Commentary notes (CN):

1. SMALL CAPS Indicate editions. Notes for each commentator are divided into three parts:

In the 1st two lines of a record, when the name of the source text (the siglum) is printed in SMALL CAPS, the comment comes from an EDITION; when it is in normal font, it is derived from a book, article, ms. record or other source. We occasionally use small caps for ms. sources and for works related to editions. See bibliographies for complete information (in process).

2. How comments are related to predecessors' comments. In the second line of a record, a label "without attribution" indicates that a prior writer made the same or a similar point; such similarities do not usually indicate plagiarism because many writers do not, as a practice, indicate the sources of their glosses. We provide the designation ("standard") to indicate a gloss in common use. We use ≈ for "equivalent to" and = for "exactly alike."

3. Original comment. When the second line is blank after the writer's siglum, we are signaling that we have not seen that writer's gloss prior to that date. We welcome correction on this point.

4. Words from the play under discussion (lemmata). In the third line or lines of a record, the lemmata after the TLN (Through Line Number] are from Q2. When the difference between Q2 and the authors' lemma(ta) is significant, we include the writer's lemma(ta). When the gloss is for a whole line or lines, only the line number(s) appear. Through Line Numbers are numbers straight through a play and include stage directions. Most modern editions still use the system of starting line numbers afresh for every scene and do not assign line numbers to stage directions.

5. Bibliographic information. In the third line of the record, where we record the gloss, we provide concise bibliographic information, expanded in the bibliographies, several of which are in process.

6. References to other lines or other works. For a writer's reference to a passage elsewhere in Ham. we provide, in brackets, Through Line Numbers (TLN) from the Norton F1 (used by permission); we call these xref, i.e., cross references. We call references to Shakespearean plays other than Ham. “parallels” (//) and indicate Riverside act, scene and line number as well as TLN. We call references to non-Shakespearean works “analogues.”

7. Further information: See the Introduction for explanations of other abbreviations. Click here for more information about browsing the entries and here for more information about the special symbols used in Hamletworks. Click the question mark icon above to remove this help message.

1765 john1

john1

3678 Giue me your pardon sir] Johnson (ed. 1765) : : “I wish Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the character of a good or a brave man, to shelter himself in falsehood. JOHNSON”

1773 v1773

v1773 = john1

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1778 v1778

v1778= v1773

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1784 Davies

Davies : v1778

3678 Giue me your pardon sir] Davies (1784, p. 140) : <p. 140> “No part of this speech of Hamlet should be spoken but that which Mr. Steevens has restored, beginning with—’Sir, in this audience,—’ [3692]and so to the end. To the rest Hamlet gives the lie most shamefully.” </p. 140>

1785 v1785

v1785 = v1778

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1793 v1793

v1793 = v1785

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1803 v1803

v1803 = v1793

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1813 v1813

v1813 = v1803

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1821 v1821

v1821 = v1813

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1855 Wade

Wade

3678-96 Wade (1855, p. 31): <p. 31> “This is probably the most formally well-reasoned speech ever spoken by a madman, detected or self-proclaimed. If it be madness, there is, indeed, ‘method in it’—infinite method! and doubtless our pretended maniac, if brought ‘to the test,’ could ‘the matter reword,’ ‘—Which madness Would gambol from.’ ‘It is not madness that he has uttered;’ not it; but a very sensible, well-considered, courtly, apology for a foolish and grossly unjustifiable piece of action, in which, as is ususal with him whenever and wherever real action is concerned, he (to speak more expressively than chastely) ‘is made a mess of it.’ </p. 31>

1862 Cartwright

Cartwright

3678ff Cartwright (1862, pp. 73-4): <p. 74> “This passage has given great offence, under the supposition Hamlet is uttering a deliberate falsehood, ‘a direct lie,’ since he said in the first act, he should feign madness, and actually did so, only an hour or two ago, on leaving the churchyard; and in the chamber-scene had solemnly assured his mother, he was only ‘mad in craft;’ but, happily, this supposition of his falsehood is altogether a misapprehension. </p. 73>

<p. 74>“The sea-voyage had effectualy cleared Hamlet’s biliary system; and he re-appears in this fifth act a wiser and a sadder man. When he justifies himself to Horatio, ‘is’t not perfect conscience to quit him with this arm,’ he does so in a straightforward and rational manner, without hinting a word about the ghost and the dread command; and, when he slays Claudius, there is not any exhibition of the same fiend-like vindictiveness as in the third act. His estimtae also of Laertes’ conduct, ‘For by the image of my cause, I see The portraiture of his,’[3581-2] differs widely from his treatment of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz; in the one case he manifests a clear and healthy judgment; but in his behaviour to his two school-fellows, the precursory symptoms of an attack of insanity are very apparent,—’distrustful of friends and relatives, very fretful and irascible on slight occasions; subject to a kind of uneasiness, which he cannot describe or account for,’ Essay on Insanity; and thus when Hamlet says to Laertes, ‘What I have done, I here proclaim was madness,’ he speaks the simple truth; for he is now conscious, that each appearance of the ghost was a temporary hallucination, produced by the violent excitement, under which at the moment he was labouring.—There is no moral obliquity of vision in Shakespeare, ‘if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him.’” </p. 74>

1870 Miles

Miles

3678-96 Miles (1870, pp. 81-2): <p. 81>“The Quarto ruins his whole exquisite apology, by making it a suggestion of the Queen’s; the folio, by another masterly omission, leaves it his own free, spontaneous offering. His superabundant penitence completes itself in this acme of courtesy. Alas Laertes!—</p. 81> <p. 82>[cites 3704-5] his fingers itching, as he speaks, for that unbated and envenomed foil.” </p. 82>

1875 Marshall

Marshall

3678-96 Marshall (1875, pp. 104-05): <p. 104> “I transcribe the whole of Hamlet’s speech here, as it has been made the grounds for an attack on his good faith and truthfulness by Johnson [see above], whose note on the passage is—[cites Johnson above] Of course, Steevens [see n. 3848-49] greedily seizes on this accusation, and adds it to his long list of charges against Hamlet; but I believe it to utterly unjust, and founded on a total misconception of this particular passage, and of Hamlet’s character. Let us see what it is that Hamlet says, and under what circumstances he says it:—[cites 3678-96]</p. 104> <p. 105>Now this apology, and I maintain that it is a most generous and frank apology, has to made in the presence of Claudius, and of the courtiers before whom Hamlet had, for his own purposes, assumed madness. He could not have ignored this assumption; he could not have said—’The King and Queen and all about the court have thought me mad, but I am not mad at all; I have been only pretending to be so; I killed your father by mistake,’ &c. &c., entering, in fact, into a long explanation of that which it was imperatively necessary he should keep concealed. The madness which he alleges, as his excuse, before Claudius and the others is the madness which he had assumed; but there was another madness, the ‘sore distraction’ into which the tragic calamities that had darkened his young life had driven him, the terrible anguish of mid which he felt on hearing with such awful suddenness of his beloved Ophelia’s death. It was not untruthful of him to say that he had killed Polonius, and had raved against Laertes by the side of his sister’s grave, when in such a state of mental agitation as might well be held to excuse him from any guilty intention. I do not see how Hamlet could possibly make a more open confession, under the circumstances, than he does in the last four lines. It was such a confession as might have induced Laertes to question him further when alone; but it was not a deliberate piece of falsehood, nor was it so wanting in thoroughness and magnanimity but it should have forced the most relentless spirit, however greatly wronged, to pause in its work of vengeance.” </p. 105>

1877 v1877

v1877 = john1 ; ≈ Seymour (see n. 3679-82) ; ≈ Walker (see n. 3679-82)

3678 Giue me your pardon sir]

1885 macd

macd

3678 MacDonald (ed. 1885): “Note in this apology the sweetness of Hamlet’s nature. How few are alive enough, that is unselfish and true enough, to be capable of genuine apology! The low nature always feels, not the wrong, but the [contraction?] of it, degrading.”

macd

3678 wrong] MacDonald (ed. 1885): “the wrong his rudeness at the funeral.”

1890 irv2

irv2 = john1 ; Strachey

3678 Giue me your pardon sir] Strachey (apud Irving & Marshall, ed. 1890): “Surely both assertions of Hamlet [the protestation to his mother that he is not mad ‘essentially, but ‘mad in craft,’ and this) [sic] are true—one of Hamlet, the other of the other Hamlet who is ‘not himself,’ but ‘his madness,’ and ‘poor Hamlet’s enemy.’ His mind is diseased, but not a mere mass of disease: health is still very strong there, so strong as to keep the disease under great control, and often to suppress it altogether for a time. And these opposite assertions are not only true of Hamlet’s two opposite states of mind, but true in reference to the two occasions on which they are made. His reason did lose its authority for the time at the grave of Ophelia, but his designs on the murdering usurper are quite rational, and it is his craft to make them seem madness. Nor is his ghost-seeing, ecstasy,—this is (as we learn from the distinction between madness and ecstasy in a previous speech in this scene) the excitement and delirium of the senses: it has nothing in common with the fantasties of a fever or night-mare, and if it be a delusion, it is one which leaves the head cool, and the powers of the practical understanding in full vigour.”

[Ed: This is from Hamlet,p. 79 by Strachey. not in v1877, from where Symons got his Johnson quotation.]

1939 kit2

kit2 = john1 +

3678 Giue me your pardon sir] Kittredge (ed. 1936): “It is odd that Dr. Johnson failed to see that Hamlet’s particular falsehood here is inseparable from the general falsehood involved in his counterfeiting madness. If his conduct here is to be reprehended, the blame should go farther back and attach itself to his whole stratagem, and no one has ever taken ethical ground against that.”

1980 pen2

pen2

3678 Spencer (ed. 1980): “Hamlet is loyally carrying out his mother’s request ((lines 200-201)) and adopts her explanation of his behaviour ((V.1.280-84)).”

1982 ard2

ard2 : Bradley ; Dover Wilson (see n. 3697-3700) ; Kit2 (see n. 3697-3700)

3678-3705 Jenkins (ed. 1982, Longer Notes, 566-8): <p. 566>“The uneasy comment which Hamlet’s apology and the reply to it have attracted comes, I think, from a misunderstanding of their purpose. They have been remarked on as showing the characters of the speakers in an unfavourble light: they have rarely been considered for their part in the play’s design, though their length and position suggest that this was something to which the dramatist attached importance. Hamlet’s apology to </p. 566> <p. 567>Laertes is not only done at length and in conspicuous form ((see [3677])), but has already been prepared for in [3579-84] and [3657+11]; and the allusion to ‘tow’ring passion’ [3584], recalling to us what the Queen pronounced to be ‘madness’ [5.1.279], presages the form excuse might take. Yet, as pointed out by Bradley ((p. 420-1)), what Hamlet sees as requiring pardon is not so much his behavior to Laertes at Ophelia’s grave as the injury he has done him by the killing of his father. The two avenging sons are here brought face to face.

“Many will share Johnson’s wish that ‘Hamlet had made some other defence’. For it is much less ‘odd’ of Johnson, while accepting the pretended madness, to object to its use as an excuse than it is of Bradley and Kittredge to see no moral distinction between the two. The difficulty comes rather from the ambiguity of the word madness. When Johnson speaks of Hamlet as sheltering in ‘falsehood’, he is assuming that the madness is wholly feigned; yet we must surely recognize not only ((1)) an ‘antic disposition’ that is ‘put on’ but also ((2)) a genuine frency of ungovernable ‘passion’ which has led to the killing of Polonius as well as the fight with Laertes at the grave ((cf. Dover Wilson, NCS [New Cambridge Shakespeare], pp. lxii-lxiv)). It is the second which gives substance to Hamlet’s self-exculpation and though the distinction between them is sometimes blurred, the play by here ignoring it seems to rest Hamlet’s defence upon a quibble. Yet once madness is accepted, the argument of [3686-9] has respected precedents: cf. Romans vii.20, ‘If I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me’. And however Hamlet’s logic is judged by an age more suspicious of casuistry, we shall surely accept the underlying truth that he wrongs Laertes not by ‘a purpos’d evil’ but ‘when he’s not himself’ and in so doing becomes his own ‘enemy’. Criticism has made too little of the bond between the two revengers which Hamlet acknowledges in the word brother. Cf. above [3581-2] and n., [n. 3697].

“The element of casuistry in Hamlet’s speech should prepare us for the same from Laertes. And the first thing to note about his reply is that it answers Hamlet ((see [3683])) point by point, dealing in order with nature (([3697])), honour (([3699])), and, although this time the actual word is not repeated, with ‘exception’ (([3704-5])). Moreover, it distinguishes between joins men together ((nature, love)) and what divides them.

“In the appeal to authoritative opinion in matters of honour the conduct of Laertes is correct. Dover Wilson cites Saviolo his Practise, which exhorts those involved in quarrels ‘to study and </p. 567> <p. 568> endeavour by all means possible to furnish themselves with men experienced and seen in chivalry and arms, that they may be counselled and advised by them’ ((sig. Aa 4)); and Kittredge compares an account in Nashe ((iii.21)) of ‘the same manner that one of these Italianate conferences about a duel is wont solemnly to be handled, which is when a man, being specially touched in reputation, or challenged to the field upon equal terms, calls all his friends together, and asks their advice how he should carry himself in the action’.

“This speech of Laertes appears to be designed to show that while his revenge is not to be foregone ((‘no reconcilement’)), he acts from the compulsion of ‘honour’ and not malice; to confirm Hamlet’s suggestion of men fated in spite of themselves to be opponents; and ((most important)) to anticipate their eventual reconcilation. The trouble of course is that the uttered sentiments are wholly at variance with the plot Laertes is even now engaged in, and the critics have accordingly been severe on his ‘monstrous hypocrisy’ ((Kittredge [see n. 3703-05])). But the plays’ attitude to Laertes is less simple. Commentators point to [3769] as preparing for his repentance, but without observing that is already being prepared for here. Ceraintly this episode forces upon our notice the appalling irony of Claudius as peacemaker and of loving words which conceal a murderous intent. Yet in the gestures of the two young men who now hold the centre of the stage I think we should see, along with this ironic prelude to a treacherous revenge, a proleptic image of the revengers’ exchange of forgiveness ((see [3813-6])). Shakespeare’s problem is to show the two revengers as at the same time mutually destructive and at one.”