against him; it was his object to conceal his crime, which was, as he believed, known only to himself; though he instinctively felt that the son of his murdered brother suspected him.

The most important step which Hamlet had taken was the resolution to break off his affectionate relations with Ophelia. The struggle must have been a very severe one. The meddlesome officiousness of Polonius in compelling his daughter to cease all correspondence with the young prince, as being above her sphere, was a piece of diplomaey by which he hoped to obtain an explicit proposal for her hand; the shallow meanness of which device Hamlet most probably saw through. This forcible severance of all communication between Ophelia and himself seemed a plausible reason enough for Hamlet's melancholy; but we know it had little or nothing to do with it; and we may be sure that it had less to do with his abandonment of his love-suit. On the day on which the second act commences we have Ophelia's vivid and beautiful description of the last interview, if we may call it so, that took place between them :

ОPH. My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,

Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd,
Ungarter'd and down-gyved to his ankle;
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous to purport

As if he had been loosed out of hell

To speak of horrors, he comes before me.
POL. Mad for thy love?

Ophelia's modest expression of her belief contrasts beautifully with the pompous assurance of Polonius. She goes

* See Act IV., Sc. 3 (King's Speech):

Yet must not we put the strong law on him :

He's loved of the distracted multitude.

Also (in same Act) Sc. VII., lines 18-24.

-Et seq

As it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being: that done, he lets me go :
And with his head over his shoulder turn'd,
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes;
For out o' doors he went without their helps,
And to the last bended their light on me.

Now, the question is, what was in Hamlet's mind when he gave way to this violent agitation? It has been said by some commentators that he behaved in this extraordinary manner in order to impress upon Ophelia's simple nature the belief that he was mad; I cannot but think that Shakespeare meant something more than this. Since his interview with the Ghost, Hamlet's mind had been dwelling upon his father's sad fate, and upon his mother's atrocious infidelity. What a fearful shock it must have been to his affectionate nature to know that the mother whom he had so loved and reverenced had been false to a husband so noble, so gentle, so loving, that the most abandoned woman might have shrunk from dishonouring him! The revelation of such a hideous fact might have forced a far stronger nature than Hamlet's to abandon all faith in womankind. During those days of mental agony, when he might have looked for the gentle consolation of her he loved, he was left to suffer alone, uncheered, save by the occasional company and the heartfelt sympathy of one true friend, Horatio. At such a time the horrid idea must have been present to his mind that the pure and innocent girl to whom he had given his first and only love might possibly grow up to become most horrible thought!-what his mother was. Doubtless, his father had often told him of the perfect joy and happiness which he had known when he first married his young and virtuous bride; she had been no less innocent and no less pure, no less single-minded in her devotion to her betrothed than Ophelia; and yet what had she become? No wonder that with such a terrible thought ever haunting him, Hamlet forgot to carry out the command which his father's spirit had enjoined. When he escaped from this mental torture, another difficulty stared him in the face; he knew his weakness, no one better; could he pursue the sweet course of love and obey the Ghost as well? Could he ask Ophelia to link herself with a life so insecure, with a heart and mind so preoccupied, with a nature crushed under the weight of such a terrible responsibility? He struggled, and not unsuccessfully, against those hideous forebodings as to what Ophelia might become; he flung away all suspicion of her perfect purity; but one of the two must be given up, his love or his task of vengeance. While the struggle is going on within him,

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X

while his heart-strings are snapping asunder, pale and trembling beneath the tempest of emotion, he bursts into the chamber of his love, like the apparition of some terrible transformation of himself; he holds her by the wrist; he gazes into her eyes, as though he would read the very depth of her nature, as if he would know the full beauty of that heart which he is giving up for ever; he cannot trust himself to speak; his frame is convulsed with a sigh so piteous and profound that it seemed to shatter his very body, a sigh which was the cry of a breaking heart; without removing his gaze from her, whom he was never to look on again with the eyes of love, he vanishes from the room, unable to utter the awful sentence of death to his love which his heart had pronounced.

I must here allude to a question which it would be more pleasant to pass over altogether, were such a course not capable of misconstruction; some people have held, and other's hold still, the monstrous opinion that Hamlet was guilty of the ruin of Ophelia.* This accusation, which betrays ignorance of this play itself, and an utter inability to comprehend Shakespeare's mode of working, is easily refuted. It rests upon the verses of some idle song, caught up, probably, from her nurse, which Ophelia innocently sings in her madness. Nobody can examine the scenes between Polonius and Ophelia, Laertés and his sister, or that between her and Hamlet, without seeing at once that this accusation is utterly groundless. Shakespeare would not have wantonly introduced such a foul stain upon Hamlet's character without using it for some dramatic purpose. The suggestion of vice is a delicacy of modern date. Hamlet's love for Ophelia was pure and honourable; and any one who thinks the contrary is not to be envied. For my own part, whatever objection may be taken to the song alluded to, I cannot but think that it is one of Shakespeare's most delicate touches in the sweetly innocent character of Ophelia, that when her unhappy mind is so distraught with grief for her father, and her reason is overthrown, she should repeat, with such simple child-like ignorance of their meaning, the verses which probably she had never heard since she was being dandled on her nurse's knee, and which, in her right senses, she might never have remembered.

As I am now treating of the relations between Hamlet and Ophelia, it would be better to go at once to that scene at the beginning of the third act, which has caused so many difficulties both to actors and critics. It is very necessary for the right understanding of this scene that we should carefully observe what has gone before. Polonius, having come to the * See Appendix D.

conclusion from what Ophelia has told him, and from letters of Hamlet's to her which he has found, that the cause of Hamlet's madness is simply love for his daughter, proposes that Ophelia should place herself in the gallery, or lobby, in which Hamlet is accustomed to walk for hours together; and that the King and he should conceal themselves behind the arras and watch the result; "if," Polonius says, "he love her not,' And be not from his reason fall'n thereon, Let me be no assistant for a state,

But keep a farm and carters.

This proposal is carried out; Ophelia is given a book and told to read it

That show of such an exercise may colour

Your loneliness.

In fact she is made a party, a direct and conscious party to the trap set for her lover.

[the

Hamlet enters, debating with himself the question of suicide in that well-known soliloquy, "To be or not to be," &c., at the end of which he turns and sees Ophelia seemingly in prayer. I think it extremely probable that Ophelia is intended really to be praying for the unhappy prince, whose agitation during the soliloquy she cannot fail to have observed. Hamlet accosts her with serious but kindly courtesy

Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember'd.

Ophelia answers

Good, my lord,

How does your honour for this many a day?

Except in that awful interview which she has described to Polonius, during which, as you remember, Hamlet never spoke, Ophelia has not seen him for some time. Hamlet answers as if wishing to check any inquiry into the cause of his apparent illness, "I humbly thank you: well."

OPн. My lord, I have remembrances of yours,

That I have longed long to re-deliver;

I pray you, now receive them.

She had probably been instructed by her father to return Hamlet's presents. Hamlet determined to avoid the discussion of a very painful question, perhaps also to ignore the fearful state of agitation in which he had been when he last saw Ophelia, and shrinking from definitely breaking off all affectionate relations between them, denies having given these gifts to Ophelia—

No, not I ;

I never gave you aught.

OPH. My honour'd lord, you know right well you did;

And with them words of so sweet breath composed;
As made the things more rich their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind

:

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.

At this point, just as Ophelia is going to force back oii Hamlet the sweet remembrances of his love, the fussy old Polonius, who has been fidgeting behind the arras, anxious to see the result of his most notable device, pops his head out, and in so doing drops his chamberlain's staff: Hamlet hears the noise, and instantly suspects the truth, that he is being made the object of an artfully devised scheme to entrap him into some confession of his secret. His suspicions had been already aroused by the manifest constraint of Ophelia's manner; at the same time his heart had been deeply touched at the equally manifest emotion under which she laboured. True, she was acting a part; but she was speaking from her own heart when she alluded to the sweet words of love which had accompanied Hamlet's presents, when she recalled the happy hours she had spent with him before this mysterious shadow had fallen on his life. We may imagine that, but for his worst suspicions being aroused by the evidence that he was being watched, he would have spoken to Ophelia with the greatest affection; now, however, it is with a rude revulsion of feeling that he treats her as a party to, indeed as the chief agent of, the deception contrived against him all that follows is couched in half enigmatical satire, the sting of which is fully to be comprehended only by the guilty Claudius. Hamlet, who guesses he is one of the parties concealed, speaks at the King, as it were, the threats he dare not utter to his face at the same time there is a wild incoherence about Hamlet's words which can only serve to bewilder the hearers as to the real cause of his condition.

After warning Ophelia against believing any man, thereby conveying a delicate rebuke of her deceitfulness, Hamlet is about to leave her with the words

Go thy ways to a nunnery.

He is crossing the stage, when his eye falls on that part of the arras whence the noise had proceeded, and he is instantly struck by some such thoughts as these:

"Have I been right in suspecting this innocent maiden of being, knowingly, a party to such a contemptible trick? Cali she, whose pure and open nature I so loved, be capable of such paltry disingenuous conduct? No! before I condemn her I will put her to the plain proof,"