Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/179

Rh sometimes does not even accomplish what is technically known as "filling the stage." In Hamlet this is not apparent; but in Richelieu it renders the performance bald. Mr. Booth does not always give to language its full force of meaning. His emphasis is sometimes misplaced; his inflections not always sufficiently marked; his reading does not always do justice to the meaning of his author. He is much too prone to lodge his emphasis on pronouns and prepositions, neglecting what elocutionists call slur, by which insignificant words are touched lightly and trippingly. He often declaims in an elevated monotone, without any flexibility, and hence fails to give to a passage its just expression. But his voice is often very tender and sweet, as his rendering of "This was your husband," in the closet scene in Hamlet, testifies.

It is as a reader that Mr. Booth is chiefly faulty; but in Hamlet he may be justly chargeable with failing to get the "antic disposition on." In the interview with his father's spirit, Hamlet has caught terrible glimpses of the nether world. Grief, horror, awe, passionate sympathy, excited by the unearthly visitation—what language can express the tumult of these sensations! Strained beyond measure, his whole nature rebounds into unnatural mirth. "Ha, ha, boy, say'st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny? Come on. You hear this fellow in the cellarage!" "Well said, old mole! Canst thou work in the earth so fast?" So does the distraught prince break out into ribaldry and phantasy of mirth. In Mr. Booth's rendering of these words, there is nothing of the tumultuous passion they reveal, no frenzy, no glimpse of intense passion covered, but not hidden, by a wild and feverish mirth. The words are, indeed, "wild and whirling," but their utterance is not. All through the play Mr. Booth puts Hamlet in the most studied and elaborated "antic disposition " possible.

In the closing soliloquy of the second act, Hamlet's pent-up passion finds adequate vent in words. Strangely stirred by the declamation of the travelling actor, and hastily dismissing him, and his faithless friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he bursts into the most passionate self upbraiding. All his conflicting emotions rush pell-mell into expression. Look at the language : "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I?" "This is meet, that I … must unlock my heart with words, and fall a cursing like a very drab, a scullion!" "Bloody, bloody villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!" Mr. Booth does not utter this speech with the passionate flow and vehemence it requires. When I first heard him deliver it, he attitudinized, declaimed, broke his words up into syllables, and failed to fire the speech with genuine passion; the second time he uttered it flowingly, but in a discursive, rambling fashion, still lacking the