Notes for lines 2023-2950 ed. Frank N. Clary
1826 sing1
sing1 ≈ john2 Appendix (Reynolds )
2766 Reynolds (apud ed. 1826): “‘There is no part of this play in its representation on the stage more pathetic than this scene; which, I suppose, proceeds from the utter insensibility Ophelia has to her own misfortunes. A great sensibility, or none at all, seems to produce the same effects. In the latter [case] the audience supply what is wanting, and with the former they sympathize.’—Sir J. Reynolds.”
Reynolds note appears in john2 (ed. 1765, Appendix). See 2769-70.
1843 col1
col1
2762-6 Collier (ed. 1843): “It deserves notice that this and the three preceding lines are marked by inverted commas in all the quartos, not for the purpose of showing that the passage was a quotation, but apparently to enforce it as an axiom. Such was not a very unusual practice.”
See n. 1.3.58 (524).
col1
2766 Collier (ed. 1843): “The stage-direction in the quarto, 1603, is curiously minute: ‘Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair hanging down, singing.’ She therefore accompanied herself in her fragments of ballads.”
1845 Hunter
Hunter: xref.
2766 Hunter (1845, 2:258): “In the first quarto it is ‘with a lute.’ She enters singing. Perhaps the lute was banished when the line was added with which she now enters: ‘Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?’ [4.5.21 (2767)] which must be said running wildly up to the Queen, when the lute would have been an encumbrance.”
1847 verp
verp = col1
2766 Collier (
apud Verplanck, ed. 1847): “‘
Re-enter Horatio,
with Ophelia.’—
with Ophelia.—The stage-direction in the quarto, 1603, is curiously minute: ‘Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing.’ She therefore accompanied herself in her fragments of ballads.—”
Col.
verp = Jameson
2766 jameson (
apud Verplanck, ed. 1847): “‘Ophelia’s madness is not the suspicion, but the utter destruction of the reasoning powers: it is the total imbecility which, as medical people well know, too frequently follows some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is frantic; Lear is mad; Ophelia is insane. Her sweet mind lies in fragments before us—a pitiful spectacle! Her wild, rambling fancies, her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gayety to sadness—each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sang her to sleep with in her infancy—are all so true to the life, that we forget to wonder, and can only weep. It belonged to Shakespeare alone, so to temper such a picture that we can endure to dwell upon it—’Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favour and to prettiness’ [4.5.188-9 (2939-40)].
“That in her madness she should exchange her bashful silence for empty babbling, her sweet maidenly demeanour for the impatient restlessness that spurns at straws, and say and sing precisely what she never would or could have uttered had she been in possession of her reason, is so far from being an impropriety, that it is an additional stroke of nature. It is one of the symptoms of this species of insanity, as we are assured by physicians. I have myself known one instance, in the case of a young Quaker girl, whose character resembled that of Ophelia, and whose malady arose from a similar cause.’—Mrs. Jameson.”
1854 del2
del2
2766 Delius (ed. 1854): “Wie Ophelia hier erscheint, erhellt aus der Bühnenweisung der Q. A.: Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing. Auf der Laute begleitete sich sich zu dem Gesange der Verse, die sie aus Liebesliedern bruchstückartig herausriss.” [How Ophelia appears here is clarified by the stage direction of Quarto A: Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing. She accompanies herself on the lute as she sings fragmentary verses which she has taken from love songs.]
1856 hud1 (1851-6)
hud1 = sing1 +
2766 Hudson (ed. 1851-6): “In the quarto of 1603, this stage-direction is curious as showing that Ophelia was originally made to play an accompaniment to her singing. It reads thus: ‘Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing.’ H.”
Note appears later in hud1. See n. 2767-8.
1857 fieb
fieb
2766 Fiebig (ed. 1857): s.d. distracted] “Re-enter Horatio, with Ophelia] “The quartos add the following stage direction: ‘Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing.’”
1858 col3
col3 ≈ col1 + magenta underlined
2766 Collier (ed. 1858): “The stage-direction in the 4to, 1603, is curiously minute: ‘Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair hanging down, singing.’ She therefore accompanied, or was supposed to accompany, herself in her fragments of ballads.”
1860 stau
stau
2766 Staunton (ed. 1860): Re-enter Horatio with Ophelia.] “The quaint direction of the quarto, 1603, is entitled to consideration from future representatives of this lovely creation, since in all probability it indicates the manner in which the author himself designed she should appear in this her greatest scene,—‘Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing.’”
1877 v1877
v1877 ≈ Walker, Abbott
v1877 ≈ Hunter, Reynolds, Coleridge
2766 Furness (ed. 1877): “
Hunter (ii, 258): “Perhaps the ‘lute’ of Q2 was banished when the line was added, which must be said running wildly up to the Queen, when the lute would have been an incumbrance.
Sir Joshua Reynolds: There is no part of this play in its representation on the stage, more pathetick than this scene; which, I suppose, proceeds from the utte insensibility Oph. has to her own misfortunes. A great sensibility, or none at all, seems to produce the same effect. In the latter the audience supply what she wants, and with the former they sympathize.
Coleridge: Ophelia singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love of Hamlet and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother, concerning the dangers to which her honor lay exposed. This play of association is instanced in lines 67, 68.”
1877 col4
col4: col3 + magenta underlined
2766 Collier (ed. 1877): “The stage-direction in the 4to, 1603, is curiously minute: ‘Enter Ophelia, playing on a lute, and her hair hanging down, singing’: the folio only says ‘distracted’.”
1878 rlf1
rlf1= v1877 (Reynolds_
Rolfe (ed. 1878): “Sir Joshua Reynolds says: ‘There is no part of the play in its representation on the stage more pathetic than this scene; which, I suppose, proceeds from the utter insensibility Ophelia has to her own misfortunes. A great sensibility, or none at all, seems to produce the same effect. In the latter the audience supply what she wants, and with the former they sympathize.’ See also p. 28 above.”
Introduction elaborates further on Ophelia’s “affecting” power: e.g. “what an astonishing picture of a mind utterly, hopelessly wrecked!—past hope —past cure!”
1885 macd
macd
2766 MacDonald (ed. 1885): “Hamlet’s apparent madness would seem to pass into real madness in Ophelia. King Lear’s growing perturbation becomes insanity the moment he sees the pretended madman Edgar.
“The forms of Ophelia’s madness show it was not her father’s death that drove her mad, but his death by the hand of Hamlet, which, with Hamlet’s banishment, destroyed all the hope the queen had been fostering in her of marrying him some day.”
1899 ard1
ard1: v1877, Naylor
2766 Dowden (ed. 1899): “The stage direction of Q1 is: ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing.’ for the traditional music of Ophelia’s song, see
Furness,
Hamlet, or E. W. Naylor,
Shakespeare and Music, 1896.”
1934 cam3
cam3: xref.
2766 Enter Ophelia] Wilson (ed. 1934): S.D. “Q2 ‘Enter Ophelia,’ F1 ‘Enter Ophelia distracted,’ Q1 ‘Enter Ophelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing.’ Cf. note [3.4.102 (2482)] S.D.”
1939 kit2
kit2
2766 Kittredge (ed. 1939): “So in the Folio. The Second Quarto has simply ‘Enter Ophelia’ (after 2761). The First Quarto reads ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, her haire downe singing.’”
1947 yal2
yal2
2766 Cross & Brooke (ed. 1947): “The direction in the First Quarto of 1603 is, ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a lute, and her haire downe, singing.’ This is the basis for the traditional stage-business.”
1980 pen2
pen2
2766 (stage direction)] Spencer (ed. 1980): “Q1 has ‘Enter Oƒelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing’. This doubtless is a memory of a performance.”
1982 ard2
ard2
2766 Jenkins (ed. 1982): “Q1 no doubt records some contemporary staging. The hair down is conventional for madness, but the lute, uncalled for in the text and incongruous with the ballad snatches Ophelia spontaneously breaks into, looks like an actors’ embellishment.”
1984 klein
klein: Strachey, Coleridge, Eissler, Sternfeld, Lyons
2766 Klein (ed. 1984): Enter Ophelia, distracted.] “As opposed to Hamlet, Ophelia is really deranged; presumably she recognises neither Gertrude nor Claudius nor even Laertes steadily. Her sexual allusions in the songs are rightly attributed by most commentators (e.g. already Strachey) as owing to the disappearance of her controlling viz. censoring functions and are set apart from her actual experience. Coleridge (Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T.M. Raysor [London and New York, 1930], Vol. I, p.30f.) adds a reference to the less than delicate warnings of Laertes and Polonius in 1.3. She seems at times to confuse Laertes with Hamlet, just as her grief at her father’s death is mingled with the love between her and Hamlet. K.R. Eissler (Discourse upon ’Hamlet’ and Hamlet: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry [New York, 1971], p.137) supposes she thinks herself indirectly responsible for Polonius’s death; there is no basis for this in the text. Her fragmentary songs are presumably taken from contemporary ballads with well-known melodies, but only two are extant; others have come down to us from the 18th century (cf. overall Sternfeld, pp. 53-78; for a more recent study of Ophelia generally and specifically in this scene see B.G. Lyons in A Journal of English Literary History 44 [1977], pp. 60-74).”
1987 oxf4
oxf4: JC// ;contra ard2
2766 Hibbard (ed. 1987): Enter Ophelia distracted] “This full and explicit direction in Q1 probably reflects the manner in which the part was played when a boy who could play on the lute – the Lucius of Caesar, for example – was available. Jenkins’ objection that the lute is incongruous with Ophelia’s songs is, in fact, an argument for her using it, since only a mad woman would think of doing so.”
1988 bev2
bev2
2766 Bevington (ed. 1988): “(In the first quarto, Ophelia enters ‘playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing’).”
1993 dent
dent
2766 Andrews (ed. 1993): Enter Ophelia distracted] “The word distracted derives from the First Folio stage direction; here it means ’beside herself’, ‘deranged’. The First Quarto, which undoubtedly preserves some authentic staging detail despite its generally unreliable rendering of the text of the play, indicates that Ophelia enters ‘playing on a Lute’, singing, and with her ‘hair down’ (a conventional sign of madness). The songs she sings in this scene are probably snatches from ballads that would have been familiar to the original audience.”
2766
