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But as of more importance, so more striking, is the judgment displayed by our truly dramatic poet, as well as poet of the drama, in the management of his first scenes. Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama commences, with the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the opening of Macbeth. It is precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of effeminacy for feeling what they had no want of resolution to bear. In all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, as in that of Brutus, of Archbishop Cranmer, that of Benvenuto Cellini recorded by himself, and the vision of Galileo communicated by him to his favourite pupil Torricelli, the ghost-seers were in a state of cold or chilling damp from without, and of anxiety inwardly. For its commonness in ordinary conversation tends to produce the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet approximates the reader or spectator to that state in which the highest poetry will appear, and in its component 140 Notes on Hamlet parts, though not in the whole composition, really is, the language of nature. That Shakspeare meant to put an effect in the actor's power in the very first words — " Who's there?
Observe the gradual transition from the silence and the still recent habit of listening in Francisco's — " I think I hear them " — to the more cheerful call out, which a good actor would observe, in the — " Stand ho! The actor should also be careful to distinguish the expectation and gladness of Bernardo's 'Welcome, Horatio! What, has this thing appear'd again to-night? Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution — "tis but our fantasy! In the deep feeUng which Bernardo has of the solemn nature of what he is about to relate, he makes an effort to master his own imaginative terrors by an elevation of style, — itself a continuation of the effort, — and by turning off from the apparition, as from something which would force him too deeply into himself, to the outward objects, the realities of nature, which had accompanied it : — Ber. Last night of all.

When yon same star, that's westward from the pole Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself. How delightfully natural is the transition to the retro- spective narrative! To offer it the show of violence. Horatio's speech : — I have heard, The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn. No Addison could be more careful to be poetical in diction than Shakspeare in providing the grounds and sources of its propriety. But how to elevate a thing almost mean by its familiarity, young poets may learn in this treatment of the cock-crow.
Horatio's speech : — And, by my advice. This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him. Note the inobtrusive and yet fully adequate mode of introducing the main character, 'young Hamlet,' upon whom is transferred all the interest excited for the acts and concerns of the king his father. The audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the royal court, in order that Hamlet may not have to take up the leavings of exhaustion. In the king's speech, observe the set and pedantically antithetic form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels of conscience, — the strain of undignified rhetoric, — and yet in what follows concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he not a royal brother?

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