"It is not madness
That I have uttered: bring me to the test,
And I the matter will re-word, which madness
Would gambol from."
And herein he implies that as he can construct the phrases of sanity,
being all the time of a sound mind, so the soundness would serve him
to invent the _non sequiturs_ of madness. If, then, he purposed to
feign it when he said that perhaps he might hereafter put on an antic
disposition, the reader may ask why so subtle a person did not carry
out his plan. No doubt, it occurred to him that, as he travelled
towards his purpose, his demeanor must be of the kind that would cover
up his traces. But he could baffle Polonius and the other spies by
the natural penetration of a mind that suspicion had sharpened. Those
emergencies did not call for any style of feigning. It is enough for
him to finger the ventages of a recorder and invite Guildenstern to
play upon it; the latter understands that he knows no touch of Hamlet,
and leaves the heart of that mystery to be voiced by the varying
breaths of critics.
When Hamlet explains to Polonius that he is reading slanders, and
then describes the old man himself as having a plentiful lack of wit
together with most weak hams, yet holds it hardly fair to have it thus
set down,--"For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab,
you could go backward,"--Polonius, who is nothing if not satirical upon
himself, muses apart, saying, "Though this be madness, yet there's
method in 't;" and there he blundered as patly into Shakspeare's secret
as he did into his own death.
And why do so many actors make Hamlet appear to be conscious of the
manɶuvre to throw Ophelia in his way that the King and Polonius may
mark his tone from the place where they hide? Shakspeare has left
no loop-hole for this supposition that Hamlet, observing the trick,
assumes a tone of flightiness towards Ophelia, in order to throw off
the spies and make them infer that he is mad. The scene being over, the
King is wrong when he says,--
"Love! his affections do not that way tend;"
but right when he adds,--
"Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,
Was not like madness."
Of course it was not; and the whole scene with Ophelia is ruined for
Shakspeare's purpose by this modern contrivance of the theatre to
deprive Hamlet of his spontaneous and uncalculating mood.
Otto Ludwig notices that his madness is "alluded to by Ophelia as
having broken out between the first and second acts; and that is
another strange thing in Shakspeare. Then, too, the style, if it was
dissimulation, is such as to bring to pass the opposite of what he
seems to have intended. So far from being disguised by it he is rather
betrayed. And what is the use of any feigning when he does things like
that of contriving the mock play? For that betrays him to the King more
than it does the King to him. It makes the situation all awry, because
the King must now know on what footing he is with Hamlet. At all
events, the courtiers keep telling how danger is threatened to the King
from Hamlet: they have no means of fathoming the King's offence. They
merely presage some danger to the King, and they manifest no surprise.
Hamlet must be conscious that he would be in great peril if the King
knew that he knew every thing; the King would be put on his defence,
and he was quite capable of contriving another murder to forestall
retribution for the first one. Why, then, does he keep on feigning?
Yet we do not observe that he hits upon any expedients to meet this
possible case; it does not even occur to him before he concocts the
trial-scene."