her brother and her father say to her, how they reveal her sweet, soft, gentle, innocent and pious nature! "It is the helplessness of Ophelia, arising merely from her innocence, and pictured without any indication of weakness, which melts us with such profound pity. Ophelia is so young, that neither her mind nor her person have attained maturity; she is not aware of the nature of her own feelings; they are prematurely developed in their full force before she has strength to bear them, and love and grief together rend and shatter the frail texture of her existence, like the burning fluid poured into a crystal vase. She says very little, and what she does say seems rather intended to hide than to reveal the emotions of her heart; yet in those few words we are made as perfectly acquainted with her character, and with what is passing in her mind, as if she had thrown forth her soul with all the glowing eloquence of Juliet. Passion with Juliet seems innate, a part of her being, as dwells the gathered lightning in the cloud;' and we never fancy her but with the dark splendid eyes and Titian-like complexion of the south. While in Ophelia we recognize as distinctly the pensive, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the north, whose heart seems to vibrate to the passion she has inspired, more conscious of being loved than of loving; and yet, alas! loving in the silent depths of her young heart, far more than she is loved." It is finely remarked by Mrs Jameson, that neither to her brother nor to her father does Ophelia say a word of her love for Hamlet; she but acknowledges the confession of Hamlet's love for her; 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! Next time we see Ophelia, it is when she has been alarmed by the distracted appearance of Hamlet. 66 · Ophelia. O, my lord! my lord! I have been so affrighted! Polonius. With what, in the name of heaven? Ophelia. My lord! as I was sewing in my closet, And with a look so piteous in purport, What? Have you given him any hard words of late? Ophelia. No, my good lord! but as you I did repel his letters, and denied Ophelia would not, of her own accord, have attributed Hamlet's apparent madness to love of her, had her father not asked the question; but questioned, she speaks the truth, hesitatingly and humbly-as if it were presumption even to fear that one so high could be "sore-distraught" for sake of one so lowly! "Hard words" indeed! Hard words from Ophelia to Hamlet! O, Polonius, "shrewd, wary, subtle, pompous, garrulous old courtier" as thou wast, little didst thou know, dear as she was unto thee, of thy daughter's heart! Of all Shakspeare's Female Characters, not one, says Mrs Jameson, ingeniously, could have loved Hamlet but Ophelia. "Let us for a moment imagine any one of Shakspeare's most beautiful and striking female characters in immediate connexion 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 for 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?" We once said-long ago*-that "there is nothing in Ophelia which could make her the object of an engrossing passion to so majestic a spirit as Hamlet." The lady, to whose work we are indebted for almost all that may give pleasure in these our Articles on Shakspeare, gently takes us to task for that opinion, and we relinquish it for her sake. "I do think," she says, "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. Our blessed religion, which has revealed deeper mysteries in the human soul than ever "It has often struck me that the behaviour of Hamlet to Ophelia has appeared more incomprehensible than it really is, from an erroneous opinion generally entertained, that his love for her was profound. Though it is impossible to reconcile all parts of his conduct towards her with each other, on almost any theory, yet some great difficulties are got over, by supposing that Shakspeare merely intended to describe a youthful, an accidental, and transient affection on the part of Hamlet. There was nothing in Ophelia that could make her the engrossing object of Passion to so majestic a spirit. It would appear, that what captivated him in her, was, that being a creature of pure, innocent, virgin nature, but still of mere nature only,-she yet exhibited, in great beauty, the spiritual tendencies of nature. There is in her frame the ecstasy of animal life,—of breathing, light-seeing life betraying itself, even in her disordered mind, in snatches of old songs (not in her own words), of which the associations belong to a kind of innocent voluptuousness. There is, I think, in all we ever see of her, a fancy and character of her affections suitable to this; that is, to the purity and beauty of almost material nature. To a mind like Hamlet's, which is almost perfectly spiritual, but of a spirit loving nature and life, there must have been something touching, and delightful, and captivating in Ophelia, as almost an ideal image of nature and of life. The acts and indications of his love seem to be merely suitable to such a feeling. I see no one mark of that love which goes even into the blood, and possesses all the regions of the soul. Now, the moment that his soul has sickened even unto the death,-that love must cease, and there can remain only tenderness, sorrow, and pity. We should also remember, that the sickness of his soul arose in a great measure from the momentary sight he has had into the depths of the invisible world of female hollowness and iniquity. That other profounder love, which in my opinion he had not, would not have been so affected. It would either have resisted and purged off the baser fire victoriously, or it would have driven him raving mad. But he seems to me to part with his love without much pain. It certainly has almost ceased. "His whole conduct (at least previous to Ophelia's madness and death), is consistent with such feelings. He felt that it became him to crush in Ophelia's heart all hopes of his love. Events had occurred, almost to obliterate that love from his soul. He sought her, therefore, in his assumed madness, to shew her the fatal truth, and that in a way not to humble her spirit by the consciousness of being forsaken, and no more beloved; but to prove that nature herself had set an insuperable bar between them, and that when reason was gone, there must be no thought of love. Accordingly, his first wild interview, as described by her, is of that character,-and afterwards, in that scene when he tells her to go to a nunnery, and in which his language is the assumed language of a mind struggling between pretended indifference and real tenderness, Ophelia feels nothing towards him but pity and grief, a deep melancholy over the prostration of his elevated spirit. 'O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!' "Here the genius of Kemble seemed to desert him, and he threw an air of fierceness and anger over the mien and gestures of Hamlet, which must have been far indeed from the imagination of Shakspeare. It was reserved for Kean to restore nature from her profanation. In his gesticulations there is nothing insulting towards such an object. There is a kind of wild bitterness, playing towards her in the words merely, that she might know all was lost,—but, in the manner of delivering those speeches, he follows the manifest intention of the divine Bard, and gives to them that mournful earnestness with which a high intellectual mind, conscious of its superiority, and severed by pain from that world of life to which Ophelia belonged, would, in a situation of extreme distress, speak authoritative counsel to an inferior soul. And when, afraid lest the gentle creature whom he deeply pities,-and whom, at that moment, it may well be said, he loves,—might in her heart upbraid him for his cruel 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, pe ty, in spite even of the excuse of his apparent madness,-Kean returns to Ophelia, and kisses her hand; we then indeed feel as if a burst of light broke in upon the darkness, and truth, and nature, and Shakspeare, were at once revealed. "To you who are so familiar with this divine drama, I need not quote passages, nor use many arguments to prove my position, that Shakspeare never could have intended to represent Hamlet's love to Ophelia as very profound. If he did, how can we ever account for Hamlet's first exclamation, when in the churchyard he learns that he is standing by her grave, and beholds her coffin? 'What, the fair Ophelia !' "Was this all that Hamlet would have uttered, when struck into sudden conviction by the ghastliest terrors of death, that all he loved in human life had perished? We can with difficulty reconcile such a tame ejaculation, even with extreme tenderness and sorrow. But had it been in the soul of Shakspeare, to shew Hamlet in the agony of hopeless despair,-and in hopeless despair he must at that moment have been, had Ophelia been all in all to him,-is there in all his writings so utter a failure in the attempt to give vent to overwhelming passion? When, afterwards, Hamlet leaps into the grave, do we see in that any power of love? I am sorry to confess, that the whole of that scene is to me merely painful. It is anger with Laertes, not love for Ophelia, that makes Hamlet leap into the grave. Laertes' conduct, he afterwards tells us, put him into a towering passion,'—a state of mind which is not very easy to reconcile with almost any kind of sorrow for the dead Ophelia. Perhaps, in this, Shakspeare may have departed from nature. But had he been attempting to describe the behaviour of an impassioned lover, at the grave of his beloved, I should be compelled to feel, that he had not merely departed from nature, but that he had offered her the most profane violation and insult. "Hamlet is afterwards made acquainted with the sad history of Ophelia, he knows, that to the death of Polonius, and his own imagined madness, is to be attributed her miserable catastrophe. Yet, after the burial scene, he seems utterly to have forgotten that Ophelia ever existed; nor is there, as far as I recollect, a single allusion to her throughout the rest of the drama. The only way of accounting for this seems to be, that Shakspeare had himself forgotten her, that with her last rites she vanished from the world of his memory. But this of itself shews, that it was not his intention to represent Ophelia as the dearest of all earthly things or thoughts to Hamlet, or surely there would have been some melancholy, some miserable hauntings of her image. But even as it is, it seems not a little unaccountable, that Hamlet should have been so slightly affected by her death. "Of the character of Ophelia, and the situation she holds in the action of the play, I need say little. Every thing about her is young, beautiful, artless, innocent, and touching. She comes before us in striking contrast to the Queen, who, fallen as she is, feels the influence of her simple and happy virgin purity. Amid the frivolity, flattery, fawning, and artifice of a corrupted court, she moves in all the unpolluted loveliness of nature. She is like an artless, gladsome, and spotless shepherdess, with the gracefulness of society hanging like a transparent veil over her natural beauty. But we feel from the first, that her lot is to be mournful. The world in which she lives is not worthy of her. And soon as we connect her destiny with Hamlet, we know that darkness is to overshadow her, and that sadness and sorrow will step in between her and the ghost-haunted avenger of his father's murder. Soon as our pity is excited for her, it continues gradually to deepen; and when she appears in her madness, we are not more prepared to weep over all its most pathetic movements, than we afterwards are to hear of her death. Perhaps the description of that catastrophe by the Queen is poetical rather than dramatic; but its exquisite beauty prevails, and Ophelia, dying and dead, is still the same Ophelia that first won our love. Perhaps the very forgetfulness of her, throughout the remainder of the play, leaves the soul at full liberty to dream of the departed. She has passed away from the earth like a beautiful air—a delightful dream. There would have been no place for her in the agitation and tempest of the final catastrophe. We are satisfied that she is in her grave. And in place of beholding her involved in the shocking troubles of the closing scene, we remember that her heart lies at rest, and the remembrance is like the returning voice of melancholy music."-No. XI., for February 1818. netrating 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 and passion-is the feeling and conviction with which I have always read the play of Hamlet." It shall henceforth be the feeling with which we too read it; and we shall believe Hamlet when he writes, " To the celestial and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia." Nor shall we say with Polonius, "that's an ill phrase, a vile phrase-beautified is a vile phrase." He loved her when he wrote "in her excellent white bosom, these "Doubt thou, the stars are fire; But never doubt I love. "O, dear Ophelia ! I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, Ŏ most best, believe it. Adieu! Thine evermore, most dear Lady, whilst this machine is to him, HAMLET." And we believe him when, with the wildest vehemence, he exclaims, on coming out of her grave, into which he had leapt "I loved Ophelia-forty thousand bro thers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum!" Alas! what then must have been the misery of Ophelia, on being used as follows by him who loved her better than forty thousand brothers! "Soft you, now! The fair Ophelia :-Nymph, in thy ori sons Be all my sins remember'd. Oph. Ham. I humbly thank you; well. of yours, That I have longed long to re-deliver; I pray you, now receive them. Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest? Ham. Are you fair? Oph. What means your lordship? Ham. That if you be honest, and fair, you should admit no discourse to your beauty. Oph. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? Ham. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd, than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness; this was some time a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once. Oph. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. Ham. You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it: I loved you not. Oph. I was the more deceived. Ham. Get thee to a nunnery: Why would'st thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better, my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambi tious; with more offences at my beck, than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in: What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven! We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us: Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's your father? Oph. At home, my lord. Ham. Let the doors be shut upon him; that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house. Farewell. Oph. O, help him, you sweet heavens! Ham. If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny: Get thee to a nunnery; farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough, what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go; and quickly too. Farewell. Oph. Heavenly powers, restore him! Ham. I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance: Go to, I'll no more of 't; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they [Exit HAMLET. are. To a nunnery, go. Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; that from which in the meekness of thy lamenting sorrow thou behold'st "that noble and most sovereign reason" fall like a star from its sphere! But hear another speak, who always speaks well: "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 trou bles, of perplexities, of agonies, of terrors. A loathing of the crime he is called on to revenge, which revenge is again abhorrent to his nature, have 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 That unmatch'd form and feature of to link his terrible destiny with hers; he blown youth, Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me! I see !" Shakspeare and Mrs Jameson were right. Ophelia herself knew that Hamlet loved her; and Hamlet knew that Ophelia knew that he loved her, and therefore he used her thus; for no behaviour of his, he was well assured, could ever make his "soul's idol" "doubt he loved." That doubt would have broken her heart. But Hamlet wished not to break Ophelia's heart, whatever else he may have wished; and what he wished is "hard to be scanned." Ophelia by all this seeming harsh usage, (Oh, most harsh!) feels not herself ill-used; no word of upbraiding escapes her lips; all she feels is -pity! She is "of ladies most deject and wretched;" but not because no more she "sucks the honey of his music vows;" but to see " Oh! what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" And never was wreck of mind so sublimely painted in words as by her, the simple of heart! when at last she exclaims, "O, woe is me!" The woe is "to have seen what I have seen! see what I see!" O sinless being! uplifted by thy self-forgetting innocence to a loftier height of humanity even than 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 that with such angry violence, that unwittingly he killed it. "In the scene with Hamlet, 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 Ham. I did love you once. Oph. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we Oph. I was the more deceived.' "Those who ever heard Mrs Siddons read the play of Hamlet, cannot forget the 'And I of ladies most deject and wretched, |