Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason.  And here again her critics seem hardly to realise the situation, hardly to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from her, goes mad and kills her father.  They seem to forget also that Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere calamities, but followed from her action in repelling her lover.  Nor do they realise the utter loneliness that must have fallen on her.  Of the three persons who were all the world to her, her father has been killed, Hamlet has been sent out of the country insane, and her brother is abroad.  Horatio, when her mind gives way, tries to befriend her, but there is no sign of any previous relation between them, or of Hamlet’s having commended her to his friend’s care.  What support she can gain from the Queen we can guess from the Queen’s character, and from the fact that, when Ophelia is most helpless, the Queen shrinks from the very sight of her (IV. v. 1).  She was left, thus, absolutely alone, and if she looked for her brother’s return (as she did, IV. v. 70), she might reflect that it would mean danger to Hamlet.

Whether this idea occurred to her we cannot tell.  In any case it was well for her that her mind gave way before Laertes reached Elsinore; and pathetic as Ophelia’s madness is, it is also, we feel, the kindest stroke that now could fall on her.  It is evident, I think, that this was the effect Shakespeare intended to produce.  In her madness Ophelia continues sweet and lovable.

     Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
     She turns to favour and to prettiness.

In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness dreadful or shocking.[78] And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful.  Coleridge was true to Shakespeare when he wrote of ’the affecting death of Ophelia,—­who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy.’[79]

5

I reluctantly pass by Polonius, Laertes and the beautiful character of
Horatio, to say something in conclusion of the Queen and the King.

The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me, practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived.  This is surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (I. v. 41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the murder.  And against this testimony what force has the objection that the queen in the ‘Murder of Gonzago’ is not represented as an adulteress?  Hamlet’s mark in arranging the play-scene was not his mother, whom besides he had been expressly ordered to spare (I. v. 84 f.).