iv.46 (180,5) tell,/Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death,/ Have
burst their cearments?] [W: in earth] It were too long to examine this
note period by period, though almost every period seems to me to contain
something reprehensible. The critic, in his zeal for change, writes with
so little consideration, as to say, that Hamlet cannot call his father
_canonized_, because _we are told he was murdered with all his sins
fresh upon him_. He was not then told it, and had so little the power of
knowing it, that he was to be told it by an apparition. The long
succession of reasons upon reasons prove nothing, but what every reader
discovers, that the king had been buried, which is implied by so many
adjuncts of burial, that the direct mention of _earth_ is not necessary.
Hamlet, amazed at an apparition, which, though in all ages credited, has
in all ages been considered as the most wonderful and most dreadful
operation of supernatural agency, enquires of the spectre, in the most
emphatic terms, why he breaks the order of nature, by returning from the
dead; this he asks in a very confused circumlocution, confounding in his
fright the soul and body. Why, says he, have _thy bones_, which with due
ceremonies have been intombed _in death_, in the common state of
departed mortals, _burst_ the folds in which they were embalmed? Why has
the tomb, in which we saw thee quietly laid, opened his mouth, that
mouth which, by its weight and stability, seemed closed for ever? The
whole sentence is this: _Why dost thou appear, whom we know to be dead?_
Had the change of the word removed any obscurity, or added any beauty,
it might have been worth a struggle; but either reading leaves the sense
the same.
Pages:
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283