“Hamlet”

This chapter focuses on dramatic literature and theatrical performance of Shakespearian play. The whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer with a dirty face, who seemed to have risen from the people late in life, and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance. The royal phantom also carried a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance of occasionally referring, with an air of anxiety and a tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state of mortality. The joy attended Mr. Wopsle through his struggle with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and the grave, and slackened no more until he had tumbled the king off the kitchentable, and had died by inches from the ankles upwards.