[Footnote 6: —consenting.]
[Footnote 7: In 1st Quarto, 'contrary.'
Hamlet hints, probing her character—hoping her unable to understand. It is the festering soreness of his feeling concerning his mother, making him doubt with the haunting agony of a loathed possibility, that prompts, urges, forces from him his ugly speeches—nowise to be justified, only to be largely excused in his sickening consciousness of his mother's presence. Such pain as Hamlet's, the ferment of subverted love and reverence, may lightly bear the blame of hideous manners, seeing, they spring from no wantonness, but from the writhing of tortured and helpless Purity. Good manners may be as impossible as out of place in the presence of shameless evil.]
[Footnote 8: Ophelia bears with him for his own and his madness' sake, and is less uneasy because of the presence of his mother. To account satisfactorily for Hamlet's speeches to her, is not easy. The freer custom of the age, freer to an extent hardly credible in this, will not satisfy the lovers of Hamlet, although it must have some weight. The necessity for talking madly, because he is in the presence of his uncle, and perhaps, to that end, for uttering whatever comes to him, without pause for choice, might give us another hair's-weight. Also he may be supposed confident that Ophelia would not understand him, while his uncle would naturally set such worse than improprieties down to wildest madness. But I suspect that here as before (123), Shakepere would show Hamlet's soul full of bitterest, passionate loathing; his mother has compelled him to think of horrors and women together, so turning their preciousness into a disgust; and this feeling, his assumed madhess allows him to indulge and partly relieve by utterance. Could he have provoked Ophelia to rebuke him with the severity he courted, such rebuke would have been joy to him. Perhaps yet a small addition of weight to the scale of his excuse may be found in his excitement about his play, and the necessity for keeping down that excitement. Suggestion is easier than judgment.]
[Footnote 9: 'here's for the jig-maker! he's the right man!' Or perhaps he is claiming the part as his own: 'I am your only jig-maker!']
[Footnote 10: This needs not be taken for the exact time. The statement notwithstanding suggests something like two months between the first and second acts, for in the first, Hamlet says his father has not been dead two months. 24. We are not bound to take it for more than a rough approximation; Ophelia would make the best of things for the queen, who is very kind to her.]
[Footnote 11: the fur of the sable.]
[Footnote 12: 1st Q.
nay then there's some Likelyhood, a gentlemans death may outliue memorie, But by my faith &c.]
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