rominent
circumstances. Zanga is a vulgar caricature of it.

HAMLET

This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we
may be said almost to remember in our after-years; he who made that famous
soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought "this
goodly frame, the earth, a steril promontory, and this brave o'er-hanging
firmament, the air, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul
and pestilent congregation of vapours;" whom "man delighted not, nor woman
neither;" he who talked with the grave-diggers, and moralised on Yorick's
skull; the school-fellow of Rosencrans and Guildenstern at Wittenberg;
the friend of Horatio; the lover of Ophelia; he that was mad and sent to
England; the slow avenger of his father's death; who lived at the court of
Horwendillus five hundred years before we were born, but all whose
thoughts we seem to know as well as we do our own, because we have read
them in Shakspeare.

Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the
poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own
thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is _we_ who are
Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history.
Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or
those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of
reflection, and thought himself "too much i' th' sun;" whoever has seen
the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast,
and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left
remarkable in it; whoever has known "the pangs of despised love, the
insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy
takes;" he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his
heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth
staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at
ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of
action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems
infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless
of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off,
to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of
them--this is the true Hamlet.

We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly know how to criticise
it any more than we should kno