“‘Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit, That, from her working, all his visage wann’d; Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?’” ... In particular, one evening, the manager was very merry in speaking of the part of Polonius, and how he meant to take it up. “I engage,” said he, “on this occasion, to present a very meritorious person in his best aspect. The repose and security of this old gentleman, his emptiness and his significance, his exterior gracefulness and interior meanness, his frankness and sycophancy, his sincere roguery and deceitful truth, I will introduce with all due elegance in their fit proportions. This respectable, gray-haired, enduring, time-serving half-knave, I will represent in the most courtly style: the occasional roughness and coarseness of our author’s strokes will further me here. I will speak like a book when I am prepared beforehand, and like an ass when I utter the overflowings of my heart. I will be insipid and absurd enough to chime in with every one, and acute enough never to observe when people make a mock of me. I have seldom taken up a part with so much zeal and roguishness.” “Could I but hope as much from mine!” exclaimed Aurelia. “I have neither youth nor softness enough to be at home in this character. One thing alone I am too sure of,--the feeling that turns Ophelia’s brain, I shall not want.” “We must not take the matter up so strictly,” said our friend. “For my share, I am certain that the wish to act the character of Hamlet has led me exceedingly astray throughout my study of the play. And now, the more I look into the part, the more clearly do I see that, in my whole form and physiognomy, there is not one feature such as Shakespeare meant for Hamlet. When I consider with what nicety the various circumstances are adapted to each other, I can scarcely hope to produce even a tolerable effect.” “You are entering on your new career with becoming conscientiousness,” said Serlo. “The actor fits himself to his part as he can, and the part to him as it must. But how has Shakespeare drawn his Hamlet? Is he so utterly unlike you?” “In the first place,” answered Wilhelm, “he is fair-haired.” “That I call far-fetched,” observed Aurelia. “How do you infer that?” “As a Dane, as a Northman, he is fair-haired and blue-eyed by descent.” “And you think Shakespeare had this in view?”