One could hardly say more for one’s sense of the reality of Forbes-Robertson’s acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them.

With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before, Gervinus, with the commentary of Wilhelm Meister in our minds, not to speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no need to traverse the character of Hamlet.  He has meant so much to our fathers—­though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us of today—­that he is, so to say, in our blood.  He is strangely near to our hearts by sheer inheritance.  And perhaps the most beautiful thing Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world.

When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well thought of him,—­Ophelia and Horatio,—­and as one who saw him only as he sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his knees.

Ophelia’s

          Courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword,
          The expectancy and rose of the fair state;

the “sweet prince” of Horatio’s “good-night”—­the soldier for whose passage Fortinbras commanded

          The soldier’s music and the rites of war.

We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humourist.

Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible boyish glee.  No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play.  His scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly:  the silken sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak—­that side of which comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a world.

In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won.

The soldier—­if necessary, the fighter—­is there as supple and strong as a Damascus blade.  One is always aware of the “something dangerous,” for all his princely manners and scholarly ways.  One is never left in doubt as to how this Hamlet will play the man.  It is all too easy for him to draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business.  Because this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he knows not how to wield it.  All this gentleness—­have a care!—­is that of an unusually masculine restraint.