revised, and in places re-written, some little time after its first composition.
30
This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I think, especially the case in King Lear and Timon.
31
The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of course, much nearer to Hamlet, especially in versification, than to Antony and Cleopatra, in which Shakespeare's final style first shows itself practically complete. It has been impossible, in the brief treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual plays.
32
The Mirror, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness, Variorum Hamlet, ii. 148. In the above remarks I have relied mainly on Furness's collection of extracts from early critics.
33
I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still less, to do justice to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder (Vorlesungen über Hamlet, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's difficulties as merely external.
34
I give one instance. When he spares the King, he speaks of killing him when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is awake in bed, when he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases the least obstacle (iii. iii. 89 ff.).
35
It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the conscience view, the line 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,' and to observe the total misinterpretation of the soliloquy To be or not to be, from which the line comes. In this soliloquy Hamlet is not thinking of the duty laid upon him at all. He is debating the question of suicide. No one oppressed by the ills of life, he says, would continue to bear them if it were not for speculation about his possible fortune in another life. And then, generalising, he says (what applies to himself, no doubt, though he shows no consciousness of the fact) that such speculation or reflection makes men hesitate and shrink like cowards from great actions and enterprises. 'Conscience' does not mean moral sense or scrupulosity, but this reflection on the consequences of action. It is the same thing as the 'craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event' of the speech in iv. iv. As to this use of 'conscience,' see Schmidt, s.v. and the parallels there given. The Oxford Dictionary also gives many examples of similar uses of 'conscience,' though it unfortunately lends its authority to the misinterpretation criticised.
36
The King does not die of the poison on the foil, like Laertes and Hamlet. They were wounded before he was, but they die after him.
37
I may add here a word on one small matter. It is constantly asserted that Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if he did, it would make no difference to my point in the paragraph above; but there is no warrant in the text for the assertion. It is based on some words of the Queen (iv. i. 24), in answer to the King's question, 'Where is he gone?':
To draw apart the body he hath killed:O'er whom his very madness, like some oreAmong a mineral of metals base,Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.
But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her son. She has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying, 'A rat! a rat!', ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he heard something stir there, whereas we know that what he heard was a man's voice crying, 'What ho! help, help, help!' And in this scene she has come straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated, shaken with 'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line 30). Now we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that said those things and others. The only sign of relenting is in the words (iii. iv. 171):
For this same lord,I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,To punish me with this and this with me,That I must be their scourge and minister.
His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at iii. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for Polonius.)
Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards? Well, in the next scene (iv. ii.) we see him alone with the body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings. And his first words are, 'Safely stowed'!
38
Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.
39
He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving (v. ii. 218). His contrary statement (ii. ii. 308) is made to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to me Shakespeare simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a very touching picture he draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in the opening lines of the play, would never drive him to suicide, but it makes him indifferent to the issue of the trial, as all his speeches in the trial-scene show.
42
Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in particular. 'Your' is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that 'your water is a sore decayer of your … dead body.'
43
This aspect of the matter leaves us comparatively unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious words to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet's mind.
44
It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (iii. iv. 150):
Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;And do not spread the compost on the weedsTo make them ranker.
45
If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length—the speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it is'—he will understand what, surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so; and still less that she understood it so).
E.g. in the transition, referred to above, from desire for vengeance into the wish never to have been born; in the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue'; in the scene at Ophelia's grave. The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the psychological movement in these passages.
49
Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of self-control. The Queen's description of him (v. i. 307),
This is mere madness;And thus awhile the fit will work on him;Anon, as patient as the female dove,When that her golden couplets are disclosed,His silence will sit drooping.
may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see further Note G.
50
Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.
51
Cf. Measure for Measure, iv. iv. 23, 'This deed … makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.'
52
iii. ii. 196 ff., iv. vii. 111 ff.: e.g.,
Purpose is but the slave to memory,Of violent birth but poor validity.
53
So, before, he had said to him:
And duller should'st thou be than the fat weedThat roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,Would'st thou not stir in this.
On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance
