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Lunatic

What man is most looked up to?  The Man in the Moon.

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THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

WALTER MONTGOMERY has been playing “HAMLET” and “OTHELLO” at NIBLO’S GARDEN.  So graceful and elegant is he in his stage presence, that I have been obliged to decline to take MARGARET to see him.  There is nothing so annoying as to escort one’s cousin (I think I have mentioned that MARGARET is my cousin) to the theatre and to hear her express the most ecstatic admiration of that “perfectly lovely Mr. MONTGOMERY.”  I have suffered from this sort of thing once, and don’t propose to subject myself to it a second time.  I do not consider myself a jealous man, but as Mr. GUPPY finely and forcibly remarks, “there are chords in the human breast.”

Last week, I referred in pointed, not to say Greeleyesque language, to the REFORMING NUISANCES who insist upon improving everything according to their own fashion.  The NUISANCE, however, has this peculiarity, that he never wants to change anything that really needs to be reformed.  He will insist upon bullying Mr. TILTON into total abstinence from the mildest form of claret and water, but he never thinks of urging Mr. GREELEY to a wholesome moderation in the use of objurgatory epithets.  He is clamorous in his demand that Rip Van Winkle should be transformed into a temperance lecture, but he is entirely satisfied with the preposterous manner in which the clever but inartistic SHAKESPEARE has thought fit to end his two meritorious tragedies, Hamlet and Othello.  Now no one at all familiar with either of these two popular plays can fail to perceive the gross faults of construction which characterize them both.

To be sure, if we accept the theory of “HAMLET’S” insanity, we can account for the preposterous idiocy of his conduct.  But from the greatest to the worst of our interpreters of “HAMLET,”—­from BOOTH to FECHTER,—­there is no modern actor who believes in the real insanity of the melancholy Dane.  The fault of his folly, therefore, lies with the dramatist, and not the actor.

What does “HAMLET” do when he decides—­on the unsworn statement of an irresponsible GHOST—­that his father has been murdered by the GHOST’S brother?  We all know that he devotes himself to the duties of a private detective; that he drives his sweetheart crazy by using very improper language to her, and by coolly denying that he had ever had any serious intentions toward her.  Then he gets up the worst specimen of private theatricals that even a royal drawing-room ever witnessed,—­a performance so hopelessly stupid as to actually make the KING and his consort seriously ill.  Next he insults his mother, and, under the weak pretext of killing rats, wantonly makes a hole in her best tapestry.  And finally, after having killed the young man who was to have been his brother-in-law, he stabs his own uncle and calmly watches the dying agonies of his mother, who has succumbed to an indiscreet indulgence in adulterated whiskey.  His death is the only redeeming incident in his career,—­only he should have died in the first, instead of the fifth act.