In his description of the king and queen we get Shakespeare's view of Lord Herbert and Miss Fitton: the king (Herbert) is “mildew'd” and foul in comparison with his modest poet-rival—“A satyr to Hyperion.”
Hamlet's view of his mother (Miss Fitton), though bitterer still, is yet the bitterness of disappointed love: he will have her repent, refrain from the adultery, and be pure and good again. When the Queen asks:
“What shall I do?”
Hamlet answers:
“Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers....”
Maddened with jealousy he sees the act, scourges himself with his own lewd imagining as Posthumus scourges himself. No one ever felt this intensity of jealous rage about a mother or a sister. The mere idea is absurd; it is one's own passion-torture that speaks in such words as I have here quoted.
Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, too, and his advice to her are all the outcome of Shakespeare's own disappointment:
“Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners?”
We all expect from Hamlet some outburst of divine tenderness to Ophelia; but the scenes with the pure and devoted girl whom he is supposed to love are not half realized, are nothing like so intense as the scenes with the guilty mother. It is jealousy that is blazing in Shakespeare at this time, and not love; when Hamlet speaks to the Queen we hear Shakespeare speaking to his own faithless, guilty love. Besides, Ophelia is not even realized; she is submissive affection, an abstraction, and not a character. Shakespeare did not take interest enough in her to give her flesh and blood.
Shakespeare's jealousy and excessive sensuality come to full light in the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, when they are about to witness the play before the king: he persists in talking smut to her, which she pretends not to understand. The lewdness, we all feel, is out of place in “Hamlet,” horribly out of place when Hamlet is talking to Ophelia, but Shakespeare's sensuality has been stung to ecstasy by Miss Fitton's frailty, and he cannot but give it voice. As soon as Ophelia goes out of her mind she, too, becomes coarse—all of which is but a witness to Shakespeare's tortured animality. Yet Goethe can talk of Hamlet's “pure and most moral nature.” A goat is hardly less pure, though Hamlet was moral enough in the high sense of the word.