Shakespeare on the Stage (Volume 2) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1911. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... tral with loneliness and limelight. The Play Scene was deftly carried to a telling climax, --although there, as at the greater climax in the Queen's closet, at "Nay, I know not Is it the king?" Mr. Forbes-Robertson manifested more the intention than the faculty of tragic power. Reynaldo was retained, providing a little more of the tedious senility of Polonius, and Fortinbras was restored, to point the contrast between the vacillating man of thought and the expeditious man of action. Mr. Forbes-Robertson's ideal of Hamlet was, as far as comprehensible, seen to be, in most particulars, correct, but it was not made absolutely clear, and his expression of it did not, at any point, except in Hamlet's interview with Ophelia, immediately after the soliloquy on death, exhibit imperial felicity of art. At the last of that colloquy, however, he manifested, exceedingly well, the wounded heart, the disordered mind, the seething passion, the wild, indefinite purpose, and the bitterness and scorn that are constituent elements of Hamlet's paroxysm. Neither there, nor elsewhere, though, did he denote that Hamlet is a man who has passed beyond the love of woman, and who, more than once, passes across the limit of sanity--as when, for example, he purposes to take such a vengeance on his enemy as will condemn the soul of the monarch to eternal torture in the depths of hell. The excision of an essential part of Hamlet's speech in the Prayer Scene almost vitiated, certainly much perplexed, the purport of the embodiment. As to the larger significance of the character, aside from its various values as a vehicle of dramatic expression, --meaning its piteous exemplification of finite man, dazed, mystified, and overwhelmed in the hopeless endeavor to pierce the mystery of his infinite env...