Part 22

"O rose of May! Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!"

And the King says, "How do you, pretty lady?" Yes, that she is, through it all. If she had her wits, and were using them to persuade us to revenge her, it could not move like these piteous, tender improprieties.

"Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness."

For she sings without smirching a single petal of the daisies and pansies, which she so softly distributes, with such an appeal of forlornness, to bid their fragrance disinfect her language, or to speak for her in the natural key of her wonted maidenhood. So every heart exhales in the pity that plays the magic of distance and softens the unsightliness of her ruin.

Shakspeare has given most touchingly rational applications to her distribution of the flowers. The flowers themselves are culled in fancy: she holds no actual nosegay in her hand. She recalls, together with the long-unheeded songs, all that she learned in girlhood about the symbolic meanings of flowers; and a light irony invests some of them. It is plain that the rosemary, for remembrance, is ideally bestowed upon Laertes, with pansies too: "A document in madness; thoughts and remembrance fitted." Rosemary was supposed to have the quality of strengthening the memory. The volatile Laertes will have need of it, and of as many thoughts as he can muster. The fennel ought to be handed to Horatio, and the columbines should be intended for the king: the one is a symbol of flattery and is exchanged among courtiers, but Horatio never learned the useful trade; the others are expressive of ingratitude and cuckoldom. Was Hamlet's father slain because of that? The columbines were earned betimes! There's rue for the queen; for she has great need of repentance. There's rue for herself too. Both need it; but the queen with a difference, as her moral condition differed from Ophelia's. We may call it an herb that leads to grace. There's a daisy. She recognizes it, but ought not to keep it for herself. And there is no other maiden present. It represents frivolous and light-thoughted girls. She would give Laertes some violets, if they had not all withered when his father died. These delicate allusions make us think that before the distraction set in Ophelia had inklings of the foul concerns around her. All the more hopeless, then, became the overthrow of reason.

Hamlet is too finely endowed to sport with her inclining maidenhood. She has no more calculation than a flower. She lets her beauty bend towards him without timidity; for she likes that he should sip the chalice which he will not rudely shatter. After every visit he used to leave behind him a sense of honor which occupied her heart when his lips had ceased protesting. Yet she will defer to the father, with the instinct, perhaps, that more favorable dispositions will transpire. Polonius, the old stickler for the conventions of royalty, is thoroughly possessed with the idea that the Prince, from that point of view, cannot be intending marriage. Some over-subtle critics will have it that the old schemer is secretly chuckling over the idea that a match may be made, but that he dreads the king. If Hamlet can only be brought to the decisive point, and held there, the temper of the court will be of little consequence. But what method shall be employed with a prince who so loves to push off upon his moods of feeling to let them get unhitched and float him from corresponding facts? A double contrivance occurs to Polonius,--to protect his daughter from the possible waywardness of a prince, and to pique him into making a declaration of alliance. This is a delicate operation; for the king will jealously scrutinize his movements. It seems as if he was merely protecting his daughter, and keeping faith with his king, when he urges her not to receive the letters which besiege her door, nor to admit him any longer to her presence. Then the sly old rat, not yet gone to burrow behind the arras, hopes to gnaw into the King by attributing Hamlet's strange behavior to love for Ophelia. And he has so nicely arranged matters, by prohibiting letters and visits, that when the King, bending severe brows upon him, asks, "How hath she received his love?" he can reply, with a flush of honor, "What do you think of me?"

I cannot find that the context will justify this theory. It is contradicted by the evident alarm and sorrow which the old man displays when Ophelia describes the piteous plight of Hamlet after his repulse; for what does Polonius know about a "father's spirit in arms" laying waste the Prince's soul? No: he must be deep in love; and Polonius must hasten to report it to the King.

We recur to the plain theory that Polonius supposes that a king's son is out of the star of her unaspiring thought, and that such a match would be against the stomach of the Court. He will cling to his lord chamberlain's staff and totter with it to the end. The daughter, respecting his fears, inflicts this harsh repulse upon Hamlet. How we pity the Prince, who is turned away from her dear house whither he would have longed to repair, weighed down with his awful secret, to place his heart upon her restfulness, and let its rhythm soothe the cracking nerves! Yet she "did return his letters, and denied his access," perhaps the very morning after he had sworn the platform oath. There's nothing to depend on left in Denmark. Who next is false? What truth or feeling escapes the monstrous irony?

But mark how quickly Ophelia's love jumps at the father's plan to bring them again together, as if by accident, in order that the King and he may observe, by the nature of the interview, whether he is mad from love of her. And when he thrusts a book into her hand, that she may have the pretence of reading when Hamlet enters, she gladly adopts the whole device; for has she not just heard the Queen confess that she hopes Hamlet loves her?

"For your part, Ophelia, I do wish That your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet's wildness; so shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way again, To both your honors."

Can she believe her ears? Hamlet's own mother hopes, as she afterwards confessed directly above Ophelia's grave, that she may become the wife of Hamlet. Then all the scruples of Laertes and her father are groundless. However indisposed the King may feel to such a match, she has a suitor in the heart of the mother. Welcome the opportunity, welcome any stratagem, even that of taking his remembrances from her bosom, to have them returned to her,--a woman's wile to receive them back more rich than ever with smiles of a recovered love.

The more common theory is that Ophelia does not suspect the mother's inclination for such a marriage. The Queen's language is guarded, and capable of two interpretations; but she spoke in the presence of the King. Measure the extent of her meaning by the depth of Ophelia's grave. Still, it is commonly thought that Ophelia understands the Queen to expect of her to make Hamlet realize the hopelessness of his passion, trusting to have his disorder dismissed with his love. In that case, she is merely yielding to the father's suggestion that these remembrances of his shall be returned; and the old plotter has arranged this for the King to witness. Filial deference cannot stoop lower than this sad enforcement; but her whole life has been the non-assertion of a will. She,

"Of ladies most deject and wretched, That suck'd the honey of his music vows,"

and who longed to

"Bring him to his wonted way again,"

is still so docile, so subject to the pervading influence of her father's house, that she declares to Hamlet she has wished for a long time to redeliver his gifts and letters, "of so sweet breath composed." And when we hear her say,

"To the noble mind, Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind,"

we have a glimpse of the interview that was brought on by him when, as she was sewing in her chamber, he forced himself into her presence, in disordered dress, and with a manner as if he would dismiss her from his heart. It wounded and distressed her:--

"Oh, woe is me! To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!"

It need not seem unnatural that the fair girl is so obsequious to the father's will. We find no mother in the house: she is gone, and the only daughter and only son transfer their love of a mother to the bereaved father, and cling to him with a devotion that includes a special submissiveness. They live very much withdrawn into themselves, and mutually dependent. The gentle daughter consults in her solitude the wishes and humors, even the whims, of the father, whose capacity for giving sound advice she perceives to have greatly aged. She loves to be retired within the old mansion, whose still life suits a maiden shyness. We come upon her sewing in her chamber, thinking of Hamlet.

"As patient as the female dove, When that her golden couplets are disclos'd,"

she sits drooping in silence, remembering her lord, but remembering too that, when her father pooh-poohed her talk about the Prince's affection for her, and bade her look out for herself, she sighed and said, "I shall obey, my lord." She is very much absorbed in contriving solace for a lonely father. So, when she learns that he has been killed, and that the blow was dealt by Hamlet, by what freak of accident she cannot understand,--but "a young maid's wits" prove to be "as mortal as an old man's life,"--the daughter suddenly empties every thing out of her heart except affection for the cherished, fatuous old father: her love for Hamlet is spilled out through that rent in the arras, as we can notice when all her pretty, distracted singing yields not a tone that might be an echo of the sweet episode in her poor little life. For otherwise, when madness broke up her maidenly reserve, and permitted us to pry into the dispositions of her soul, we ought to have found there a love for Hamlet as deeply seated as devotion to a father; but it never was so deep, and never had time enough to surmount all other considerations. Therefore the sad wanderings bury the father over and over again, finding a fresh grave for him each time:--

"He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. White his shroud as the mountain snow, Larded with sweet flowers; Which bewept to the grave did go, With true-love showers."

"We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep to think they should lay him in the cold ground. My brother shall know of it;" and on the strength of that she culls out rosemary for him.

"They bore him bare-fac'd on the bier, And in his grave rain'd many a tear;

Fare you well, my dove!" says this loyal daughter. We echo it, but with a difference: she is this dove to whom we bid farewell. For already "in the distance one white arm is seen above the tide," clutching at the branches of a willow growing askant a brook; and our pulse premeditates the funeral strain that goes graveward while her Prince is looking "at the skull as though Death had written on it the history of man."

Poor maiden, to be churlishly suspected of making an end of herself, when we know that "an envious sliver broke" and let her into that coffin strewn with flowers,--the tributes, not to womanhood in its capacity to resolve, to outlive destiny, to outdo circumstance with patience, to contrive escapes from disaster, but simply "sweets to the sweet," turned as they were to immortal amaranths when Hamlet's breath endowed them:--

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."

Then, too late for her, but not for us, to atone for her chariness of language and action, all her gifted simplicity is revealed to justify the silent past and to ennoble Hamlet for his heart's choice of such an unambitious soul. What freighted her might have kept Hamlet riding on a steady keel upon any ocean that was not phantom-haunted. Death casts up her freight underneath the cliffs of this stern tragedy, and we are wreckers all along the shore to recover strays from the sail that love had chartered.

When the procession enters the churchyard, Hamlet steps aside to be unperceived. There is not a trait in this scene which does not illustrate Ophelia's character, and reflect a tender worth upon it. Hamlet wonders who it is, what person of estate whom they follow, "and with such maimèd rites." When Laertes steps forward, Hamlet praises him to Horatio. This deepens our feeling of his unconsciousness that it is a brother who is burying that beloved sister. 'Tis our common fashion of noting, with slightly raised sympathy, the mourners in a train that bears away nothing particularly dear to us. "What ceremony else?" Nothing more: the stubborn old priest will not venture his own salvation on another word for her whose "death was doubtful." Where he got that notion does not appear in the play. It is like Malcolm's crotchet that Lady Macbeth took herself off "by self and violent hands." But notions are the sheet-anchors of formalists. The priest drops his, swings round, and becomes immovable. He complains, with the whine of a man who has been imposed upon, that "here she is allow'd her virgin crants, her maiden strewments," and even a bell! If the sour old ritualist could have had his way, he would have pitched "shards, flints, and pebbles" over her. It is not only pity which increases, but respect, with every line: it takes her part, and magnifies her nature. There must have been more of her than we used to think. So, when the requiem is denied, Laertes pronounces it for all when he says,--

"A minist'ring angel shall my sister be,"

as she always had been. And our sentiment recalls the dominant excellence of her character. If ever the priest himself should come to grief, and lie howling in that place which is paved with good intentions and bad practices, she would be the first to toss him a sprig of "herb o' grace o' Sundays."

When Laertes lets fall the word "sister," Hamlet appears to utter nothing but ordinary surprise,--"What! the fair Ophelia?"--and his action goes no further. Some critics have inferred, from this absence of manifested emotion, that Hamlet never really loved Ophelia, and that his subsequent passionate outbreak was only inspired by pique at seeing Laertes take on so with leaping into the grave as if to fill it with hyperboles of language. It is said that, at the very instant of hearing her name, a lover would have exclaimed bitterly, would have rushed forward into the funeral group to agitate its grief afresh with his own, would have sunk into some gesture of abandonment. Romeo might have improvised such a scene, but Hamlet was a different style of lover: he was always "ill at such numbers. His emotion smouldered underneath all the refinements of intellect and conscience, and rarely gleamed through the scruples of his will. When it did gain a moment's mastery, as in that scene of surrendering love,--

"He raised a sigh so piteous and profound, That it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being,"

it palsied the tongue, and only advertised itself in the pathetic eyes which fell to such perusal of Ophelia's face, "and to the last bended their light" on her.

Let us try to conceive the situation at the grave. Hamlet has been absent in England during Ophelia's distraction. Returning, he strolls into a churchyard, amuses himself with the old grave-digger, withdraws aside when the train approaches, so as not to be recognized by the King. Then comes the discovery that Ophelia is dead. There was always in Hamlet's brain that time allowed for the transit of a message between his feeling and his deed. The line connected with a great many intermediate tracts, in each of which there was delay. Nothing but an unsyllabled fluid of conjecture passed all along the way. Dead? How? Was that glad girl the one to take her own life? Why? There was just time enough for him to hear that confession of his mother,--

"I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife."

What a remembrance, extorted from death, of the old love that he never could conceal from the mother's instinct which was so fond and clear! He listens thus to despair reclaiming former hopes, and it draws his spirit backward, so that the body cannot move and the tongue dare not break this sacred silence of his retrospection. Therefore, Laertes has plenty of time to rant like Pistol in a tavern. His exaggerated action plunges into the grave of Hamlet's reverie and breaks it up. The Prince is forced into disgust at hearing a man vaunt love against his own. All scruples are shrivelled up in anger; and he instinctively assumes the tone he hears. The old ironical disgust for sham makes the imitation perfect. Afterward, to Horatio, he acknowledges that he forgot himself:--

"But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me Into a towering passion."

And this passion broke open his respect and prudence, and let loose the first cry of his love that had ever reached the ears of others. Else it would have lain buried with Ophelia in the silence of her lover's breast.

It was too much,--to discover at such a moment what used to be his mother's expectations; to see the sprinkling of those flowers that should have been for marriage; to have the old conviction return, that marriage was impossible for him,--a man whose bed, watched by a ghost, could have no other tenant; to recall how he ousted love, that revenge might occupy. It was too much for this heart of sensitive and noble strain to see the dead girl, and catch through the rant of Laertes that her prince had indirectly caused her death. His solid flesh could not melt: the coffin chilled it. But how long could he listen to this man, whose affected furor showed him to be a person incapable of deep passion? It fans all that smoulders in him into smoke and flame. In the rage of a temperament whose trick it always was to baffle itself, and in the bitterness of being reminded by her cold beauty that he had to surrender it while it was too young to die,--it is too masterful. He bursts into Laertes's vein with its own style,--

"Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou,"

but soon checks himself with a half apology, and subsides.

How mobile and impressible he was, notwithstanding his large capacity of reason! The latter aided him to dissimulate and to keep his projects waiting; but the other traits nourished a fancy that easily turned to mimicry of whatever was transpiring; as when he assumed, half-consciously, the dandified phrasing of Osric, and played with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This plastic fancy jumped to the high stilts of Laertes, and it stalked to "make Ossa like a wart."

But his bosom secret has escaped. He turns away, is followed by Horatio, to whom, before the next scene opens, we hear him (though no folio nor quarto ever lisped a syllable of it) pouring out the confidences of a fruitless passion to the only honest man of all the crowd, the still and trusty comrade. This Shakspeare would have us understand, I think, by giving Hamlet to say to Horatio, as they enter the next scene together, "So much for this, sir." So much for what? we think. Then it dawns upon us that the only other interest of the moment must have been Ophelia's death.

And we recollect that Horatio was absent at the time of her death, having gone to meet Hamlet near the sea-coast. So both of them were ignorant of the occurrence. But now Horatio has been making inquiries during the time that elapses between the burial and the next scene. He picks up all the particulars, and has been detailing to the eager Hamlet all that we know. And Hamlet's entry upon the next scene is timed exactly when Horatio has ceased narrating. There is nothing more to tell. Hamlet enters, saying, "So much for this, sir. Now you shall see the other." That is, I will relate what has happened to me also, and how a divinity has shaped my ends to this return. And his brief life is claimed again by the native land on which a ghost has left the tracks of a murder; for great Heaven has not yet hunted it down. So

"Lay her i' the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring,"

to renew the breed which withered with the death of her father.

MACBETH.

MACBETH.

It is the opinion of Fleay that "'Macbeth,' in its present state, is an altered copy of the original drama, and the alterations were made by Middleton." Thomas Middleton wrote twenty-three plays. Among them was "The Witch," written, perhaps, in 1613, and published in 1617. Shakspeare's "Macbeth" was first played in 1606. It appears in the Folio of 1623 for the first time in print, as a more finished acting copy than the other plays. The divisions of acts and scenes and the stage directions are carefully marked. The death of Shakspeare occurred in 1616. It is possible that Middleton was the person who prepared the Folio copy of "Macbeth." Scarce a trace, however, of his own style can be suspected; for there is only occasionally a verbal similarity of the charms and incantations employed in "Macbeth" and "The Witch" of later date. In Act iii. 5, the burden of the song, "Come away, come away," and, in Act iv. 1, the song, "Black spirits," &c., are to be found in "The Witch:" the latter is merely indicated as a stage direction in "Macbeth." In Act i. 1, we are reminded of Middleton in "I come, Graymalkin!"[19] and "Paddock calls." He may have shoved his "Malkin" into that first chant of the witches, and spoiled its metre. But although the introduction of Hecate, in Act iii. 5, is said to be not Shakspearean enough in relevancy to the play, it is altogether too Shakspearean in style for Middleton, who never could have written,--

"Great business must be wrought ere noon: Upon the corner of the moon There hangs a _vaporous drop profound_; I'll catch it ere it come to ground: And that, distill'd by magic sleights, Shall raise such artificial sprites As by the strength of their illusion Shall draw him on to his confusion."

And we must notice that Hecate thus introduces and accounts for the "artificial sprites,"--the apparitions which deceive Macbeth in Act iv. 1, and entice him to "be bloody, bold, and resolute." This scene is certainly Shakspeare's. It is therefore probable that he would have preceded it by some inkling of the deceptive nature of the armed head, the bloody child, and the child crowned.

On the ground of an apparently un-Shakspearean style of metre in Act i. 2, which introduces the wounded sergeant, several commentators credit that scene also to Middleton. It is said to be too slovenly and bombastic for Shakspeare.

It is unsafe to limit the critical treatment of Shakspeare's verse to metrical or verbal tests. Æsthetic emergencies will sometimes overrule the decisions of the sharpest critics who construct Shakspeare out of reputed peculiarities of his style. He escapes from them to be raggeder than we think is personal to him, broader than our taste can tolerate, more thin or more fulsome than his grandest tone, whenever occasion summons traits which fit into a deeper consistency than that of style. Then, if the critic of metrical and verbal niceties is not also a human observer, or is too much preoccupied with his theory of the Shakspearean method, he will be apt to disparage some prescriptions of Nature.