Bernardo: Who’s there?

     Francisco: Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.

     Bernardo: Long live the King!

     Francisco: Bernardo?

     Bernardo: He.

     Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.

     Bernardo: ’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

     Francisco: For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold....

And all that he tried to make others do with these lines, he himself did with every line of his own part.  Every word lived.

Some said:  “Oh, Irving only makes Hamlet a love poem!” They said that, I suppose, because in the Nunnery scene with Ophelia he was the lover above the prince and the poet.  With what passionate longing his hands hovered over Ophelia at her words: 

    “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”

His advice to the players was not advice.  He did not speak it as an actor.  Nearly all Hamlets in that scene give away the fact that they are actors, and not dilettanti of royal blood.  Irving defined the way he would have the players speak as an order, an instruction of the merit of which he was regally sure.  There was no patronizing flavor in his acting here, not a touch of “I’ll teach you how to do it.”  He was swift—­swift and simple—­pausing for the right word now and again, as in the phrase “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature.”  His slight pause and eloquent gesture was the all-embracing word “Nature” came in answer to his call, were exactly repeated unconsciously years later by the Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva).  She was telling us the story of a play that she had written.  The words rushed out swiftly, but occasionally she would wait for the one that expressed her meaning most comprehensively and exactly, and as she got it, up went her hand in triumph over her head.  “Like yours in ‘Hamlet,’” I told Henry at the time.

I knew this Hamlet both ways—­as an actress from the stage, and as an actress putting away her profession for the time as one of the audience—­and both ways it was superb to me.  Tennyson, I know, said it was not a perfect Hamlet.  I wonder, then, where he hoped to find perfection!

James Spedding, considered a fine critic in his day, said Irving was “simply hideous ... a monster!” Another of these fine critics declared that he never could believe in Irving’s Hamlet after having seen “part (sic) of his performance as a murderer in a commonplace melodrama.”  Would one believe that any one could seriously write so stupidly as that about the earnest effort of an earnest actor, if it were not quoted by some of Irving’s biographers?

Some criticism, however severe, however misguided, remains within the bounds of justice, but what is one to think of the Quarterly Reviewer who declared that “the enormous pains taken with the scenery had ensured Mr. Irving’s success”?  The scenery was of the simplest—­no money was spent on it even when the play was revived at the Lyceum after Colonel Bateman’s death.  Henry’s dress probably cost him about L2!