SHAKESPEARIANA.

VOL. VIII.

JANUARY, 189'.

No. 1.

"FRATRICIDE PUNISHED; OR, PRINCE HAMLET OF DENMARK."

THE difficulties in the way of believing either that there was, or that there was not, an English play dealing with the Danish story of Hamlet prior to the appearance of the First Quarto of Shakespeare's, would seem to be about equal. If there was, how could it so entirely have disappeared, when older and contemporary productions reasonably survive? If there was not, how can we receive the phenomenon of great Shakespeare's greatest play-the greatest and splendidest of tragedies as a contemporary production with the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus? Meres, in 1598, records that Shakespeare-worthy, he notes, to be called the English Seneca— wrote these three, but makes no mention of Hamlet. Nash, however, in the same year, speaks of a Hamlet, written by an English Seneca who could be "read by candle-light "-a sort of euphuistic statement, perhaps, that he was to be seen, not in a book, but on a stage in a house lighted by candles; and two other accredited authorities speak of a play called Hamlet, which had been played on a public stage prior to 1603. That is to say: Meres mentions a Shakespeare without a Hamlet, and Nash a Hamlet without a Shakespeare; although it would appear to have been quite as impossible then as now to separate master and masterpiece, or pronounce the name of either without the other, when treating of English dramatic literature.

But the question, either answer to which is so inexplainable, is tremendously complicated when we consider the new element which the discovery of the German version, of which a translation is presented herewith, adds to it. This German play can be traced in Germany to its performance in Veltheim in 1665, which performance is preceded, however, by an entry in an almanac of 1626 which some officer at the Court of Dresden in that year had used as a diary: "Junius 24, eine Tragedia von Hamlet einen Printzen in Dennemarck."

The reader (and I trust it will be read attentively, for the impression it gives on careful perusal is a much safer judgment upon the probabilities than any possible commentary) will perceive that—although this German play does not follow any known version of Shakespeare's Hamlet-yet it does strongly suggest at every period the first Quarto version. When we remember, therefore, that at either or both of the above dates, the Quarto version of 1604 had been long superseded by the perfected version of the second Quarto (of 1604, which was itself cut down considerably for stage purposes and so printed in the first Folio in 1623), the alternative is, surely: either this play came from England about simultaneously with the first Quarto, or else the dialogue has been substituted from somewhere to fit the action of the English production (which is practically preserved by the German play indifferently to the stately and splendid diction of the Hamlet of 1623). Some ten years ago I suggested in The Shakespearean Myth that a good deal of the difficulty we experience in accommodating Shakespeare to his audiences would disappear if we were to assume that a Shakespeare play, as printed, was what the author wrote or meant to write; and that, inside the theatres, the actors (who had the ACTION by heart), entertained such audiences as they found there by delineating this action, and accompanying it by such speech as they supposed would carry its explanation to the spectators, who certainly cared for little in the way of eloquence and splendors of rhetoric-and comprehended less. The suggestion still seems to me of some value. By the aid of it Hamlet's exhortation to the players to speak only what is set down for them becomes still more pregnant with stage history. But particularly, in applying the suggestion to our present German puzzle, some light seems to darkly break. Let us imagine that these English actors in Germany had Hamlet in their repertory. They acted it, as at home, to carry the story; the dialogue they simply ignored, just as they did at home, except so far as it accompanied and explained the action. They knew well enough that the play of Hamlet moves along perfectly well without Hamlet's soliloquies: "O that this too, too solid flesh would melt," "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I," "To be, or not to be," and without the discussion on mortality carried on with the shrewd gravedigger. And so these were cut out peremptorily. But every soliloquy or dialogue, however philosophical or introspective, which accompanies action, and without which the story is not coherent (such as the long monologue of the King at prayers, or the rencontre with Osric), was supplied, in some sort, by a few words, or an exchange of speeches, or some dialogue or statement, so that the play could go on. And, if this were the plan, we see how the German version before us confirms our theory of the actors. For nobody can deny that here is the story of Hamlet, though everybody will read it with suppressed disgust at the travesty, conscious or unconscious, but still present always in the perusal—a travesty which some

how sounds more deliberate, but still is no more of a travesty, than is the first Quarto, upon the mighty text of the first Folio.

The unsettled questions as to whether the 1603 Quarto was the mere stealage: merely as much as a concealed stenographer could catch from a performance of the text of the 1604 version on the stage, and supplement by purchase of actors' lines, or the actual first draft enlarged by Shakespeare himself into the 1604 version, has been ably debated in Volume XI. of "The Bankside Shakespeare." Mr. Vining strenuously holds the latter view, and the late Richard Grant White, in his posthumous paper, reprinted in connection with Mr. Vining's Introduction, quite as vigorously combats it.

And I cannot forbear remarking upon another apparent confirmation of a theory of my own. In my (Bankside) Introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor I pointed out how (although the majority of commentators treated the first Quarto of The Merry Wives precisely as they did the first Quarto of Hamlet-namely, as a surreptitious and stolen report of a better version) an actual examination of the better version showed that the accretions were largely allusions to or accounts of things which happened after the date of the first Quarto-running along at intervals of one, two and three years, and even at longer ones, until many of them were of no importance and had entirely lost their significance by lapse of time-and which, therefore, could not all have been inserted at once; that is to say, that the play grew in the mouths of the actors by precisely what we to-day call "localisms" and "gags." Now here, it seems to me, is a curious proof that the English actors, in playing Hamlet, used a certain "gag" or hit at a matter of London talk in or about 1589. It was of too temporary an interest, and that not a comic one, and so was not incorporated into any English version of the play. But when the passage was pronounced by rote in Germany, the German transcriber took it down, just as it was, as if it were a part of the play, and an allusion to Portugal in Denmark quite as natural as an allusion to England (which, perhaps, it was). But it stamps, to my thinking, not only the English origin of the Fratricide Punished; or, Prinz Hamlet of Dannemarck, but the fact that the custom of "gagging" or "localizing" a play, from time to time, was a custom of Shakespeare's day quite as constantly as of our own. This is the incident: In Fratricide Punished, Act III., scene x., occurs the dialogue:

King. We have resolved to send you to England. . . . Hamlet.-Ay, ay, King, send me off to Portugal, so that I may never come back again. That's the better plan.t

* An exceedingly popular young comedian of to-day, Mr. Nat. Goodwin, says that, after acting one of his pieces for a year or so, he happened to look at the prompter's book, and found that scarcely a third of it, as it stood at first, was left, the practice having been to substitute, for the book, any gag" or popular allusion which the audience

approved or applauded.

Dr. Furnivall, who, I think, is not entirely free from a certain habit of settling

Now, to my thinking, this shows that, when a new play called Hamlet (Shakespeare's, or the prior one of which the commentators tell us) was played in England in or about 1589, the actor who impersonated Hamlet worked in an allusion to what then was a matter of public indignation, viz.: Essex's disastrous expedition to Portugal in 1589, in which, out of the 1100 officers and 21,000 common soldiers who started with him, 350 officers and 1100 soldiers never lived to come back. The localism certainly had no meaning in Germany, and had nothing to do with the play either in Germany or in England. But I present the point with due submission. I may add that, in the book of Fratricide Punished, the play is preceded by a mythological prologue, given in a cloud, in which a goddess, who says her name is "NIGHT," entering in a chariot spangled with stars, describes herself as the patrongoddess of illicit love, and then (rather inconsistently) summons her satellites to arrange to punish the adulterous love of a King for his brother's Queen by compassing the death of both. It is not necessary to translate this prologue (which is not, on the whole, unimpressive), since it would vary in no respect the conclusions which the reader will draw for himself from this curious but undoubted version of the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. APPLETON MORGAN.

"FRATRICIDE PUNISHED."

PERSONS IN THE TRAGEDY.

GHOST of the old King of Denmark.

ERICO, brother of the present King.

HAMLET, Prince, son of the murdered King.

SIGRIE, the Queen, mother of Prince Hamlet.

HORATIO, a gentleman of high rank, friend to Hamlet.

CORAMBUS, the Lord Chamberlain.

LEONHARDUS, his son.

OPHELIA, Corambus's daughter, sister to Leonhardus.

PHANTASMO, a Court clown.

FRANCISCO, an officer of the guard.

JENS, a peasant.

CHARLES, leader of the comedians.

A Corporal.

Two Ruffians.

Two Soldiers, Life Guards, Servants, two Comedians, Supernumeraries.

important questions on the spur of the moment, and of declining to see any reason for their reconsideration by others, after he has once pronounced; says that this allusion to Portugal is merely a sort of " 'equivalent to a modern Englishman's saying 'go to Jericho'" (a saying, by the way, which I do not remember to have heard, which accounts, perhaps, for the loss upon me of the good Dr.'s commentary), and that any other view of the matter is "absurd."-" Forewords" to Grigg's Reprint of the 1603 Quarto Hamlet, P. viii.