Ophelia. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

     Hamlet. You should not have believed me ...  I loved you not.

     Ophelia. I was the more deceived.

Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but that she had repulsed him; and here, with his usual unobtrusive subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own heart is unchanged.

I will add one note.  There are critics who, after all the help given them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still shake their heads over Ophelia’s song, ’To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day.’  Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, ‘as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,’ sing an old song containing the line,

     If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men.]

[Footnote 80:  I.e. the King will kill her to make all sure.]

[Footnote 81:  I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (IV. vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in soliloquy (III. iii. 55).]

[Footnote 82:  This also is quietly indicated.  Hamlet spares the King, he says, because if the King is killed praying he will go to heaven.  On Hamlet’s departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters: 

     My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: 
     Words without thoughts never to heaven go.]

[Footnote 83:  I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.]

[Footnote 84:  The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.]

LECTURE V

OTHELLO

There is practically no doubt that Othello was the tragedy written next after Hamlet.  Such external evidence as we possess points to this conclusion, and it is confirmed by similarities of style, diction and versification, and also by the fact that ideas and phrases of the earlier play are echoed in the later.[85] There is, further (not to speak of one curious point, to be considered when we come to Iago), a certain resemblance in the subjects.  The heroes of the two plays are doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have dealt without much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the other; but still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each endures the shock of a terrible disillusionment.  This theme is treated by Shakespeare for the first time in Hamlet, for the second in Othello.  It recurs with modifications in King Lear, and it probably formed the attraction which drew Shakespeare to refashion in part another writer’s tragedy of Timon.  These four dramas may so far be grouped together in distinction from the remaining tragedies.