Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/156

 grave-digging business to be a mouldy impertinence, when there flashes upon us the better thought that Shakspeare was here deepening pathos upon the fair maid who must be the tenant of this grave so fatuously dug. To this complexion must we all come at last, and beauty cannot repel the loutish hands which take their fee for shovelling dirt upon its clay.

There is so little comic business in this scene that actors are at their wits' end to make it hold the audience. They used to wear a dozen or two waistcoats, and, pretending to be hot and blown, strip them off, one after another; wearing all the time an air as if each one was the last, until you doubted whether, instead of a man inside, there were any thing more than a yardstick to measure vest-patterns with. So Thackeray takes George IV. to pieces by peeling away all the well-known articles of his apparel,—"under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." But the waistcoated business always secured the laugh which the clowns' insipid discussion could not raise.

This scene, as it stands in the Folio of 1623, had no existence in the earlier Hamlets, and was plainly an after-thought of Shakspeare as he moulded the play to its perfection.

In the vignettes of mediæval manuscripts and the frescoes of chapels, there were ghastly drawings of the Dance of Death, or the so-called Danse Macabre. *