ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET O read into an author's words a meaning which perchance he may not have meant to convey is an easy slip of the reviewer's pen. It is always difficult to know precisely what an author may have intended, what may have been his deeper and more recondite meanings, especially when his thoughts are presented not in argumentation and discursive speech, but in the embodiment of symbolism, allegory or character impersonation. The mind must first discern some clear idea of the author's half revealed or deep concealed thought before the reader can justly interpret his works. Our opinion, favorable or otherwise, will rest wholly upon the personal interpretation we make of the production we are perusing. Oft times because we lose sight of the author's point of view and read into his creation our own less abstruse conception, devoid of his finesse and casuistry, we find incongruities, the absence of logic and a want of interest. Many of Shakespeare's plays have thus been criticized by those who seemed incapable of rising to his mental or philosophical plane, who have not hesitated to denounce him as a literary pretender and a very wretched interpreter of human nature. His most bitter critics have been those who had thought the stage should portray to the fascinated listener only such scenes and characters as would be regarded as true exemplars to the discerning, and noble inspirations to the aspiring. A play for them must be a consistent production, revealing but one phase of life unmingled with incongruities or contradictions. It must be all tragedy or all comedy; all laughter or all tears. To such critics the mingling of the sunshine with the glowing cloud-the redeeming glint of the silver lining-was disruptive of reason and subjective experience. The mind, they think, can grasp but one thought, or one phase of thought, at a single time. When men laugh they are so engaged in their frivolity or delight that they can but poorly contemplate the possibility of despondency or wretchedness. Hence to such critics there is not only inconsistency but something akin to savagery in the interplay between tragedy and comedy in the same performance. It appalls them as would the sudden outburst of laughter at a funeral, or the shout of sensible delight at the lowering of the coffin into the grave. To such critics every tragedy of Shakespeare is an anomaly, nay, an atrocity, contrary to natural experience and subversive of the higher ideals of the race. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that among a people so simple, unaffected and amenable to natural impulse, as were the ancient Greeks, their moods of melancholy should be so discrete, so separate from their moments of mental exaltation and spiritual abandonment, that the two were never presented together in their dramatic plays, but were regarded as contradictory and mutually conflicting. For centuries this idea prevailed in literature, even till the time of Shakespeare, whose daring originality so amazed and angered his critics that they wholly lost sight of his sublime point of view. But as I shall contend in a subsequent lecture, Shakespeare is distinctly a portrait painter, a delineator of life and character. When, therefore, he found tears and smiles intermingled in the course of human events-that in short men were not always only happy nor always only sad, |