subject, he extorts from her, in short sentences, uttered with bashful
reluctance, the confession of Hamlet's love for her, but not a word of
her love for him. The whole scene is managed with inexpressible
delicacy: it is one of those instances, common in Shakspeare, in which
we are allowed to perceive what is passing in the mind of a person,
without any consciousness on their part. Only Ophelia herself is unaware
that while she is admitting the extent of Hamlet's courtship, she is
also betraying how deep is the impression it has made, how entire the
love with which it is returned.
POLONIUS.
What is between you? give me up the truth!
OPHELIA.
He hath, my lord, of late, made many tenders
Of his affection to me.
POLONIUS.
Affection! poh! you speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstances.
Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?
OPHELIA.
I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
POLONIUS.
Marry, I'll teach you: think yourself a baby;
That you have taken these tenders for true pay
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly
Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Wronging it thus) you'll tender me a fool.
OPHELIA.
My lord, he hath importun'd me with love
In honorable fashion.
POLONIUS.
Ay, fashion you may call it; go to, go to.
OPHELIA.
And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord,
With almost all the holy vows of heaven.
POLONIUS.
Ay, springes to catch woodcocks.
This is for all:
would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment's leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet,
Look to't, I charge you: come your ways.
OPHELIA.
I shall obey, my lord.
Besides its intrinsic loveliness, the character of Ophelia has a
relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of
Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the
powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of
purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always
shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on
the event," united to immense intellectual power, render him unspeakably
interesting: and yet I doubt whether any woman, who would have been
capable of understanding and appreciating such a man, would have
passionately loved him. Let us for a moment imagine any one of
Shakspeare's most beautiful and striking female characters in immediate
connection with Hamlet. The gentle Desdemona would never have despatched
her household cares in haste, to listen to his philosophical
speculations, his dark conflicts with his own spirit. Such a woman as
Portia would have studied him; Juliet would have pitied him; Rosalind
would have turned him over with a smile to the melancholy Jacques;
Beatrice would have laughed at him outright; Isabel would have reasoned
with him; Miranda could but have wondered at him: but Ophelia loves him.
Ophelia, the young, fair, inexperienced girl, facile to every
impression, fond in her simplicity, and credulous in her innocence,
loves Hamlet; not from what he is in himself, but for that which appears
to her--the gentle, accomplished prince, upon whom she has been
accustomed to see all eyes fixed in hope and admiration, "the expectancy
and rose of the fair state," the star of the court in which she moves,
the first who has ever whispered soft vows in her ear: and what can be
more natural?
But it is not singular, that while no one entertains a doubt of
Ophelia's love for Hamlet--though never once expressed by herself, or
asserted by others, in the whole course of the drama--yet it is a
subject of dispute whether Hamlet loves Ophelia, though she herself
allows that he had importuned her with love, and "had given countenance
to his suit with almost all the holy vows of heaven;" although in the
letter which Polonius intercepted, Hamlet declares that he loves her
"best, O most best!"--though he asserts himself, with the wildest
vehemence,--
I lov'd Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum:
--still I have heard the question canvassed; I have even heard it denied
that Hamlet did love Ophelia. The author of the finest remarks I have
yet seen on the play and character of Hamlet, leans to this opinion. As
the observations I allude to are contained in a periodical publication,
and may not be at hand for immediate reference, I shall indulge myself
(and the reader no less) by quoting the opening paragraphs of this noble
piece of criticism, upon the principle, and for the reason I have
already stated in the introduction.
"We take up a play, and ideas come rolling in upon us, like waves
impelled by a strong wind. There is in the ebb and flow of Shakspeare's
soul all the grandeur of a mighty operation of nature; and when we think
or speak of him, it should be with humility where we do not understand,
and a conviction that it is rather to the narrowness of our own mind
than to any failing in the art of the great magician, that we ought to
attribute any sense of weakness, which may assail us during the
contemplation of his created worlds.
"Shakspeare himself, had he even been as great a critic as a poet, could
not have written a regular dissertation upon Hamlet. So ideal, and yet
so real an existence, could have been shadowed out only in the colors of
poetry. When a character deals solely or chiefly with this world and its
events when it acts and is acted upon by objects that have a palpable
existence, we see it distinctly, as if it were cast in a material mould,
as if it partook of the fixed and settled lineaments of the things on
which it lavishes its sensibilities and its passions. We see in such
cases the vision of an individual soul, as we see the vision of an
individual countenance. We can describe both, and can let a stranger
into our knowledge. But how tell in words, so pure, so fine, so ideal an
abstraction as Hamlet? We can, indeed, figure to ourselves generally his
princely form, that outshone all others in manly beauty, and adorn it
with the consummation of all liberal accomplishment. We can behold in
every look, every gesture, every motion, the future king,--
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,
Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state;
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,
Th' observ'd of all observers.
"But when we would penetrate into his spirit, meditate on those things
on which he meditates, accompany him even unto the brink of eternity,
fluctuate with him on the ghastly sea of despair, soar with him into the
purest and serenest regions of human thought, feel with him the curse of
beholding iniquity, and the troubled delight of thinking on innocence,
and gentleness, and beauty; come with him from all the glorious dreams
cherished by a noble spirit in the halls of wisdom and philosophy, of a
sudden into the gloomy courts of sin, and incest, and murder; shudder
with him over the broken and shattered fragments of all the fairest
creations of his fancy,--be borne with him at once, from calm, and
lofty, and delighted speculations, into the very heart of fear, and
horror, and tribulations,--have the agonies and the guilt of our mortal
world brought into immediate contact with the world beyond the grave,
and the influence of an awful shadow hanging forever on our
thoughts,--be present at a fearful combat between all the stirred-up
passions of humanity in the soul of man, a combat in which one and all
of these passions are alternately victorious and overcome; I say, that
when we are thus placed and acted upon, how is it possible to draw a
character of this sublime drama, or of the mysterious being who is its
moving spirit? In him, his character and situation, there is a
concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity. There is
scarcely a trait of frailty or of grandeur, which may have endeared to
us our most beloved friends in real life, that is not to be found in
Hamlet. Undoubtedly Shakspeare loved him beyond all his other creations.
Soon as he appears on the stage we are satisfied: when absent we long
for his return. This is the only play which exists almost altogether in
the character of one single person. Who ever knew a Hamlet in real life?
yet who, ideal as the character is, feels not its reality? This is the
wonder. We love him not, we think of him, not because he is witty,
because he was melancholy, because he was filial; but we love him
because he existed, and was himself. This is the sum total of the
impression. I believe that, of every other character either in tragic or
epic poetry, the story makes part of the conception; but of Hamlet, the
deep and permanent interest is the conception of himself. This seems to
belong, not to the character being more perfectly drawn, but to there
being a more intense conception of individual human life than perhaps
any other human composition. Here is a being with springs of thought,
and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search. These springs rise
from an unknown depth, and in that depth there seems to be a oneness of
being which we cannot distinctly behold, but which we believe to be
there; and thus irreconcilable circumstances, floating on the surface of
his actions, have not the effect of making us doubt the truth of the
general picture."[41]
This is all most admirable, most eloquent, most true! but the critic
subsequently declares, that "there is nothing in Ophelia which could
make her the object of an engrossing passion to so majestic a spirit as
Hamlet."
Now, though it be with reluctance, and even considerable mistrust of
myself, that I differ from a critic who can thus feel and write, I do
not think so:--I do think, with submission, that the love of Hamlet for
Ophelia is deep, is real, and is precisely the kind of love which such
a man as Hamlet would feel for such a woman as Ophelia.
When the heathen would represent their Jove as clothed in all his
Olympian terrors, they mounted him on the back of an eagle, and armed
him with the lightnings; but when in Holy Writ the Supreme Being is
described as coming in his glory, He is upborne on the wings of
cherubim, and his emblem is the dove. Even so our blessed religion,
which has revealed deeper mysteries in the human soul than ever were
dreamt of by philosophy till she went hand-in-hand with faith, has
taught us to pay that worship to the symbols of purity and innocence,
which in darker times was paid to the manifestations of power: and
therefore do I think that the mighty intellect, the capacious, soaring,
penetrating genius of Hamlet may be represented, without detracting from
its grandeur, as reposing upon the tender virgin innocence of Ophelia,
with all that deep delight with which a superior nature contemplates the
goodness which is at once perfect in itself, and of itself unconscious.
That Hamlet regards Ophelia with this kind of tenderness,--that he loves
her with a love as intense as can belong to a nature in which there is,
(I think,) much more of contemplation and sensibility than action or
passion--is the feeling and conviction with which I have always read the
play of Hamlet.
As to whether the mind of Hamlet be, or be not, touched with
madness--this is another point at issue among critics, philosophers, ay,
and physicians. To me it seems that he is not so far disordered as to
cease to be a responsible human being--that were too pitiable: but
rather that his mind is shaken from its equilibrium, and bewildered by
the horrors of his situation--horrors which his fine and subtle
intellect, his strong imagination, and his tendency to melancholy, at
once exaggerate, and take from him the power either to endure, or "by
opposing, end them." We do not see him as a lover, nor as Ophelia first
beheld him; for the days when he importuned her with love were before
the opening of the drama--before his father's spirit revisited the
earth; but we behold him at once in a sea of troubles, of perplexities,
of agonies, of terrors. Without remorse, he endures all its horrors;
without guilt, he endures all its shame. A loathing of the crime he is
called on to revenge, which revenge is again abhorrent to his nature,
has set him at strife with himself; the supernatural visitation has
perturbed his soul to its inmost depths; all things else, all interests,
all hopes, all affections, appear as futile, when the majestic shadow
comes lamenting from its place of torment "to shake him with thoughts
beyond the reaches of his soul!" His love for Ophelia is then ranked by
himself among those trivial, fond records which he has deeply sworn to
erase from his heart and brain. He has no thought to link his terrible
destiny with hers: he cannot marry her: he cannot reveal to her, young,
gentle, innocent as she is, the terrific influences which have changed
the whole current of his life and purposes. In his distraction he
overacts the painful part to which he had tasked himself; he is like
that judge of the Areopagus, who being occupied with graver matters,
flung from him the little bird which had sought refuge in his bosom, and
with such angry violence, that unwittingly he killed it.
In the scene with Hamlet,[42] in which he madly outrages her and
upbraids himself, Ophelia says very little: there are two short
sentences in which she replies to his wild, abrupt discourse:--
HAMLET.
I did love you once.
OPHELIA.
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET.
You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so
inocculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it. I loved
you not.
OPHELIA.
I was the more deceived.
Those who ever heard Mrs. Siddons read the play of Hamlet, cannot forget
the world of meaning, of love, of sorrow, of despair, conveyed in these
two simple phrases. Here, and in the soliloquy afterwards, where she
says,--
And I of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
are the only allusions to herself and her own feelings in the course of
the play; and these, uttered almost without consciousness on her own
part, contain the revelation of a life of love, and disclose the secret
burthen of a heart bursting with its own unuttered grief. She believes
Hamlet crazed; she is repulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, where
she had bestowed her young heart, with all its hopes and wishes; her
father is slain by the hand of her lover, as it is supposed, in a
paroxysm of insanity: she is entangled inextricably in a web of horrors
which she cannot even comprehend, and the result seems inevitable.
Of her subsequent madness, what can be said? What an affecting--what an
astonishing picture of a mind utterly, hopelessly wrecked!--past
hope--past cure! There is the frenzy of excited passion--there is the
madness caused by intense and continued thought--there is the delirium
of fevered nerves; but Ophelia's madness is distinct from these: it is
not the suspension, but the utter destruction of the reasoning powers;
it is the total imbecility which, as medical people well know,
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 sung 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 Shakspeare alone so to temper such a picture
that we can endure to dwell upon it:--
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favor and to prettiness.
That in her madness she should exchange her bashful silence for empty
babbling, her sweet maidenly demeanor 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.
The whole action of this play sweeps past us like a torrent, which
hurries along in its dark and resistless course all the personages of
the drama towards a catastrophe that is not brought about by human will,
but seems like an abyss ready dug to receive them, where the good and
the wicked are whelmed together.[43] As the character of Hamlet has been
compared, or rather contrasted, with the Greek Orestes, being like him,
called on to avenge a crime by a crime, tormented by remorseful doubts,
and pursued by distraction, so, to me, the character of Ophelia bears a
certain relation to that of the Greek Iphigenia,[44] with the same
strong distinction between the classical and the romantic conception of
the portrait. Iphigenia led forth to sacrifice, with her unresisting
tenderness, her mournful sweetness, her virgin innocence, is doomed to
perish by that relentless power, which has linked her destiny with
crimes and contests, in which she has no part but as a sufferer; and
even so, poor Ophelia, "divided from herself and her fair judgment,"
appears here like a spotless victim offered up to the mysterious and
inexorable fates.
"For it is the property of crime to extend its mischiefs over innocence,
as it is of virtue to extend its blessings over many that deserve them
not, while frequently the author of one or the other is not, as far as
we can see, either punished or rewarded."[45] But there's a heaven above
us!
MIRANDA.
We might have deemed it impossible to go beyond Viola, Perdita, and
Ophelia, as pictures of feminine beauty; to exceed the one in tender
delicacy, the other in ideal grace, and the last in simplicity,--if
Shakspeare had not done this; and he alone could have done it. Had he
never created a Miranda, we should never have been made to feel how
completely the purely natural and the purely ideal can blend into each
other.
The character of Miranda resolves itself into the very elements of
womanhood. She is beautiful, modest, and tender, and she is these only;
they comprise her whole being, external and internal. She is so
perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but
ethereal. Let us imagine any other woman placed beside Miranda--even one
of Shakspeare's own loveliest and sweetest creations--there is not one
of them that could sustain the comparison for a moment; not one that
would not appear somewhat coarse or artificial when brought into
immediate contact with this pure child of nature, this "Eve of an
enchanted Paradise."
What, then, has Shakspeare done?--"O wondrous skill and sweet wit of the
man!"--he has removed Miranda far from all comparison with her own sex;
he has placed her between the demi-demon of earth and the delicate
spirit of air. The next step is into the ideal and supernatural; and the
only being who approaches Miranda, with whom she can be contrasted, is
Ariel. Beside the subtle essence of this ethereal sprite, this creature
of elemental light and air, that "ran upon the winds, rode the curl'd
clouds, and in the colors of the rainbow lived," Miranda herself appears
a palpable reality; a woman, "breathing thoughtful breath," a woman,
walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as
frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom.
I have said that Miranda possesses merely the elementary attributes of
womanhood, but each of these stand in her with a distinct and peculiar
grace. She resembles nothing upon earth; but do we therefore compare
her, in our own minds, with any of those fabled beings with which the
fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain or the
ocean?--oread or dryad fleet, sea-maid, or naiad of the stream? We
cannot think of them together. Miranda is a consistent, natural, human
being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace, and
purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she
exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she
_could_ not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. She has
never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one
imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in
her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and
its vanities. She has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her
father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and
woods, the many-shaped, many-tinted clouds, and the silent stars; her
playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests, and ran
rippling to kiss her feet. Ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over
her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before
her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her
father's art, floated in music around her. If we can presuppose such a
situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character
of Miranda not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results
of such a situation? She retains her woman's heart, for that is
unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment,
her looks, her language, her thoughts--all these, from the supernatural
and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal;
and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature,
nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she
produces upon others, who never having beheld any thing resembling her,
approach her as "a wonder," as something celestial:--
Be sure! the goddess on whom these airs attend!
And again:--
What is this maid?
Is she the goddess who hath severed us,
And brought us thus together?
And Ferdinand exclaims, while gazing on her,
My spirits as in a dream are all bound up!
My father's loss, the weakness that I feel,
The wreck of all my friends, or this man's threats,
To whom I am subdued, are but light to me
Might I but through my prison once a day
Behold this maid: all corners else o' the earth
Let liberty make use of, space enough
Have I in such a prison.
Contrasted with the impression of her refined and dignified beauty, and
its effect on all beholders, is Miranda's own soft simplicity, her
virgin innocence, her total ignorance of the conventional forms and
language of society. It is most natural that in a being thus
constituted, the first tears should spring from compassion, "suffering
with those that she saw suffer:"--
O the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls! they perished.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e'er
It should the good ship so have swallowed,
And the freighting souls within her;
and that her first sigh should be offered to a love at once fearless and
submissive, delicate and fond. She has no taught scruples of honor like
Juliet; no coy concealments like Viola; no assumed dignity standing in
its own defence. Her bashfulness is less a quality than an instinct; it
is like the self-folding of a flower, spontaneous and unconscious. I
suppose there is nothing of the kind in poetry equal to the scene
between Ferdinand and Miranda. In Ferdinand, who is a noble creature, we
have all the chivalrous magnanimity with which man, in a high state of
civilization, disguises his real superiority, and does humble homage to
the being of whose destiny he disposes; while Miranda, the mere child of
nature, is struck with wonder at her own new emotions. Only conscious of
her own weakness as a woman, and ignorant of those usages of society
which teach us to dissemble the real passion, and assume (and sometimes
abuse) an unreal and transient power, she is equally ready to place her
life, her love, her service beneath his feet.
MIRANDA.
Alas, now! pray you,
Work not so hard: I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs, that you are enjoined to pile!
Pray set it down and rest you: when this burns,
'Twill weep for having weary'd you. My father
Is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself:
He's safe for these three hours.
FERDINAND.
O most dear mistress,
The sun will set before I shall discharge
What I must strive to do.
MIRANDA.
If you'll sit down,
I'll bear your logs the while. Pray give me that,
I'll carry it to the pile.
FERDINAND.
No, precious creature;
I had rather crack my sinews, break my back,
Than you should such dishonor undergo,
While I sit lazy by.
MIRANDA.