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'Absents him from felicity a while, And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain, dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo and Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes a new De Amicitia must find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan prose. They are types fixed for all time.
If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Laertes, and the rest of the dismal people at Elsinore, could have seen him now, they would not have known him. Where were his wan looks and biting speeches? His eyes were no longer filled with mournful speculation. He went in glad apparel, and took the sunshine as his natural inheritance.
When he challenged the ghost with "I call thee keeng, father, rawl-Dane," you Would hardly have had the erring utterance bettered. It sufficed as it was; and when he said to Rosencrantz, "Will you pleh upon this pyip?" it was with such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that you made no note of the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of their quaintness afterwards.
And besides, you keep goin' with Charley King and George Heigold and and " "And what?" says Mitch. "And I was afraid you liked 'em better'n me." "Why," says Mitch, "them two boys is just grave diggers compared to you or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while you are Horatio all the time."
Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with sickliest intonation.
Rosencrantz in the second act of Hamlet bears witness to the popularity of these boy actors, when he calls them "little eyases, that cry on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for it." Ben Jonson's touching lyrical epitaph on a boy actor, Salathiel Pavy, who had for "three fill'd zodiacs" been "the stage's jewel," shows how highly the Elizabethans sometimes regarded boy actors.
He held himself apart from the noisy company, and sulk in a corner, while they laugh, and drink, and sing the song. They were afraid of him, and, mon dieu! they might be for once, when Monsieur Rosencrantz, as I remember, came and threw some absinthe my absinthe, messieurs in his face, Monsieur le Ghost he knocked him down with a blow that sounded oh, like a clap of the thunder.
He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect as in the scene where he kills Polonius; and, again, where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death.
When he challenged the ghost with "I call thee keeng, father, rawl-Dane," you Would hardly have had the erring utterance bettered. It sufficed as it was; and when he said to Rosencrantz, "Will you pleh upon this pyip?" it was with such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that you made no note of the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of their quaintness afterwards.
Hamlet takes the twofold murder committed against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as little to heart as the 'indiscreet' deed by which Polonius was killed. Then the consolation was sufficient for him that lovingkindness had forced him to be cruel. This time, his conscience is not touched, because
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