g archaeology of
scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the
play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may
be no more elaborate than those of a _guignol_ in the Champs-Elysees.

Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about
him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at
all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted.

His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be
left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day,
with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage
saying, "This is Elsinore."

One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of
Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that
distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan
theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all
that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them.

With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before,
Gervinus, with the commentary of _Wilhelm Meister_ in our minds, not to
speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no
need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our
fathers--though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us
of today--that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to
our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing
Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a
great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad
smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and
tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world.

When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well
thought of him,--Ophelia and Horatio,--and as one who saw him only as he
sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his
knees.

Ophelia's

Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state;

the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"--the soldier for whose
passage Fortinbras commanded

The soldier's music and the rites of war.

We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a
philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a
ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philoso