"Yet Edmund was beloved;
The one the other poisoned for his sake,
And after slew herself."
Emilia is accused by Iago in soliloquy as being suspected of faithlessness to his bed, but he obviously does not believe the charge:—
"I hate the Moor;
And it is thought abroad that 'twixt my sheets
He has done my office; I know not if 't be true,
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety."
He uses it merely as an additional excuse for hating the Moor; a palliation to his conscience in the career which he is about to pursue. Queen Gertrude's marriage with her brother-in-law is made the subject of severe animadversion; but it does not appear that she had dishonoured herself in the life of her first husband, or was in any manner participant in the crime of Claudius. Hamlet, in the vehemence of his anger, never insinuates such a charge; and the Ghost, rising to moderate his violence, acquits her by his very appearance at such a time, of any heinous degree of guilt. As for the gross theory of Tieck respecting Ophelia, it is almost a national insult. He maintains that she had yielded to Hamlet's passion, and that its natural consequences had driven her to suicide. Such a theory is in direct opposition to the retiring and obedient purity of her character, the tenour of her conversations and soliloquies, the general management of the play, and what I have endeavoured to show is the undeviating current of Shakspeare's ideas. If the German critic propounded this heresy to insult English readers through one of their greatest favourites in revenge for the ungallant reason which the Archbishop of Canterbury,[36] in Henry V, assigns as the origin of the Salique law, he might be pardoned; but, as it is plainly dictated by a spirit of critical wickedness and blasphemy, I should consign him, in spite of his learning, acuteness, and Shakspearian knowledge, without compassion, to the avenging hands of Lysistrata.[37]