3434 What . . .
Ophelia]
Knight (ed. [1841]) : “Of
Hamlet’s violence at the grave of Ophelia we think with the critic on Sir Henry Halford’s Essay, that it was a real aberration, and not a simulated frenzy. His apparently cold expression, ‘What the faire Ophelia!’ appears to us to have been an effort of restraint, which for the moment overmastered his reason. In the interval between this ‘towering passion’ and the final catastrophe,
Hamlet is thoroughly himself--meditative to excess with
Horatio--most acute, playful, but altogether gentlemanly, in the scene with the frivolous courtier. But observe that he forms no plans. He knows the danger which surrounds him; and he still feels with regard to the usurper as he always felt: ‘is’t not perfect conscience,‘To quit him with this arm?’ But his will is still essentially powerless; and now he yields to the sense of predestination: [cites ‘If it be now . . . speech] The catastrophe is perfectly in accordance with this prostration of
Hamlet’s mind. It is the result of an accident, produced we know not how. Some one has suggested a polite ceremonial on the part of
Hamlet, by which the foils might be exchanged with perfect consistency. We would rather not know how they were exchanged. [
cites JOHNSON:’The catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the dagger, and Laerets with the bowl’] No doubt. A tragedy terminated by
chance appears to be a capital thing for the rule-and-line men to lay hold of. But they forget the poet’s purpose. Had
Hamlet been otherwise, his will would have been the predominant agent in the catastrophe. The empire of chance would have been over-ruled; the guilty would have been punished; the innocent perhaps would have beens pared. Have we lost any thing? Then we should have had the
Hamlet who is ‘the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered;’[Coleridge] then we should not have had the
Hamlet who is ‘a concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity; in whom there is a more intense conception of individual human life than perhaps in any other human composition; that is, a being with springs of thought, and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search;’ [Blackwood, Vol. II] then we should not have had the
Hamlet, of whom it has been said, ‘
Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is
we who are
Hamlet.’ [Hazlitt].”
Wade (1855, pp. 23-24): <p. 23> Upon hearing this [3430-33],
Hamlet can no longer strive to conceal from himself that the corse about to be committed to the earth, is that of his fair and young deserted mistress; her whom his mother hoped to have seen, and who ought to have been, his wife:—[cites 3436-38] ‘What,’ exclaims the to-himself-acting
Hamlet, as the word ‘sister’ falls from the lips of Laertes—’What? the fair Ophelia!’ and, feeling that he ought to be passionately grieved for her and, feeling that he ought to be passionately grieved for her (believed) self-inflicted death, himself the dire involuntary cause of that death, when Laertes, in a momentary paroxysm of unfeigned and naturally exaggerative despair, leaps into his sister’s too early grave, and denounces the real author of her melancholy death—her false lover, and her father’s murderer—[cites 3439-48] </p. 23> <p. 24>