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dignity: The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.

POL. Come, firs.

HAM. Follow him, friends: we'll hear a play tomorrow. Doft thou hear me, old friend; can you play the murder of Gonzago?

1. PLAY. Ay, my lord.

HAM. We'll have it to-morrow night. You could, for a need, study a speech of fome dozen or fixteen lines, which I would fet down, and infert in't? could you not?

1. PLAY. Ay, my lord.

HAM. Very well.-Follow that lord; and look you mock him not. [Exeunt POLONIUS and Players.] My good friends, [To Ros. and GUIL.] I'll leave you till night: you are welcome to Elfinore.

Ros. Good my lord!

[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN. HAM. Ay, fo, God be wi' you :-Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant flave am I! Is it not monftrous, that this player here,

2 Is it not monstrous, that this player here,] It should feem from the complicated nature of such parts as Hamlet, Lear, &c. that the time of Shakspeare had produced some excellent performers. He would scarce have taken the pains to form characters which he had no profpect of feeing reprefented with force and propriety on the ftage.

His plays indeed, by their own power, must have given a different turn to acting, and almost new-created the performers of his age. Mysteries, Moralities, and Enterludes, afforded no materials for art to work on, no difcriminations of character, or varieties of appropriated language. From tragedies like Cambyfes, Tamburlaine, and Jeronymo, nature was wholly banished; and the comedies of Gammer Gurton, Common Condycyons, and The Old Wives Tale, might have had justice done to them by the loweft order of human beings.

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his foul so to his own conceit,
That, from her working, all his visage wann'd;3
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspéct,+

Sanctius his animal, mentisque capacius altæ

was wanting, when the dramas of Shakspeare made their first appearance; and to these we were certainly indebted for the excellence of actors who could never have improved so long as their fenfibilities were unawakened, their memories burthened only by pedantick or puritanical declamation, and their manners vulgarized by pleasantry of as low an origin. STEEVENS.

3-all his visage wann'd;) [The folio-warm'd.] 'This might do, did not the old quarto lead us to a more exact and pertinent reading, which is visage wan'd; i. e. turned pale or wan. For fo the visage appears when the mind is thus affectioned, and not warm'd or flush'd. WARBURTON.

4 That, from her working, all his visage wann'd;

Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, Wan'd (wann'd it should have been spelt,) is the reading of the quarto, which Dr. Warburton, I think rightly, restored. The folio reads warm'd, for which Mr. Steevens contends in the following note:

"The working of the foul, and the effort to shed tears, will give a colour to the actor's face, instead of taking it away. The vifage is always warm'd and flush'd by any unusual exertion in a paffionate fpeech; but no performer was ever yet found, I believe, whose feelings were of such exquifite sensibility as to produce paleness in any fituation in which the drama could place him. But if players were indeed poffefsed of that power, there is no fuch circumftance in the speech uttered before Hamlet, as could introduce the wanness for which Dr. Warburton contends."

Whether an actor can produce paleness, it is, I think, unneceffary to enquire. That Shakspeare thought he could, and confidered the speech in question as likely to produce wanness, is proved decisively by the words which he has put into the mouth of Polonius in this scene; which add such fupport to the original reading, that I have without hefitation restored it. Immediately after the Player has finished his speech, Polonius exclaims,

"Look, whether he has not turn'd his colour, and has tears in bis eyes." Here we find the effort to shed tears, taking away, not giving a colour. If it be objected, that by turn'd bis colour, Shakspeare meant that the player grew red, a passage in King

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A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

5

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for paffion,

That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,

Richard III. in which the poet is again describing an actor, who is master of his art, will at once answer the objection:

"Rich. Come, coufin, can'st thou quake, and change thy
colour?

"Murder thy breath in middle of a word;
" And then again begin, and stop again,
"As if thou wert distraught and mad with terror?
"Buck. Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian;

" Tremble and start at wagging of a straw," &c.
The words, quake, and terror, and tremble, as well as the whole
context, shew, that by "change thy colour," Shakspeare meant grow
pale. MALONE.

The word afpect (as Dr. Farmer very properly observes) was in Shakspeare's time accented on the second syllable. The folio exhibits the paflage as

I have printed it. STEEVENS.

s What's Hecuba to him, &c.] It is plain Shakspeare alludes to a ftory told of Alexander the cruel tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly, who feeing a famous tragedian act in the Troades of Euripides, was so sensibly touched that he left the theatre before the play was ended; being ashamed, as he owned, that he who never pitied those he murdered, should weep at the fufferings of Hecuba and Andromache. See Plutarch in the Life of Pelopidas. UPTON.

Shakspeare, it is highly probable, had read the life of Pelopidas, but I fee no ground for fuppofing there is here an allusion to it. Hamlet is not ashamed of being seen to weep at a theatrical exhibition, but mortified that a player, in a dream of paffion, should appear more agitated by fictitious forrow, than the prince was by a real calamity. MALONE.

6

-the cue for passion,] The hint, the direction. JOHNSON. This phrafe is theatrical, and occurs at least a dozen times in our author's plays. Thus, says Quince to Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream, " You speak all your part at once, cues and all." See also Vol. IX. p. 384, n. 6. STEEVENS.

And cleave the general ear1 with horrid speech;
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant; and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property, and most dear life,
A damn'd defeat was made." Am I a coward?

1-the general ear - The ear of all mankind. So before,Caviare to the general, that is, to the multitude. JOHNSON.

* Like John a-dreams,] John a-dreams, i. e. of dreams, means only John the dreamer; a nick-name, I fuppofe, for any ignorant filly fellow. Thus the puppet formerly thrown at during the feason of Lent, was called Jack-a-lent, and the ignis fatuus Jacka-lanthorn. John-a-droynes however, if not a corruption of this nick-name, seems to have been fome well-known character, as I have met with more than one allusion to him. So, in Have with you to Saffron Walden, or Gabriel Harvey's Hunt is up, by Nashe, 1596: "The defcription of that poor John-a-droynes his man, whom he had hired," &c. John-a-Droynes is likewife a foolish character in Whetstone's Promos and Caffandra, 1578, who is feized by informers, has not much to say in his defence, and is cheated out of his money. STEEVENS.

9

-unpregnant of my cause, Unpregnant, for having no due fenfe of. WARBURTON.

Rather, not quickened with a new defire of vengeance; not teeming with revenge. JOHNSON.

* A damn'd defeat qwas made.] Defeat, for destruction.

Rather, difpoffeffion, JOHNSON,

WARBURTON.

The word defeat, (which certainly means destruction in the prefent inftance) is very licentiously used by the old writers. Shakfpeare in Othello employs it yet more quaintly. -" Defeat thy favour with an ufurped beard;" and Middleton, in his comedy called Any Thing for a Quiet Life, says" I have heard of your defeat made upon a mercer."

Again, in Revenge for Honour, by Chapman:

"That he might meantime make a fure defeat

"On our good aged father's life."

!

Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i'the

throat,

As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?

Ha!

Why, I should take it: for it cannot be,
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppreffion bitter; or, ere this,
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this flave's offal: Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorselefs, treacherous, lecherous, kindless vil-

lain!

Why, what an ass am I? This is most brave;
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a curfing, like a very drab,

Again, in The Wits, by Sir W. D'Avenant, 1637: " Not all the skill I have, can pronounce him free of the defeat upon my gold and jewels."

Again, in The Isle of Gulls, 1606: "My late shipwreck has made a defeat both of my friends and treasure." STEEVENS.

In the passage quoted from Othello, to defeat is used for undo or alter: defaire, Fr. See Minsheu in v. Minsheu confiders the substantives defeat and defeature as synonymous. The former he defines an overthrow; the latter, execution or flaughter of men. In King Henry V. we have a fimilar phraseology:

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Making defeat upon the powers of France."

And the word is again used in the same sense in the last act of

this play:

3

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-Their defeat

"Doth by their own infinuation grow." MALONE.

-kindless-] Unnatural. JOHNSON.

4 Why, what an ass am I? This is most brave;] The folio reads,

" O vengeance!

"Who? what an ass am I? Sure this is most brave."

STEEVENS.

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