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Line 3466 - Commentary Note (CN)

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.

Notes for lines 2951-end ed. Hardin A. Aasand

For explanation of sigla, such as jen, see the editions bib.

3466 Ham. I loued Ophelia, forty thousand brothers	5.1.269

1780 Richardson

Richardson

3466-8 Ham. I . . . summe] Richardson (1780, pp. 122-4): <p. 122>“To Ophelia [Hamlet] would shew dislike and indifference; because a change of this nature would be, of all others, the most remarkable, and because his affection for her was passionate and </p. 122> <p. 123> sincere. Of the sincerity and ardour of his regard he gives undoubted evidence. [cites 3466-8]

“The tendency of indignation, and of furious and inflamed resentment, is to inflict punishment on the offender. But, if resentment is ingrafted on the moral faculty, and grows from it, its tenor and conduct will be different: in its first emotion it may breathe excessive and immediate vengeance; but sentiments of justice and propriety interposing, will arrest and suspend its violence. An ingenuos mind, thus agitated by powerful and contending principles, exceedingly tortured and perplexed, will appear hesitating and undetermined. Thus the vehemence of the vindictive passion will by delay suffer abatement; by its own ardour it will be exhausted; and our natural and habituated propensities will resume their influ-</p. 123> <p. 124>ence. </p. 124>“

1815 Freron

Freron

3466-68, 3471-81] Freron (1815, pp. 13-14): <p. 13>“But it seems this vulgar and disgusting rant must be forgiven. It was not the plan of the author to make the prince deliver himself in his ususal, noble and natural manner; he was to put on the madman, the better to conceal his purposes of vengeance against </p. 13> <p. 14>his father’s murderers. His affected extravagance, joined to the real derangement of his mistress Ophelia, fills the piece with so many of these silly scenes necessary to the project of the author, that tears are far more scarce among the spectators, than bursts of laughter. What makes this composition still more extraordinary, is, that no tragedy can be found with a more shocking catastrophe; for almost all the persons of the drama, die in presence of the audience by poison or by the sword.” </p. 14>

1848 Strachey

Strachey

3466-68, 3471-81] Strachey (1848, p. 91): <p. 91>“Yet observe that Hamlet’s excessive self-consciousness; reappears immediately, in his perception that he is mouthing and ranting: and though not being able instantly to check his headlong course, he says he will rant, yet in the very act of so saying he stops ;-—[cites 3466-86]” </p. 91>

1857 elze1

elze1

3466 forty thousand] Elze (ed. 1857): "S. die Anm. Zu §.77: Sometimes he walks four hours together.—QA: as deere as twenty brothers could. ’Tewnty’ bedeutet gleichfalls öfters eine unbestimmte Menge. Zu den bei §.77. gegebenen Beweisstellen fügen wir hier noch ein paar andere hinzu. Hawkins The Origin of the Engl. Drama ((Oxford 1773)) I, 94: he stale forty pounde of mune in monaye. Ebenda III, 144: There stood above forty dishes before me to-day. Sogar ’eighty’ ((=zweimal vierzig)) kommt in diesem Sinne, vielleicht mit verstärkter Bedeutung, vor. Hawkins III, 233: hark thou, sir; you shall have eighty thanks." [See note on §77: . . . Q1: as deere as twenty brothers could. ’Twenty’ means likewise often an indeterminate crowd. To this aforementioned example at §77, we add here still a pair of others. Hawkins The Origin . . . to-day. Even ’eighty’ ((=twice 40)) occurs in this meaning, perhaps with amplified meaning. Hawkins . . .]

1864-68 c&mc

c&mc

3466-68 Clarke & Clarke (ed. 1864-68, rpt. 1874-78): “Well may Hamlet, with his passionate love for Ophelia crushed into silence and prisoned within his own heart feel that he indeed has loved her better than ‘forty thousand’ such ‘brothers’ as Laertes, with his ranting boast of affection, could lover her! Laertes has in his nature more suspicion than attachment, more malice than kindliness, more rancour than love. He begins by imputing evil intention to Hamlet, cherishes a malignant wrath against him, and carries out a treacherous scheme to take away his life. He is more capable of hating Hamlet than of loving Ophelia.”

1869 tsch

tsch : elze1 ; Dyce Gloss.

3466 forty thousand] Tschischwitz (ed. 1869): “Ueber diese dem Gebrauch nach dem gr. murioi (muriosj) , lat. sexcenti entsprechende Zahl s. Elze p. 246. Bulw. Rienzi 5.3. I may have dreamed therefore some forty thousand dreams! Dyce, Gloss, s.v. forty.” [About this appropriate number in use after the Greek murioi, Latin sexcenti, see Elze, p. 246 . . . ]

1875 Marshall

Marshall

3466 Marshall (1875, p. 99): <p. 99> “It is impossible for me to describe the effect which that cry of agony, ‘I loved Ophelia,’ has upon me. I never heard it yet spoken on the stage with one-thousandth part of the force that rightly belongs to it. Is it not the key to much of the mystery which Hamlet has been to all around him, and, in some degree, even to himself? It is the cry of a love which has been cruelly beaten down, which has been kept, as it were, chained and gagged in the farthest corner of his sorrow-darkened heart; it has never ceased to struggle against its fetters; and now at last, in the anguish of death, its bonds are burst and its voice can be stifled no longer. Whatever the consequences, in the presence even of his uncle, before whom he would have shrunk from showing any glimpse of his real feelings, Hamlet is obliged to lay bare his heart’s wounds. Precisely in proportion to the sincerity and depth of his love for Ophelia has been the difficulty which he experienced in fulfilling a task involving the abandonment of that love. Much of his bitterness to her and others is now explained; for he was trying to kill an affection which would not die.” </p. 99>

1885 macd

macd

3466 Ham. I loued Ophelia] MacDonald (ed. 1885): “That he loved her is the only thing to explain the harshness of his behaviour to her. Had he not loved her and not been miserable about her, he would have been as polite to her as well bred people would have him.”

1889-90 mBooth

mBooth

3466-8 I loued Ophelia . . . my summe] [E. Booth] (ms. notes in PB 82, HTC, Shattuck 108): “All that I have marked has ever been my own idea concerning Hamlet’s love. Such natures love more through the head than with the heart. E.B.”

[FNC: Booth’s note is written on an interleaved item in Appleton’s Journal, titled “On some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters: By One Who Has Personated Them,” by Helena Faucit Martin. He has marked the following passage from p. 252: “Let us hope that, when he sees her grave, his conscience stings him; but beyond ranting louder than Laertes about what he would do for her sake—and she dead!—there is not much sign of his love being worthy, at any tme, of the sweet life lost for it.” Another passage on the same page is underscored: “Hamlet loves, I have always felt, only in a dreamy, imaginative way, with love as deep, perhaps, as can be felt by a nature fuller of thought and contemplation than of sympathy and passion.]

1914 Stewart

Stewart

3466-8 Stewart (1914, pp. 214-5): <p. 214>“After that trifling and mocking bout between them at the court play, Ophelia seems to. drop entirely out of his thoughts; and suddenly we are called upon to believe, in the scene at the grave, that he still loves her! In this case we could wish that Shakespeare himself had thrown a little light on so important a point. It is not his way to be so over-subtle —carrying a point to such an </p. 214><p. 215> extreme point of neglect that it is no point at all. As will be seen, much depends upon our interpretation of his conduct at her grave; for all this inconsistency arises out of the critical theory that he is here affected by his love of her.

“But there is another inconsistency in his conduct which strikes a reader even more strangely. Why this sudden change of front toward Laer tes? Hamlet has not had ’any bitterness of feeling toward Ophelia’s brother, but rather the opposite. When he first sees him in this scene he speaks of him as ‘a very noble youth.’ And as we see later in the play, Hamlet is so far from having any hard feelings toward Laertes that he feels actual sympathy for him over the loss of his father. Shakespeare, in order to make this state of affairs plain to us, is at pains to have Hamlet explain the basis of his kindly feeling toward Laertes —’For by the image of my cause I see the portraiture of his.’ That is to say, Hamlet, having lost a father whom he loved, can appreciate Laertes’ feeling over the loss of his own father, whom Hamlet inadvertently killed. Hamlet is therefore willing to go to almost any extreme of apology toward Laertes; he does not blame him for feeling bitter but tries to make his own irresponsibility understood. He has so much respect and kindliness of feeling toward Laertes that he prizes his good opinion and is willing to make any sort of allowance for Laertes’ bitterness toward him. Now in this:scene at the grave, Hamlet’s feel-</p. 215><p. 216> ings are the same; his first thought upon seeing Laertes is that he is ‘a very noble youth,’[3413]— a comment that is certainly spoken in a mood of commendation.”</p. 216>

1980 pen2

pen2

3466 I loued Ophelia] Spencer (ed. 1980): “Hamlet is shown briefly as having lost most of his self-consciousness and as being moved by serious feelings. Or perhaps it is another self-dramatization?”

3466 forty] Spencer (ed. 1980): “(its use as an indefinitely large number seems to derive from its frequent biblical use).”

1985 cam4

cam4 ≈ MacDonald (see n. 3481)

3466-8 I . . . summe] Edwards (ed. 1985): “Laertes’ brotherly love may have expressed itself ((in 1.3)) priggishly and pompously and now his grief emerges in extravagant language, but he never behaved as cruelly to her as Hamlet did. Has Hamlet any right to be angry with Laertes for expressing his love for Ophelia? MacDonald says ‘Perhaps this is the speeech in all the play of which it is most difficult to get into a sympathetic comprehension.’ [see n. 3481]”