Notes for lines 0-1017 ed. Bernice W. Kliman
1839 knt1
knt1
984-97 He . . . me] Knight (ed. 1839, 1:171): “It is here, then, that the complexity of Hamlet’s character begins. It is in the description of Ophelia that he is first presented to us, at some short period after the supernatural visitation:—[he quotes]. This was not the ‘antic disposition’ which Hamlet thought meet to put on. It was not the ‘ecstacy of love,’ produced by Ophelia’s coldness, according to Polonius. But it was the utterance, as far as it could be uttered, of his sense of the hard necessity that was put upon him to go forth to a mortal struggle with evil powers and influences;—to cast away all the high and pleasant thoughts that belonged to the cultivation of his understanding;—to tear himself from all the soothing and delicious fancies that would arise out of the growth of his affection for that simple maid upon whom he bestowed ‘a sigh so piteous.’ Under the pressure of the one absorbing ‘commandment’ that had been imposed upon him, he had vowed that it should live ‘within the volume of his brain, unmixed with baser matter.’ All else in the world had become to him mean and unimportant. Love was now to him a ‘trivial, fond record,’—the wisdom of philosophy, ‘the saws of books.’ All ‘that youth and observation copied,’ was to be forgotten in that dread word, ‘remember me.’”
This paragraph comes within a section in the Supplementary Notice discussing Hamlet’s pretended or real madness as discussed by Goethe, Coleridge, the anonymous writer of a writer in Blackstone’s? Magazine (I have ordered the latter).
1885 macd
macd
984-97 MacDonald (ed. 1885): “The detailed description of Hamlet and his behaviour that follows, must be introduced in order that the side mirror of narrative may aid the front mirror of drama, and between them be given a true notion of his condition both mental and bodily. Although weeks have passed since his interview with the Ghost, he is still haunted with the memory of it, still broods over its horrible revelation. That he had, probably soon, begun to feel far from certain of the truth of the apparition, could not make the thoughts and questions it had awaked, cease tormenting his whole being. The stifling smoke of his mother’s conduct had in his mind burst into loathsome flame, and through her he has all but lost his faith in humanity. To know his uncle a villain, was to know his uncle a villain; to know his mother false, was to doubt women, doubt the whole world.
“In the meantime Ophelia, in obedience to her father, and evidently without reason assigned, has broken off communication with him: he reads her behaviour by the lurid light of his mother’s. She too is false! she too is heartless! he can look to her for no help! She has turned against him to curry favour with his mother and his uncle!
“Can she be such as his mother! Why should she not be? His mother had seemed so good! he would give his life to know her honest and pure. Might he but believe her what he had believed her, he would yet have a hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest! If he could but know the truth! Alone with her once more but for a moment, he would read her very should by the might of his! He must see her! He would see her! In the agony of doubt upon which seemed to hand the bliss or bale of his being, yet not altogether unintimidated by a sense of his intrusion, he walks into the house of Polonius, and into the chamber of Ophelia.
“Ever since the night of the apparition, the court, from the behaviour assumed by Hamlet, has believed his mind affected; and when he enters her room, Ophelia, though such is the insight of love that she is able to read in the face of the son the father’s purgatorial sufferings, the picture of one ‘loosed out of hell, to speak of horrors,’ attributes all the strangeness of his appearance and demeanour, such as she describes them to her father, to that supposed fact. But there is, in truth, as little of affected as of actual madness in his behaviour in her presence. When he comes before her pale and trembling, speechless and with staring eyes, it is with no simulated insanity, but in the agonized hope, scarce distinguishable from despair, of finding, in the testimony of her visible presence, an assurance that the doubts ever tearing his spirit and sickening his brain, are but the offspring of his phantasy. There she sits!—and there he stands, vainly endeavouring through her eyes to read her soul!, for alas, ‘there’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face!’ [Mac. 1.4.11 (292)]—until at length, finding himself utterly baffled, but unable, save by removal of his person, to take his eyes from her face, he retires speechless as he came. Such is the man whom we are now to see wandering about the halls and corridors of the great castle-palace.
“He may by this time have begun to doubt even the reality of the sight he had seen. The moment the pressure of a marvellous presence is removed, it is in the nature of man the same moment to begin to doubt: and instead of having any reason to wish the apparition a true one, he had every reason to desire to believe it an illusion or a lying spirit. Great were his excuse even if he forced likelihoods, and suborned witnesses in the court of his own judgment. To conclude it false was to think his father in heaven, and his mother not an adulteress, not a murderess! At once to kill his uncle would be to seal these horrible things irrevocable, indisputable facts. Strongest reasons he had for not taking immediate action in vengeance; but no smallest incapacity for action had share in his delay. The Poet takes recurrent pains, as if he foresaw hasty conclusions, to show his hero a man of promptitude, with this truest fitness for action, that he would not make unlawful haste. Without sufficing assurance, he would have no part in the fate of either of the uncle he disliked or the mother he loved.”
