Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

"And with a look so piteous in purport,
As if he had been loosed out of hell,
To speak of horrors....
He took me by the wrist, and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face,
As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so;
At last,—a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,—
He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound,
That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being. That done, he lets me go:
And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd,
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes;
For out of doors he went without their help,
And, to the last, bended their light on me."

Polonius decides that it is the very ecstasy of love. Yes, it is, but ecstasy that has made an assignation with despair. The two feelings meet at the rendezvous of Ophelia's description, where they display to us the yearning scrutiny that a man throws into the eyes of an expiring love: it is too passionately dear to be surrendered into the inane; it is too selfishly personal to be consistent with his future purpose. For he had married a bride at midnight who is still expecting him. It is the consummation of one murder by another. For such a bridal as that, to leave her cheeks on which the color comes and goes between her love and his renunciation, "like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set," seems to shatter and end his being. But let him fall to such perusal of her face as he may, he sees the complexion of the ghost through each warm feature; and its pallor stands even there to wave him apart to an interview in which all seeming becomes debatable, for rascally things may smile. He shades his brow, and his eyes are two magnets which he detaches from her heart, as he surrenders his last confidence in a stale and unprofitable world.

The irony reaches its most powerful exercise in the second scene of the third act, where Hamlet avails himself of the arrival of play-actors to test the King with his mouse-trap of an interlude. The Athenian mechanics played Pyramus and Thisbe with the simple intention of contributing their duty and homage to the nuptials. We see the humor of its juxtaposition with courtly scenes and weddings. But Hamlet, in his interlude, pretends amusement and mimics a murder to conceal his knowledge of the real one. "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence in the world." His light talk with Ophelia is nothing but the audacity of excitement and expectation. His baffling of Guildenstern with the pipe; his making Polonius see a camel, a weasel, and a whale in a cloud,—covers the dreadful necessity which drives him, in the witching time of night, to that upbraiding of a mother, and that second meeting with a dead father, which will make men's breath bate and their veins creep while English is spoken in this world.

What other mood than Irony could a soul with such a secret for its guest spread for entertainment? Too strongly built and level to be cracked with the earthquake of madness; too awfully overclouded to sparkle with imaginings of wit; too daunted and saddened with the thought of a dear father in purgatorial flames to break into the geniality of Humor,—all his mirth lost of late, there is no resource, no method of relief to the mind that is strained to live with dissemblers and swear vengeance to a ghost, but to dissemble too with an irony as ruthless and sweeping as the crime. He saves his wits which might otherwise justify suspicion and go all distraught, by unconsciously assuming that love, marriage, chastity, all honorable things, and friendship too, are crazes, and he that banters them alone is sane.

But when he knows that the grave, near which he stood and satirized the careers which men pursue, was another piece of irony, since Nature by keeping Ophelia alive and beautiful really meant death by her, it destroys his own tendency to be ironical, and he breaks forth with an intense sincerity; then we take the point of his previous behavior.

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum."

And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in all serious and ennobling things,—too much so to grow deranged, enough so to create the concealment and defence of all his innuendo.

The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and makes a speech full of pompous platitudes about Laertes,—"an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and so on. Hamlet mimics the style; and you would think he was just such another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whose macaronic manner he assumes to indicate his aversion from it. "Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more."

I wonder that the psychologists have not greedily picked up this obscure and fantastic passage as a specimen of his craft in feigning.