He had been thinking of death only as the passing away of the present with its troubles; here comes the recollection that death has its own troubles—its own thoughts, its own consciousness: if it be a sleep, it has its dreams. 'What dreams may come' means, 'the sort of dreams that may come'; the emphasis is on the what, not on the may; there is no question whether dreams will come, but there is question of the character of the dreams. This consideration is what makes calamity so long-lived! 'For who would bear the multiform ills of life'—he alludes to his own wrongs, but mingles, in his generalizing way, others of those most common to humanity, and refers to the special cure for some of his own which was close to his hand—'who would bear these things if he could, as I can, make his quietus with a bare bodkin'—that is, by slaying his enemy—'who would then bear them, but that he fears the future, and the divine judgment upon his life and actions—that conscience makes a coward of him!'[14]
To run, not the risk of death, but the risks that attend upon and follow death, Hamlet must be certain of what he is about; he must be sure it is a right thing he does, or he will leave it undone. Compare his speech, 250, 'Does it not, &c.':—by the time he speaks this speech, he has had perfect proof, and asserts the righteousness of taking vengeance in almost an agony of appeal to Horatio.
The more continuous and the more formally logical a soliloquy, the less natural it is. The logic should be all there, but latent; the bones of it should not show: they do not show here.]
[Footnote 5: One 'well' only in Q.]
[Footnote 6: He does not want to take them back, and so sever even that weak bond between them. He has not given her up.]
[Footnote 7: The Q. reading seems best. The perfume of his gifts was the sweet words with which they were given; those words having lost their savour, the mere gifts were worth nothing.]
[Footnote 8: Released from the commands her father had laid upon her, and emboldened by the queen's approval of more than the old relation between them, she would timidly draw Hamlet back to the past—to love and a sound mind.]
[Footnote 9: I do not here suppose a noise or movement of the arras, or think that the talk from this point bears the mark of the madness he would have assumed on the least suspicion of espial. His distrust of Ophelia comes from a far deeper source—suspicion of all women, grown doubtful to him through his mother. Hopeless for her, he would give his life to know that Ophelia was not like her. Hence the cruel things he says to her here and elsewhere; they are the brood of a heart haunted with horrible, alas! too excusable phantoms of distrust. A man wretched as Hamlet must be forgiven for being rude; it is love suppressed, love that can neither breathe nor burn, that makes him rude. His horrid insinuations are a hungry challenge to indignant rejection. He would sting Ophelia to defence of herself and her sex. But, either from her love, or from gentleness to his supposed madness, as afterwards in the play-scene, or from the poverty and weakness of a nature so fathered and so brothered, she hears, and says nothing. 139.]
[Footnote 10: Honesty is here figured as a porter,—just after, as a porter that may be corrupted.]
[Footnote 11: If the Folio reading is right, commerce means companionship; if the Quarto reading, then it means intercourse. Note then constantly for our than.]