His
mental deductions as they answered were clearly shown. With "I would I
had been there" the cloud of unseen witnesses with whom he had before
been communing again descended. For a second or two Horatio and the rest
did not exist for him.... So onward to the crowning couplet:
"... foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes."
After having been very quiet and rapid, very discreet, he pronounced
these lines in a loud, clear voice, dragged out every syllable as if
there never could be an end to his horror and his rage.
I had been familiar with the scene from my childhood--I had studied it;
I had heard from my father how Macready acted in it, and now I found
that I had a _fool_ of an idea of it! That's the advantage of study,
good people, who go to see Shakespeare acted. It makes you know
sometimes what is being done, and what you never dreamed would be done
when you read the scene at home.
As one of the audience I was much struck by Irving's treatment of
interjections and exclamations in "Hamlet." He breathed the line: "O,
that this too, too solid flesh would melt," as one long yearning, and,
"O horrible, O horrible! most horrible!" as a groan. When we first went
to America his address at Harvard touched on this very subject, and it
may be interesting to know that what he preached in 1885 he had
practiced as far back as 1874.
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