August
Wilhelm Schlegel
August
Wilhelm (later: von) Schlegel (September 8, 1767 – May 12, 1845) was a
German poet, translator, critic, and a foremost leader of German
Romanticism. His translations of Shakespeare made the English
dramatist's works into German classics.
“Lectures
on Dramatic Art and Literature”
(1809)
Hamlet
is singular in its kind: a tragedy of thought inspired by continual and
never-satisfied meditation on human destiny and the dark perplexity of
the events of this world, and calculated to call forth the very same
meditation in the minds of the spectators. This enigmatical work
resembles those irrational equations in which a fraction of unknown
magnitude always remains, that will in no way admit of solution. Much
has been said, much written, on this piece, and yet no thinking head
who anew expresses himself on it, will (in his view of the connexion and the signification
of all the parts) entirely coincide with his predecessors.
What naturally most astonishes us,
is the fact that with such hidden purposes, with a foundation laid in
such unfathomable depth, the whole should, at a first view, exhibit an
extremely popular appearance. The dread appearance of the Ghost takes
possession of the mind and the imagination almost at the very
commencement; then the play within the play, in which, as in a glass,
we see reflected the crime, whose fruitlessly attempted punishment
constitutes the subject-matter of the piece; the alarm with which it
fills the King; Hamlet's pretended and Ophelia's real madness; her
death and burial; the meeting of Hamlet and Laertes at her grave; their
combat, and the grand determination; lastly, the appearance of the
young hero Fortinbras, who, with warlike pomp, pays the last honours to an extinct family of
kings; the interspersion of comic characteristic scenes with Polonius,
the courtiers, and the grave-diggers, which have all of them their
signification, – all this fills the stage with an animated and varied
movement. The only circumstance from which this piece might be judged
to be less theatrical than other tragedies of Shakespeare is, that in
the last scenes the main action either stands still or appears to
retrograde. This,
however, was inevitable, and lay in the nature of the subject. The whole is intended to show that a calculating
consideration, which exhausts all the relations and possible
consequences of a deed, must cripple the power of acting; as
Hamlet himself expresses it: –
And
thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with
the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
With
respect to Hamlet's character: I cannot, as I understand the poet's
views, pronounce altogether so
favourable a
sentence upon it as Goethe does. He is,
it is true, of a highly cultivated mind, a prince of royal manners,
endowed with the finest sense of propriety, susceptible of noble
ambition, and open in the highest degree to an enthusiastic admiration
of that excellence in others of which he himself is deficient. He acts
the part of madness with unrivalled power, convincing the persons who
are sent to examine into his supposed loss of reason, merely by telling
them unwelcome truths, and rallying them with the most caustic wit. But
in the resolutions which he so often embraces and always leaves
unexecuted, his weakness is too apparent: he does himself only justice
when he implies that there is no greater dissimilarity than between
himself and Hercules. He is not solely impelled by necessity to
artifice and dissimulation, he has a natural
inclination for crooked ways; he is a hypocrite towards himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to
cover his want of determination: thoughts, as he says on a
different occasion, which have
–
– but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward. – –
He
has been chiefly condemned both for his harshness in repulsing the love
of Ophelia, which he himself had cherished, and for his insensibility
at her death. But he is too much overwhelmed
with his own sorrow to have any compassion to spare for others;
besides his outward indifference gives us by no means the measure of
his internal perturbation. On the other hand, we evidently perceive in
him a malicious joy, when he has
succeeded in getting rid of his enemies, more through necessity and
accident, which alone are able to impel him to quick and decisive
measures, than by the merit of his own courage, as he himself confesses
after the murder of Polonius, and with respect to Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. Hamlet has no firm belief either in himself or in anything else: from
expressions of religious confidence he passes over to sceptical doubts; he believes in
the Ghost of his father as long as he sees it, but as soon as it has
disappeared, it appears to him almost in the light of a deception.
[Footnote: It has been censured as a contradiction, that Hamlet in the
soliloquy on self-murder should say,
The
undiscover'd
country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns – –
For
was not the Ghost a returned traveller? Shakespeare, however, purposely
wished to show, that Hamlet could not fix himself in any conviction of
any kind whatever.] He has even gone so far as to say, "there is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so;" with him the poet loses
himself here in labyrinths of thought, in which neither end nor
beginning is discoverable. The stars themselves, from the
course of events, afford no answer to the question so urgently proposed
to them. A voice from another
world, commissioned it would appear, by heaven, demands vengeance for a
monstrous enormity, and the demand remains without effect; the
criminals are at last punished, but, as it were, by an accidental blow,
and not in the solemn way requisite to convey to the world a warning
example of justice; irresolute foresight, cunning treachery, and
impetuous rage, hurry on to a common destruction; the less guilty and
the innocent are equally involved in the general ruin. The
destiny of humanity is there exhibited as a gigantic Sphinx, which
threatens to precipitate into the abyss of scepticism all who are
unable to solve her dreadful enigmas.
As
one example of the many niceties of Shakespeare which have never been
understood, I may allude to the style in which the player's speech
about Hecuba is conceived. It has been the subject of much controversy
among the commentators, whether this was borrowed by Shakespeare from
himself or from another, and whether, in the praise of the piece of
which it is supposed to be a part, he was speaking seriously, or merely
meant to ridicule the tragical
bombast of his contemporaries.
It seems never to have occurred to them that this speech must not be
judged of by itself, but in connexion
with the place where it is introduced. To distinguish it in the play
itself as dramatic poetry, it was necessary that it should rise above
the dignified poetry of the former in the same proportion that
generally theatrical elevation soars above simple nature. Hence
Shakespeare has composed the play in Hamlet altogether in sententious
rhymes full of antitheses. But this solemn and measured tone did not
suit a speech in which violent emotion ought to prevail, and the poet
had no other expedient than the one of which he made choice:
overcharging the pathos. The language of the speech in question is
certainly falsely emphatical;
but yet this fault is so mixed up with true grandeur, that a player practised in artificially
calling forth in himself the emotion he is imitating, may certainly be
carried away by it. Besides, it will hardly be believed that
Shakespeare knew so little of his art, as not to be aware that a
tragedy in which Aeneas had to make a lengthy epic relation of a
transaction that happened so long before as the destruction of Troy,
could neither be dramatical
nor theatrical.
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