A. G.
Snelgrove, Esq., London Hospital, London, E.
PRESIDENT :
[ft -is hoped that one of our chief living Poets will take tAs post.]
VICE-PRESIDENTS :
I
F
j
The Rev. Edwin A. Abbott, D.D.
C. E. Appleton, Esq., D.C.L.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells.
Professor T. Spencer Baynes, LL.D., St An
drew’s.
William Black, Esq.
H. I. H. Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte.
Professor F. J. Child, Ph.D., Harvard Coll.,
U.S.A.
Prof. Hiram Corson. Cornell Uni^ Ithaca,
U.S.A.
The Right Hos, Wm. F. Cowper-Temple,
M.P.
The Hon. Mrs Wm. F. Cowper-Temple.
Sir John F. Davis, Bart.
Lord Delamere.
Professor N. Delius, Ph.D., Bonn.
The Right Hon. The Earl of Derby.
The Duke of Devonshire, K.G.
Professor Dowden, LL.D., Trim Coll., Dublin.
The Archbishop of Dubmjt.
<The Countess of Ducie.
The Right Hon. The Earl of Dufferin
and Clandeboye, Governor-General of
Canada.
The Earl of Ellesmere.
Alexander J. Ellis, Esq., F.R.S.
Professor Karl Elze, Pil.D., Dessau.
Horace Howard Furness, Esq., Philadel
phia, U.S.A.
Mrs Horace Howard Furness.
Madame Gervinus, Heidelberg.
Henry Hucks Gibbs, Esq., M.A.
The Earl of Gosford.
Professor G. Guizot, College de France,
Paris.
N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Esq.
Sir T. Duffus Hardy.
Rev. H. N. Hudson, Cambridge, U.S.A.
Professor T. H. Huxley, F.R.S.
R. C. Jebb, Esq., M.A., Public Orator, Cam
bridge.
Lord Leconfield.
F. Leighton, Esq., R.A.
Professor Leo, Ph.D., Berlin.
H. R. H. Prince Leopold.
The Marquis of Lothian.
J. Russell Lowell, Esq., D.C.L., Cambridge,
U.S.A.
Sir John Lubbock, Bart., F.R.S.
The Right Hon. Lord Lyttelton.
George MacDonald, Esq., LL.D.
The Duke of Manchester.
H. Maudsley, Esq., M.D.
Prof. Henry Morley, Univ. Coll., London.
Rev. Richard Morris, LL.D.
Professor Max Müller, Ph.D., Oxford.
Professor C. W. Opzoomer, Ph.D., Utrecht.
Professor C. H. Pearson, M.A., Melbourne.
Sir Henry Rawlinson.
Henry Reeve, Esq., D.C.L.
The Right Hon. Lord Romilly.
Dante G. Rossetti, Esq.
Professor J. Ruskin, M.A., Oxford.
The Ex-Bishop of St David’s.
Alexander Schmidt, Ph.D., Berlin.
Professor J. R. Seeley, M.A., Cambridge.
The Rev. W. W. Skeat, M.A., Cambridge.
William Smith, Esq., D.C.L.
Sir Edward Strachey, Bart.
Tom Taylor, Esq., M.A.
Professor Bernhard Ten Brink, Ph.D.,
Strassburg.
The Right Rev. Bishop Thirlwall.
The Rev. W. H. Thompson, D.D., Master or
Trinity College, Cambridge.
Professor Ulrici, Ph.D., Halle.
R. Grant White, Esq., New York, U.S.A.
COMMITTEE :
F. J. Furnivall, Esq. (M.A.), Director, 3, St George’s Square, Primrose Hill, London, N.W.
J. W. Hales, Esq., M.A.
I Fred. D. Matthew, Esq.
C. Mansfield Ingleby, Esq., LL.D.
Brinsley Nicholson, Esq., M.D.
George H. Kingsley, Esq., M.D.
| Richard Simpson, Esq., B.A.
Treasurer: William Payne, Esq., The Keep, Forest Hill, London, S.E.
Hon. Sec.: Arthur G. Snelgrove, Esq., London Hospital, London, E.
Hankers: The Alliance Bank, Bartholomew Lane, London, E.C.
Publishers: N. Trübner & Co., 57 and 59, Ludgate Hill, London, E.C.
Agents for North Germany: Asher & Co., 53, Mohren-Strasse, Berlin.
Agent for South Germany, <£■<•. .■ Karl J. Trübner, 9, Münster Platz, Strassburg.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Which are Hamlet's 'dozen or sixteen lines'?
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Malleson, W.T.
Seeley, J.R.
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: [2], [465]-499, [2] p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. List of publications of the New Shakespeare Society listed inside front cover. List of officers and committee members on back page. Papers read before before the New Shakespeare Society at the eleventh meeting, Friday, December 11, 1874 at University College, London. From: New Shakespeare Society. Publications. Series 1: Transactions. Nos. 1-2, xii, 1874. Inscription on inside front cover: 'M.D. Conway with W. Malleson's affectionate regards'. The New Shakespeare Society was founded in autumn 1873 by Frederick James Furnivall. Printed by John Child and Son.
Publisher
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[New Shakespeare Society]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1874]
Identifier
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G5302
Subject
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Literature
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Which are Hamlet's 'dozen or sixteen lines'?), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Hamlet
Shakespeare