Part 7 (2/2)

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'!]

[Footnote 38: Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 40: See Note B.]

[Footnote 41: 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.]

[Footnote 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.']

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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 weeds To make them ranker.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 46: See Note D.]

[Footnote 47: See p. 13.]

[Footnote 48: _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 pa.s.sages.]

[Footnote 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 pa.s.sage see further Note G.]

[Footnote 50: Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.]

[Footnote 51: Cf. _Measure for Measure_, IV. iv. 23, 'This deed ... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.']

[Footnote 52: III. ii. 196 ff., IV. vii. 111 ff.: _e.g._,

Purpose is but the slave to _memory_, Of violent birth but poor validity.]

[Footnote 53: So, before, he had said to him:

And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Would'st thou not stir in this.

On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance see Note D.]

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