Page 99 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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theatrical tradition, was able to put much of the play in a
new light when he produced it at the Princess's Theatre.
He wore long flaxen curls and a small two-pointed
beard, because Hamlet was a Dane; and he dressed his
company in the style of the Viking era. He was delicate,
handsome, graceful. He had a princely nonchalance
and a pleasant way with his inferiors, and he could
express emotion with sensibility. But he showed no awe
nor depth of feeling. He thought that 'To be or not to
be' was an impediment to the action, and spoke it fast
and unimpressively, holding a drawn sword in his hand.
He was never distraught, and seldom more than a little
excited. His calm and self-possession were too much
even for Lewes, who was prepared to see in him the
pot-bound rose of Goethe, Hamlet with a burden laid on
him too heavy for his soul to bear; but, lacking power,
and too matter-of-fact and shallow, he robbed the play
of true tragedy. Fechter doubtless cleared the Way for
others whom the tradition might have hampered. He
appears to have retained the soliloquy during the King's
prayer. According to one account his Hamlet did not
see the King and Polonius spying on his meeting with
Ophelia; according to another account he saw Polonius,
but not the King. When he staged the play at the Lyceum
in 1864, Kate Terry was his excellent Ophelia, and he
knocked another nail into the coffin of the old manner of
shouting at her in fury.
Ten years later, at that same theatre, came a hurried,
shabby production of the play which ran for a hundred
nights and revealed a Hamlet who owed something, no
doubt, to the naturalism of Fechter (the new Hamlet
himself had worn, in his provincial youth, a flaxen wig),
something to the momentary fires of Edmund Kean,
something to the consistent artistic unity of John Philip
Kemble, and most of all to his own mind and his own
personality. Henry Irving finally killed off the sepul-
chral Hamlet and restored the intensity of thought