Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama commences, with
the direfol music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the opening of



154



APPENDIX



Macbah, The tone is quite ramiliar ; — ^there is no poetic description of niglit, no elab-
orate information conveyed by one speaker to another of what both had immediately
before their senses (such as the first distich in Addison's Cato^ which is a transhition
into poetry of < Past four o'clock and a dark morning!') ; — and yet nothing border-
ing on the comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It
is precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of effemi-
nacy for feeling what they had no want of resolution to bear. Yet the armor, the
dead silence, the watchfulness that first interrupts it, the welcome relief of the guard,
the cold, the broken expressions of compelled attention to bodily feelings still under
control, — all excellently accord with, and prepare for, the after gradual rise into
tragedy ;— but, above all, into a tragedy the interest of which is as eminently ad et
apud intra as that of Macbeth is directly ad extra, [The rest of Coleridge's notes
are incorporated in the commentary to the text. Ed.]






COLERIDGE (i8ia)

{Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, London, 1856, p. 141.) — ^The first
question we should ask ourselves is : What did Shakespeare mean when be drew the
character of Hamlet ? He never wrote anything without design, and what was his
design when he sat down to produce this tragedy ? My belief is, that he always
regarded his story before he began to write much in the same light as a painter
regards his canvas before he begins to paint : as a mere vehicle for his thoughts, — as
a ground upon which he was to work. What, then, was the point to which Shake-
speare directed himself in Hamlet t He intended to portray a person in whose
view the external world and all its incidents and objects were comparatively dim and
of no interest in themselves, and which began to interest only when they were re-
flected in the mirror of his nxind. 