He, on the contrary, says:—'I shall never take kindly to impotence, whatever good it may do me.'
Montaigne, the old and young lover, is lashed in act v. sc. I, in disfigured verses of a song sung by the grave-digger, which dates about from the year 1557, and at Shakspere's time probably was very popular. In the original, where the image of death is meant to be represented, an old man looks back in repentance, and with great aversion, upon his youthful days when he found pleasure in love. The original verse stood thus:—
I lothe that I did love,
In youth that I thought swete,
As time requires for my behove,
Methinks they are not mete.
Until now, no sense could be made of the first verse which the gravedigger sings. It runs thus:—
In youth, when I did love, did love,
Methought it was very sweet,
To contract, OH! the time, for, AH! my behove,
O, methought, there was nothing meet.
Let it be observed what stress is laid on the 'Oh!'—the proper time, and the 'Ah!'—the delight felt at the moment of enjoyment. The meaning of the old verse is changed in such a manner as to show that old Montaigne looks back with pleasure upon the time of his dissolute youth, whilst the author of the original text shrinks back from it.
The second verse [75] is a further persiflage of the old song. Its reading, too, is changed. It is said there that age, with his stealing steps, as clawed the lover in his clutch [76] and shipped him into the land as if he 'never had been such.'
By none has the relation between Ophelia and Hamlet been better felt and described than by Goethe. He calls her 'the good child in whose soul, secretly, a voice of voluptuousness resounds.' Hamlet who—driven rudderless by his impulse, his passion, his daimon, from one extreme to the other—drags everything that surrounds him into the abyss, also destroys the future of the woman that might truly make him happy. He disowns and rejects her whom Nature has formed for love. At a moment when fanatical thoughts have mastered his reason, he bids her go to a nunnery.
Once more we must point to the Essay in which Montaigne lays down his ideas about woman and love. French ladies, he says, study Boccaccio and such-like writers, in order to become skilful (habiles). 'But there is no word, no example, no single step in that matter which they do not know better than our books do. That is a knowledge bred in their very veins … Had not this natural violence of their desires been somewhat bridled by the fear and a feeling of honour wherewith they have been provided, we would be dishonoured (diffamez).' Montaigne says he knows ladies who would rather lend their honour than their 'coach.' [77]
'At last, when Ophelia has no longer any power over her own mind,' says Goethe, 'her heart being on her tongue, that tongue becomes a traitor against her.' [78]