landofnowhere | Felix Mendelssohn as theatre critic (Reply)

A 20-year old Felix Mendelssohn, writing home to his family on his first visit to England in 1829, just having seen Hamlet at Covent Garden. (I think the "Kemble" here must be Charles Kemble.)

In the evening I went with Rosen Mühlenfels and Klingemann to Covent Garden: 'Hamlet'. I believe, children, that he was right who said that the English sometimes do not understand Shakespeare. At least this representation was extravagant; and yet Kemble played Hamlet, and in his way played him well. But alas ! that way is crazy and ruins the whole piece. His appearing, for instance with one yellow and one black leg, to indicate madness, his falling before the ghost in order to strike an attitude, his screaming out the end of every little phrase in that regular applause-exacting high tone of his, his behaving altogether like a John Bull Oxford student and not like a Danish crown prince, all that might pass. But that he should not the least enter into poor Shakespeare's intention as to killing the king, and therefore coolly skip that scene where the king prays and Hamlet comes in and goes out again without having made up his mind for the deed (to my taste one of the finest passages of the piece), and that he constantly behaves like a bravado, treating the king in such a way that he deserves to be shot down at once, for instance during the play on the stage threatening him with his fist and shouting into his ear the words that he should have quietly dropped--these are things not to be pardoned. Of course Laertes and Hamlet do not jump into Ophelia's tomb and wrestle there, for they never guess why they should do so : and at the end when Hamlet falls down and says 'The rest is silence' and I expected a flourish and Fortinbras, Horatio actually leaves the prince, hastily comes forward to the lamps and says 'Ladies and gentlemen, to-morrow evening The Devil's Elixir."'