Here Hamlet again mystifies Polonius about his daughter, quoting from an old English ballad. Jephthah is pilloried in history as the man who sacrificed his daughter in payment for his worldly success. Shakespeare also refers to him in '3 Henry VI,' v, 1, 91: "To keep that oath were more impiety than Jephthah's when he sacrificed his daughter." Hamlet dubs Polonius "Jephthah," because he believes that he has paid for political preferment by yielding his daughter to the King. And when Polonius says that, if he is to be called Jephthah, he admits that like Jephthah he loves his daughter, Hamlet replies in characteristic vein, "Nay, that follows not"; meaning that it follows instead that like Jephthah he has sacrificed her. But when Polonius presses him to say what does follow, he conceals his real meaning, as his custom is, and diverts the old man's mind by answering the line from the ballad. As was the case with regard to Ophelia, Hamlet is reluctant to make the open charge against her father.
Thus in every instance in which Hamlet comes in contact with Ophelia, or refers to her, his actions and his words consistently point to the fact that he renounces her because he believes her to have thrust him aside while engaging in an intrigue with the King. And the fact that from this point of view there is a connected story of their relations told by the several interviews above discussed, that Hamlet's conduct and language in them all are adequately explained, and that a single belief of his accounts for each of them, is strong confirmation of the theory's correctness. It is in harmony with the general scheme of the drama also, all of whose important movements hinge on "purposes mistook"; and it furnishes Hamlet with an adequate motive for his treatment of Ophelia, and removes from him the stigma of mere brutishness or insanity. Coleridge well says that there must have been "some profound heart truth" under the story, and the theory herein advanced seems to disclose it.
David A. McKnight.
Washington, D. C., February 26, 1898.
[CLEWS TO EMERSON'S MYSTIC VERSE.]
(Third Paper.)
"When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."--Touchstone.
The phantasmal lords of life of the poem 'Experience,' which we considered at the close of the last paper, were presumably suggested to Emerson by the following lines from Tennyson's 'Mystic,' published in 1830 (Emerson imported these early volumets of young Tennyson, and never tired of praising them to his friends):--