Part 4 (1/2)
He is jealous of the players' tears. Here again is no debate, but simply surprise at his own apathy. He tries to lash himself to fury but fails, and falls back on the practical test he is about to apply to the guilt of the king which he must appear to doubt, or this pseudo-activity would be too obviously superfluous.
In the interval between the instruction to the players and the play, Hamlet's mind, unless absorbed by some strong preoccupation, would naturally turn to the issue of the plot; and he would reveal, if he admitted us to the secret workings of his mind, if not resolution, at least irresolution, something to mark the vacillation of which we hear so much. But we find that the whole matter has dropped from his mind, and that he has drifted back to the theme of--
”Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt!”
It is now recast more in the tone of deliberate thought than of excited feeling: he asks not which is best for him, but which is ”n.o.bler in the mind,”--an impersonal, a profoundly human question, which so fascinates our attention that we forget its irrelevance to the matter in hand or what we a.s.sume to be the matter in hand. It is as if he had never seen the Ghost. In his profound preoccupation he speaks of the ”bourne from which no traveller returns,” and of ”evils that we know not of,”
although the Ghost had told him ”of sulphurous and tormenting flames.”
Hamlet muses, ”To sleep! perchance to dream,--ay, there's the rub,” but the Ghost had said--
”I am thy father's spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And, for the day, confined to fast in fires.”
It is plain that the ”traveller” that had returned was not present at all to his mental vision nor his tale remembered. In his former meditation he had accepted the doctrine of the church; here he interrogates the human spirit in its still place of judgment; and he gives its verdict with a sigh of reluctance--
”Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.”
Considering that this and the succeeding lines occur at the end of a soliloquy on suicide,--that there is not only the absence of any reference to the ghostly action, but positive proof that the subject was not present to his thoughts, it is nothing less than astonis.h.i.+ng that this pa.s.sage should be quoted as Hamlet's witness to his own ”irresolution.” He would willingly take his own life; conscience forbids it; therefore conscience makes us cowards: and then with a still further generalization he announces the opposition of thought and resolution, causing the failure of
”enterprises of great pith and moment.”
Now the only enterprise on which lie was engaged--the testing of the king's conscience--was in a fair way of success, and did, in fact, ultimately succeed.
The scene with Ophelia that immediately follows is the development of another theme in the first soliloquy, ”Frailty! thy name is woman.”
Ophelia is inseparably connected with the queen in Hamlet's mind. She is a Court maiden, sheltered, guarded, cautioned, and, as we see in the warnings of Polonius and Laertes, cautioned in a tone that is suggestive of evil. What scenes she must have witnessed--the confusion on the death of the king, the exclusion of Hamlet from the throne, the marriage of the queen to the usurper! Yet she takes it all quite sweetly and subserviently. She is as docile to events as she is to parental advice.
To such a one every circ.u.mstance is a fate, and she bows to it, as she bows to her father: ”Yes, my lord, I will obey my lord.” She denies Hamlet's access to her though he is in sorrow; though he has lost all, she will ”come in for an after loss.” One would rather leave her blameless in the sweetness of her maiden prime and the pathos of her end, but to place her, as some do, high on the list of Shakespeare's peerless women fastens upon Hamlet unmerited reproach. There is a love that includes friends.h.i.+p, as religion includes morality, and such was Portia's for Ba.s.sanio. There is a love whose first instinctive movement is to share the burden of the loved one, and such was Miranda's love for Ferdinand. And there is a love that reserves the light of its light and the perfume of its sweetness for the shadowed heart and the sunless mind. How would Cordelia have addressed this king and queen--how would she have aroused the energy of Hamlet and rehabilitated his trust, with that voice, soft and low indeed, but firmer than the voice of Cato's daughter claiming to know her husband's cause of grief! As Hamlet talks to Ophelia, you perceive that the marriage of his mother is more present to him than the murder of his father. He discourses on the frailty of woman and the corruption of the world; ”Go to, it hath made me mad. We will have no more marriages.”
The play is acted. The king is ”frighted with false fire,” and Hamlet is left with the feeling of a dramatic success and the proof of his uncle's guilt. He sings s.n.a.t.c.hes of song. Horatio falls in with his mood. ”You might have rhymed,” he says. The only effect of the confirmation of the ghost's story, as at its first hearing, is a fresh blaze of indignation against his mother. When Polonius has delivered his message that the queen would speak with him, Hamlet presently says, ”Leave me, friend;”
and then his mind clouds like the mind of Macbeth before he enters the chamber of Duncan--
”'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and h.e.l.l itself breathes out Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on.”
As he pa.s.ses to the Queen's closet in this tense and dangerous mood, he sees the king on his knees. His brow relaxes in a moment; he stops, looks curiously at him, and says, familiarly--
”Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying.”
He did not mean to do it, because he was on his way to his mother's closet, but some reason must be found. The word ”praying” suggests it.
”This would be scanned;” and he scans it, and decides to leave him for another day. As he enters the closet to speak the words ”like daggers,”
his quick decisive gesture and shrill peremptory tones alarm the queen.
She rises to call for help; he seizes her roughly: ”Come, come, and sit you down.” Nothing can mark Hamlet's awful resentment more than his persistence through two interruptions that would have unnerved the bravest, and checked the most relentless spirit. As he looks at his mother there is that in his countenance bids her cry aloud for a.s.sistance. There is a movement behind the arras. Hamlet lunges at once.
Is it the king? No; it is but Polonius. Had it been the king, it would not have diverted him from his purpose. He is no more afraid of killing than he is afraid of death, and is as hard to arrest in his reproof of his mother as in his talk with his father:
”Leave wringing of your hands; peace, sit you down.”
His mother confesses her guilt. Hamlet is not appeased. He vilifies her husband with increasing vehemence; the Ghost rises as if to protect the queen. ”Do not forget,” he cries, although the king's name was at that moment on Hamlet's lips in terms of bitterest contempt. But it was understood between the two spirits that it was the queen's husband and not his father's murderer that he was thus denouncing. After the disappearance of the ghost, he turns again to his mother; and on leaving her almost reluctantly, without further punishment, asks pardon of his own genius--”Forgive me this my virtue,” more authoritative to Hamlet than a legion of spirits.
This scene is the spiritual climax of the play, and from it the whole tragedy directly proceeds. The death of Polonius leads on the one side to the madness of Ophelia, on the other to the revenge of Laertes and the final catastrophe. Hamlet's apathy at the death of Polonius is of the same character as his oblivion of the ghost's command, and has the same origin. For there is no apathy like that of an over-mastering pa.s.sion, whether it be love or jealousy, or a new faith, or a terrible doubt. It draws away the life from other duties and interests, and leaves them pale and semi-vital. Men thus possessed acknowledge the duties they evade, let slip occasion, are ”lapsed in time and pa.s.sion,”
and are surprised at their own oblivion.