"Tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense."
With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has Shakspeare drawn the pathos of Ophelia's fate! It begins to infect us as soon as we discover that she loves; for her lover receives the visits of a murdered father. We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into what tragedies that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, while she walks unconsciously so close that her garments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the greaves of the grisly visitant. Her helplessness is not cast in a faint, outline against the background of these palace treacheries and lusts; but it appears in startling vividness, because she is so pure, so remote from all the wicked world, so slenderly fitted out to contend with it. Tears are summoned when we see how simple she is, and fashioned solely for dependence: a disposition, not a will; a wife for Hamlet's will, but poor to husband one of her own.
What will become of her? What becomes of the vine when lightning splits its oak? The clipping tendrils and soft green have lost their reason for existing when the wood which centuries have grained is blasted in an hour. She will shrink into herself, will sicken, grow sere, rustle to and fro. Her leaves will blab loose songs to every wanton wind. To wither is all that is left to do, since all that she could do was to love, to climb, to cling, to cloak ruggedness with grace, to make strength and stature serve to lift and develop all her beauteous quality.
She is free to love, yet bound by old-fashioned duty toward her father; and he belongs to the old fashion of supposing that a prince can only amuse himself, no matter what sweet protestations flow into her ear. She cannot believe it; nor, when her flighty brother serves her with long-winded cautions on the same subject, does she hardly seem to listen. Her answers are so short that she plainly does not share his solicitude. In fact, she is highly amused to see him play the prig with the consequential air which only a brother can assume. Between the lines there are peals of girlish laughter, not printed, as she turns upon him with the advice to take himself into custody. This amusement ripples through her retort:—
"Good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede."
The old songs which Ophelia had picked up by no means decide that she was passionate enough to justify so much advice on the point. Some nurse who crooned over her, some book of old ballads, such as Autolycus might leave at the door, was responsible for the scraps which floated into her unconscious girlhood. It frequently happens to an unwary, half developed youth that things not excessive in decorum get established in the memory. They are kept strenuously secret, unless something demoralizes the brain. When madness tears her modesty all to tatters, they escape, and wander without a rag of clothing through her talk. They do not betray that she was ever less than a true lady. She rebukes Hamlet during the mock play, when the expectation of unmasking the king ferments in him with the flightiest remarks, and his tongue rides a steeple-chase over the bounds of courtesy. She will not listen, and says to him, "You are naught, you are naught: I'll mark the play." However, she knows her lord to be a gentleman; for she has often silently felt the effluence of an honest man whose manners and morals were noble. She pays no consideration to the family caution.
It is noteworthy how Shakspeare defends Ophelia from our censure while she is chanting those free ditties of an olden time. We listen to them in company with the pitying King and Queen: the air seems to gather pity to tone the rude surprise. She was naturally full of sensibility; so, when she enters in the first mad scene, entirely insensible to her misfortune, it both increases our sadness and calls upon us to create what should be her sane feeling. When that is done, the songs borrow all the chasteness of misfortune. We are absorbed in sorrow to see how distraction could violate her sacred privacy: thinking more of that than of the words, the coarseness eludes us. We are all bound up in the brother's feeling at this sight, who cries,—
"O rose of May!
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!"
And the King says, "How do you, pretty lady?" Yes, that she is, through it all. If she had her wits, and were using them to persuade us to revenge her, it could not move like these piteous, tender improprieties.
"Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favor and to prettiness."