[Footnote 44:  It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy reappears in Hamlet’s adjuration to his mother (III. iv. 150): 

     Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;
     And do not spread the compost on the weeds
     To make them ranker.]

[Footnote 45:  If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet’s that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length—­the speech beginning ’Seems, madam! nay, it is’—­he will understand what, surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost boastful.  It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so; and still less that she understood it so).]

[Footnote 46:  See Note D.]

[Footnote 47:  See p. 13.]

[Footnote 48:  E.g. in the transition, referred to above, from desire for vengeance into the wish never to have been born; in the soliloquy, ‘O what a rogue’; in the scene at Ophelia’s grave.  The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the psychological movement in these passages.]

[Footnote 49:  Hamlet’s violence at Ophelia’s grave, though probably intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of self-control.  The Queen’s description of him (V. i. 307),

               This is mere madness;
     And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
     Anon, as patient as the female dove,
     When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
     His silence will sit drooping.

may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity.  On this passage see further Note G.]

[Footnote 50:  Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.]

[Footnote 51:  Cf. Measure for Measure, IV. iv. 23, ’This deed ... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.’]

[Footnote 52:  III. ii. 196 ff., IV. vii. 111 ff.:  e.g.,

     Purpose is but the slave to memory,
     Of violent birth but poor validity.]

[Footnote 53:  So, before, he had said to him: 

     And duller should’st thou be than the fat weed
     That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
     Would’st thou not stir in this.

On Hamlet’s soliloquy after the Ghost’s disappearance see Note D.]

LECTURE IV

HAMLET

The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet’s character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone, explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama.  To attempt such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if I felt certain of the interpretation of all the facts.  But I propose now to follow rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially illustrates the character, reserving for separate consideration one important but particularly doubtful point.