There can be no question that New York is the dramatic metropolis of the United States--and despite the absence of anything like State aid--as certainly as Paris is the capital of France, and as surely as London is the centre of Great Britain. A New York success is of as much importance to the new play and to the young player as is the crown of the Academy to the new book, or the degree to the young doctor; and a history of _Hamlet_ in New York, therefore, is virtually a history of _Hamlet_ in America. The tragedy has been played here during the last century and a quarter in many languages, by actors of all ages and of both sexes, in blond wigs and in natural black hair, with elaborate scenery and with no scenery at all, by almost every tragedian in the country, and on the stage of almost every theatre in the city with the exception of Wallack's last theatre, now Palmer's. It has been burlesqued, and sung as an opera; and its representatives have been good, bad, and very, very indifferent. So much is there to be said about _Hamlet_ in New York that the great difficulty in preparing this sketch of its career is the proper and natural selection of what not to say. [Illustration: EDMUND KEAN.] _Hamlet_ was first presented in the city of New York on the evening of the 26th of November, 1761, and at the "New Theatre in Chappel Street"--now Beekman Street--near Nassau, the younger Lewis Hallam, the original Hamlet in America (at Philadelphia, in the autumn of 1759), playing the titular part. Hallam was a versatile actor, who was on the stage in this country for over fifty years, and always popular. Concerning his Hamlet very little is now known, except the curious statement in the _Memoirs of Alexander Graydon_, published in 1811, that Hallam once ventured to appear as Hamlet in London--"and was endured!" He was the acknowledged leading tragedian of the New York stage until his retirement in 1806, and he is known to have played Hamlet as late as 1797, when he must have been close upon sixty years of age. Mr. Ireland is of the impression that John Hodgkinson, a contemporary of Hallam's, who appeared as Hamlet in Charleston, South Carolina, early in the present century, conceded Hallam's rights to the character in the metropolis, and never attempted it here. The first Hamlet in New York in point of quality, and perhaps the second in point of time, was that of Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, who played the part at the John Street Theatre on the 22d of November, 1797, although Mr. Ireland believes that he was preceded by Mr. Moreton at the theatre on Greenwich Street, in the summer of the same year, as he had played the Ghost to Moreton's Hamlet in Baltimore a short time before. William Dunlap speaks in the highest terms of Cooper's Hamlet, and John Bernard ranks it with the Hamlet of John Philip Kemble himself.