FRASER'S

MAGAZINE

FOR

TOWN AND COUNTRY.

VOL. XIV.

JULY TO DECEMBER, 1836.

LONDON:

JAMES FRASER, 215 REGENT STREET;

AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS AND NEWSMEN

IN TOWN AND COUNTRY.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY JAMES MOYES,

Castle Street, Leicester Square.

"So Ecstasy,

Fantastic Dotage, Madness, Frenzy, Rapture
Of mere Imagination, differ partly

From MELANCHOLY, which is briefly thus:
A mere commotion of the Mind-overcharged
With Fear and Sorrow, first began i' th' brain,
The seat of Reason; and from thence derived
As suddenly into the heart, the seat
Of our affections."- FORD's Lovers.

SHAKESPEARE has written plays, and
these plays were acted; and they suc-
ceeded; and by their popularity the
author achieved a competency, on
which he was enabled to retire from
the turmoils of a theatrical life to the
enjoyment of a friendly society and
his own thoughts. Yet am I well
convinced, it is impossible that any
one of Shakespeare's dramatic works-
and especially of his tragedies, touch-
ing one of which I mean to speak -
ever could be satisfactorily represented
upon the stage. Laying aside all other
reasons, it would be, in the first place,
necessary to have a company such as
was never yet assembled and no money
could at any time have procured — a
company, namely, in which every actor
should be a man of mind and feeling:
for in these dramas every part is a
character, fashioned by the touch of
Genius; and, therefore, every part is
important. But of no play is this more
strictly true than it is of that strange,
and subtle, and weird-work, Hamlet.

VOL. XIV. NO. LXXIX.

"The heartach,

And the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to ;"

human infirmities, human afflictions, and supernatural agency, are so blended

questions and considerations of Melancholy, of Pathology, Metaphysics, and Demonology, are so intertangled --the powers of man's Will, which are well nigh almighty, and the dictates of inexorable Fate, are brought into such an appalling yet dim collision, that to wring a meaning from a work else inscrutable requires the exercise of every faculty, and renders it necessary that not an incident should escape the observation, that not a word should be passed over, without being scanned curiously.

Hamlet is, even more peculiarly than Lear, or Macbeth, or Othello, a play for the study. And not this alone; for it is, in good sooth, a work for the high student, who, through the earnestness of his Love, the intensity of his Thoughts, the pervading purity of his

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