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.

“On the question of pronunciation, there is something to be said which I think in ordinary teaching is not sufficiently considered.  Pronunciation should be simple and unaffected, but not always fashioned rigidly according to a dictionary standard.  No less an authority than Cicero points out that pronunciation must vary widely according to the emotions to be expressed; that it may be broken or cut with a varying or direct sound, and that it serves for the actor the purpose of color to the painter, from which to draw variations.  Take the simplest illustration.  The formal pronunciation of A-h is ‘Ah,’ of O-h, ‘Oh,’ but you cannot stereotype the expression of emotion like this.  These exclamations are words of one syllable, but the speaker who is sounding the gamut of human feeling will not be restricted in his pronunciation by dictionary rule.  It is said of Edmund Kean that he never spoke such ejaculations, but always sighed or groaned them.  Fancy an actor saying: 

     ‘My Desdemona!  Oh! oh! oh!’

“Words are intended to express feelings and ideas, not to bind them in rigid fetters; the accents of pleasure are different from the accents of pain, and if a feeling is more accurately expressed as in nature by a variation of sound not provided by the laws of pronunciation, then such imperfect laws must be disregarded and nature vindicated!”

It was of the address in which these words occur that a Boston hearer said that it was felt by every one present that “the truth had been spoken by a man who had learned it through living and not through theory.”

I leave his Hamlet for the present with one further reflection.  It was in courtesy and humor that it differed most widely from other Hamlets that I have seen and heard of.  This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius.  His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say:  “You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life—­how terribly in the way you seem now.”  With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said:  “I had thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably.”