I was late. The First Act was nearly over. The play was not yet alive,
neither in the bosoms of the actors nor in the audience. I closed the
door of the box softly, and came forward. The rolling Italian eyes of
Hamlet glanced up at me. There came a new impulse over the Court
of Denmark.
Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet sat close,
making him stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the
commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs. And he carried a
long black rag, as a cloak, for histrionic purposes. And he had on his
face a portentous grimace of melancholy and philosophic importance. His
was the caricature of Hamlet's melancholy self-absorption.
I stooped to arrange my footstool and compose my countenance. I was
trying not to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic
melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His
close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate
doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a
melancholic droop.
All the actors alike were out of their element. Their Majesties of
Denmark were touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman, was ill at
ease in her pink satin. Enrico had had no mercy. He knew she loved to be
the scolding servant or housekeeper, with her head tied up in a
handkerchief, shrill and vulgar. Yet here she was pranked out in an
expanse of satin, la Regina. Regina, indeed!
She obediently did her best to be important. Indeed, she rather fancied
herself; she looked sideways at the audience, self-consciously, quite
ready to be accepted as an imposing and noble person, if they would
esteem her such. Her voice sounded hoarse and common, but whether it was
the pink satin in contrast, or a cold, I do not know. She was almost
childishly afraid to move. Before she began a speech she looked down and
kicked her skirt viciously, so that she was sure it was under control.
Then she let go. She was a burly, downright little body of sixty, one
rather expected her to box Hamlet on the ears.
Only she liked being a queen when she sat on the throne. There she
perched with great satisfaction, her train splendidly displayed down the
steps. She was as proud as a child, and she looked like Queen Victoria
of the Jubilee period.
The King, her noble consort, also had new honours thrust upon him, as
well as new garments. His body was real enough but it had nothing at all
to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by
themselves. But wherever he went, they went with him, to the confusion
of everybody.
He was a thin, rather frail-looking peasant, pathetic, and very gentle.
There was something pure and fine about him, he was so exceedingly
gentle and by natural breeding courteous. But he did not feel kingly, he
acted the part with beautiful, simple resignation.
Enrico Persevalli had overshot himself in every direction, but worst of
all in his own. He had become a hulking fellow, crawling about with his
head ducked between his shoulders, pecking and poking, creeping about
after other people, sniffing at them, setting traps for them, absorbed
by his own self-important self-consciousness. His legs, in their black
knee-breeches, had a crawling, slinking look; he always carried the
black rag of a cloak, something for him to twist about as he twisted in
his own soul, overwhelmed by a sort of inverted perversity.
I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he
seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His
nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King,
his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The
character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a
spirit of disintegration.
There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self-dislike, through
much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. In
Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious
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