Page 98 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

S T A G E - H I S T O R Y xci

and after the Play, and (like his father) his elaborate
death-scene, following the words 'The rest is silence/
with which he ended the play. In the scene with Ophelia
some found him too harsh, some too tender, which
proves mediocrity, while one friend congratulated him
on doing without the 'clapping and banging the doors,
and the maniac ravings of the old school.' In general he
was too lachrymose, too vehement, and too little of the
prince. His first performance in London was at Drury
Lane on January 8, 1838. After that the play was
among his most successful, and the staging of it at the
Princess's in 18 5 0 and afterwards was in his usual careful
and elaborate style. But he brought back to the stage
scarcely anything that the others had left out; and he left
out all the scene of the King's prayer and Hamlet's
soliloquy thereon. The playbill of Samuel Phelps's
Hamlet, first produced at Sadler's Wells in July, 1844,
shows no Fortinbras, no Ambassadors, and no Rey-
haldo.
Barry Sullivan in 1852, with a flowing light brown
wig and his black relieved with purple, had given
London a taste of a completely sane Hamlet, with a ro-
bust temper, keen wits and a bitter tongue. And in 1861
Manchester (with Mr Henry Irving in its stock company
ready to play Laertes) was fortunate enough to see what
London had to wait for till 18 80—the Hamlet of Edwin
Booth, sane, natural, graceful, melancholy, super-
sensitive, restless, and wildly impetuous, evidently a
many-sided and beautiful performance, of which the
abiding impression was that the prince was a haunted
man. (Booth, it should be added, played the most
nearly complete version of any on the English-speaking
stage.) It is tempting to believe that, if London could
have seen Booth's Hamlet before it saw, in March of that
very year 1861, Fechter's Hamlet, the innovations of the
'naturalistic' player might have been regarded more
steadily. But Fechter, knowing little of the English