The Works Alexander Brown Bell

LECTURE - SHAKESPEARES HEROINES

This was publicised as “Some of Shakespeares Heroines”. Which appears to  have been a popular topic at that time. As a brief survey of the newspaper archives shows that there were several lectures and lecturers presenting along this general theme then, clearly with a similar remit of bringing Shakespeare and what was considered “literature of a high order “ to the wider working population of Britain.

He notes that this was first delivered at Highfield Public Library, Sheffield, for the Corporation Libraries Committee, in October, 1902.

Shakespeare and Womanhood

It is always a pleasure to talk about Shakespeare; for he is not only our great national poet, but belongs to that select band of poets who seem to be inexhaustible. As you grow in years, you find, considerably to your astonishment, that there are poets whose work moves you to admiration, and you take them up with enthusiasm for a time. Then gradually that enthusiasm dies down, You feel as if you had extracted all the vital juices from their work, and you cast it aside as you would a sucked orange. It is not so with Shakespeare. The more you study him, the more you surrender yourself to his enchantment, the more you are astonished by the immense range of his interests and the unfathomable depths of his experience.

Moreover, While Shakespeare provides the scholar with an endless field for research, and even today, after three hundred years and more have gone, the student still finds fresh things to say about him, he also has riches which he yields up in another way to the plain man who, like myself, makes no pretension to Shakespearean scholarship. There is, in fact, no limit to the aspects which his writings present to our view; and, amid that embarrassment of choice, there are few I will not say more important, but at least few more interesting, than his attitude towards womanhood. 

John Ruskin, in what is probably the most popular of his writings, says that Shakespeare "has no heroes: he has only heroines", and that “the catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none.” 

Now that is rather a sweeping generalisation; and I am afraid that, like a good many more of Mr, Ruskin's sayings, we cannot, as the French say, take it to the foot of the letter. The “redemption” in ‘Much Ado about Nothing", for instance, is not brought about by the “wisdom and virtue" of Beatrice, but by the lucky accident of a watchman hearing a villain confess his villainy. ln fact, if Beatrice had had her way, she'd have made rather a mess of things; for she would have persuaded Benedick to kill Claudio, and the end would have been tragedy instead of a happy marriage. It is true that the tragedy of "Macbeth" all turns upon the fact that Macbeth, while physically brave, was a moral coward; yet we are bound to recognise that, in spite of, nay because of, his moral cowardice, Macbeth might have lived and died a fairly virtuous person if he had not been hounded on to the murder of Duncan by the bloodthirsty ambition of his wife. 

We realise, too, how dangerous it is to make such sweeping statements about Shakespeare as that I have quoted when we notice how his conception of womanhood changed in the course of the years. The superficial smartness of the heroines of his earlier plays covers something not far removed from shallowness. The two young ladies in “A Midsummer Night's Dream", for instance, are not particularly lovable persons. Even Beatrice, for all her charm and sparkle, is something of a minx; and I often wonder, considering that quick tongue of hers, what her life with Benedick was like after they had been married a year or two. You get a nobler, deeper type of womanly character in Portia, in the "Merchant of Venice"; and you come upon something graver and stronger still as you pass on to Isabella, and Hermione, and Imogen. 

We must remember, too, that not only did Shakespeare's conception of the ideal woman change as he grew older: his attitude towards women did not always remain the same. Everybody who has read his plays is aware that the sunny outlook on life which characterised the earlier work became overcast, and he entered upon what is known as his dark period. The clouds passed away in time, and he emerged into a term of greater poise and peace than he had known before; but, while that dark period lasted, his opinion of women was a very low one. Read "Timon of Athens", and you cannot help feeling that, when he wrote it, he doubted every woman's virtue, and suspected that even the saintliest to outward seeming was probably no better than she should be. 

It is generally accepted that there was a very intimate connection between Shakespeare's dark period, the period during which his great tragedies were written, and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. I find myself wondering sometimes, however, whether Shakespearean scholarship may not have got upon a false scent here. The Dark Lady's character was notorious, and Shakespeare seems to have been well aware of it. One cannot readily imagine, therefore, that he would have been torn to the very depths of his being because he found that she was no more faithful to him than she had been to other men.

A good many years ago, in preparing a lecture on another aspect of Shakespeare's work, I was very much struck by one or two facts which led me to wonder whether there was not some influence other than that of the Dark Lady at work, and, more particularity, whether the woman, whoever she was, who had appeared to let him down so badly that his mental equilibrium was upset, and his whole outlook upon life was jaundiced for a time, did not really let him down at all, but only appeared to do so. In other words, was the whole affair based on a misunderstanding--a misunderstanding so grave that it embittered Shakespeare's life for some years? Further, was the misunderstanding cleared up by Shakespeare's discovery that he had been mistaken? 

I only throw this out as an hypothesis, of course; but some of you may think it worth while following up as you read Shakespeare's plays. At any rate, it offers an explanation of some rather curious facts. We have all been struck by the serenity of the outlook on life, the mellow beauty, which characterises the plays Shakespeare wrote when his dark period passed away, the suggestion I ask you to consider is that the clouds broke up because somehow or another Shakespeare discovered that he had unwittingly done a grievous wrong; that he had suspected a woman friend of having caused him an injury of which she had never been guilty at all. 

Consider those latest plays of his. In "A Winter's Tale" you have a mother, in "Cymbeline a wife, and in Pericles" a young giri, subjected in each case to the severest trial which it is possible to conceive, yet coming triumphantly through it. Is it altogether too fanciful to suggest that in those three plays--for ‘Pericles” though in part an early work, was completed in late--Shakespeare was offering his Apologia for the wrong he had done to his friend? Anyhow, they a striking retraction of all the bitter and unworthy things he had written about women in “Timon” and elsewhere. And that view is supported by the last play of all. Something very remarkable must have happened to drive home to Shakespeare the fallibility of human judgement, and the call for charity towards others which our own need for forgiveness implies, and to make his sense of these truths the basic thought of “The Tempest". Read that play through, and mark how deeply Providence and prayer and pardon, are woven into the texture of it; and then ask yourself what sort of experience it was the outgrowth.

Before I pass from this matter of Shakespeare's changing views in regard to women, I want to stress one important point. Even when his opinion of womankind is at its lowest, and the innuendos he brings against women are at their worst and most revolting, his reverence for womanhood remains intact. His bitterness is largely due to the gulf which he believes to exist between women as they are and woman as she ought to be. And in that respect, if his plays do not altogether bear out that dictum of Mr, Ruskin's which I have made the jumping-off place for this lecture, they amply confirm the concluding portion of that passage from "Sesame and Lilies" I have quoted, in which we are told that the buckling on of a knight's armour by his lady's hand is no mere caprice of romantic passion but the type of an eternal truth — “ that the soul's armour is never well knit to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it, and that it is only when she braces it loosely that the honour of manhood fails".

I propose, therefore, in what time remains to me, to illustrate that truth from two of the best-known of Shakespeare's tragedies. I want to take two characters, or rather two pairs of characters--Romeo and Juliet,and Hamlet and Ophelia--and show you how, in the one case, a noble-hearted girl lifts a poor weak creature of a man up to something like her own level, and, in the other, how a man of fine parts and lofty character is lost and ruined because the woman upon whom he has set his affections proves weaker even than he.

When first we meet Romeo, he is a very callow youth indeed, and suffering badly from what is commonly known as calf-love. He has a great capacity for honest affection in him, no doubt; but, for want of serious purpose, it is all running to seed. He fancies himself in love with a certain cold beauty called Rosaline. She will have none of him, and he makes himself very miserable in consequence; but it is all a sentimental make-believe. If I may put it in rather a mixed-up was, he was in such a state of mind that he would not have been happy unless he had been miserable. A man whose heart and soul are full of real love would not speak of love in such an affected way as this:-- 

O brawling love. O loving hate. 

O anything of nothing first create. 

O heavy lightness, serious vanity. 

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, 

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, 

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is. 

This Love feel I, that feel no love in this, 

You may judge the sincerity of that woe-begone utterance from the fact that Romeo does not hesitate to break off in the middle of it in order to ask his cousin where they shall have dinner.

The other star-crossed lover of the piece is a mere girl when we see her first; and her child-like innocence of the world and its ways impresses us all the more by reason of its contrast with the calculating heartlessness of her mother, Lady Capulet, and the drivelling obscenity of that great, gross, garrulous piece of flesh, her Nurse.

When Lady Capulet sounds Juliet regarding her willingness to marry Juliet's answer:--"It is an honour that I dream not of" - stamps her at once as of a nobler clay than the worldly-minded mother. As for the Nurse, no sooner is the name of Count Paris mentioned than she bursts out with:-- 

A man, young lady! lady, such a man

As all the world--- Why, he's a man of wax!

That's all she sees in it. Count Paris has a fair exterior. He is well shaped and well-proportioned, and has a good complexion, in short, he's “a man of wax". What more could a reasonable girl want?

Come now to the famous balcony scene. Romeo and Juliet have met in the ballroom, Love has leapt up full statured in Juliet's breast. Romeo has discovered that, compared with his newly-born affection for Juliet, his sentimental passion for the haughty Rosaline is but “as moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine". Each has learned that the other bears a hated name, but that is no obstacle to love, Romeo leaves the ballroom only to wander about the grounds in the darkness, soliloquising on his new-found joy. Unawares, he finds himself under Juliet's window, where she is sitting after the ball with the warm Italian night air playing about her cheek. She, too, is bewailing her hard fate. Plucking a rose from the trellis-work by her side, she cries:-- 

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?..... 

What's in a name? that which we call a rose 

By any other name would smell as sweet. 

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, 

Retain that dear perfection that he owes

Without that title, Romeo, doff thy name, 

And for that name which is no part of thee,

Take all myself.

 Romeo, unseen, hears this confession, and takes Juliet at her word:

Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptised; 

henceforth I never will be Romeo. 

The whole scene is brimming over with romance and poetry, and passion; and yet we are conscious of a strain of pathos in it for which perhaps, we do not find it easy to account. Its origin, I think, may be found in the contrast between Juliet's immense superiority to Romeo and the completeness of her surrender to him. We feel, somehow, that she deserved a better mate than this sentimental trifler. If they had lived, she might, in time, have made him worthy of her; for he had great possibilities in him. Even already she had made him more in earnest, more of a man. 

Juliet's superiority lay in this--that she never lost touch with facts. Her emotions were as kean as Romeo's; she was as full of romance, and poetry, and passion as he was; but she never let them carry her away from the realities of things. You will notice that she does not, as a lesser woman would have done, deny or endeavour to whittle down, the open avowal of her love for Romeo which she knows quite well. Romeo must have overheard. Observe, too, how this simple girl who, in that fateful interview with her mother, had hardly a word to say for herself except one character-revealing sentence addressed to her nurse-see how she rises to the occasion, takes the entire responsibility upon her shoulders, thinks and acts for Romeo and herself, while Romeo--the man upon whom the burden of action and initiative should have fallen-- revels in delicious dreams. 

No sooner is Juliet assured that it is Romeo to whom she speaks, and that Romeo loves her, than she is alarmed for his safety. Love has made a world of difference to their two selves; but Juliet never loses sight of the fact that she is still a Capulet and Romeo is still a Montague, and that their love has made no difference at all to the ancient feud between their two families. If her kinsmen find Romeo where he is, they will kill him; and, though it means the ending of their delicious conference, she promptly confided her fear to Romeo. 

Romeo, from his perch among the clouds, cries airily:-- 

Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye 

Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet, 

And I am proof against their enmity. 

A very pretty speech, certainly; and no doubt Juliet thoroughly appreciated the compliment, But, if her cousin Tybalt, that “walking Lucifer match", as an old teacher of mine used to call him, had suddenly appeared round the corner, Romeo would probably have given his pretty speech the lie.

That was not a time for pretty speeches, but for prompt, decisive action. If Romeo had been worth his salt, he would have carried Juliet with him to friar Laurence’ cell, and bound her to him for life; then asked the Prince to make peace between their two families on the strength of the union. But Romeo's love for Juliet was a mew sensation, and the knowledge that Juliet returned that love was another new sensation; and Romeo was so wrapped up in them that he gave no thought to such a plain matter-of-fact thing as his duty to the girl who had given herself to him so unreservedly and at such peril to herself. He is ready enough to swear “by yonder blessed moon"; it is Juliet who has to arrange about sending the messenger who will learn from Romeo when and where they are to be married. 

Yet, with all her quiet practicality, and faithfulness to the thing that is, as distinct from the thing she would like it to be, there is nothing hard or harsh about Juliet. She can enjoy sentiment every bit as keenly as Romeo does, It is she who utters these exquisite Lines:-- 

Goodnight, goodnight! parting is such sweet sorrow 

That I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.

But she does not let sentiment master her and carry her up into a Cloud-Cuckoo-Town, as Romeo does. She keeps it in its place. She is ever mistress of her own soul. 

Next day, Juliet and Romeo are married at Friar Laurence’ cell. About an hour afterwards, Romeo and Tybalt happen to meet, and Tybalt tries to pick a quarrel with Romeo. Mercutio intervenes, and gets killed for his pains. Then Romeo, enraged at his friend's death, kills Tybalt. For his part in that brawl, Romeo is vanished from Verona; but, at the risk of his life, he climbs to Juliet's chamber under cover of the darkness to bid her farewell. 

Then Juliet has to face another crisis in her life. The, grim reality of banishment has sobered Romeo a little; and, at daybreak, as he takes his leave, he speaks words of cheerfulness and encouragement to his young wife:-- 

“Oh think'st thou we shall ever meet again?" she asks; and Romeo replies:--

I doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve 

For sweet discourses in our time to come.

But Juliet has the clearer vision of the future. She is looking over the balcony, watching Romeo climb down the rope ladder in the dim morning light; and she exclaims:-- 

O God, I have an ill-divining soul. 

Methinks I see, now thou art below,

As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.

Barely has Romeo escaped when Lady Capulet comes to tell Juliet that she is to be married to Count Paris. Old Capulet follows hard at his wife's heels, and Juliet keeps them both at arm's length as best she can. Both parents are heartless- the woman more so than the man-and they are enraged by the appearance, to them quite inexplicable, of force of character in the child they had calculated upon finding mere wax in their hands. But their rage spends itself at last, and Juliet is left once more alone with her Nurse.

The Nurse has been her confidante; she has been the go-between in arranging the secret marriage. Juliet thinks that surely she will find in her, at least a sympathetic heart, and turns to her with:-

O Nurse, how shall this be prevented? 

My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven; 

How shall that faith return again to earth 

Unless my husband send it me from heaven 

By leaving earth? Comfort me, counsel me. 

Alack, alack, that heaven should practise stratagems 

Upon so soft a subject as myself. 

What sayst thou? Hast thou not a word of joy? 

Some comfort, Nurse. 

And this is the comfort Juliet gets:-

Faith, here it is. 

Romeo is banished; and all the world to nothing 

That he does ne'er come back to challenge you; 

Or, if he do, it needs must be by stealth. 

Then, Since the case so stands as now it doth, 

I think it best you married with the County. 

O, he's a lovely gentleman! 

Romeo's a dish clout to him.

Instantly Juliet realises that, if she is to preserve her soul in that heartless household, she must do it alone and unaided. There must be no more confidences. Her former care-free girlish life is at an end; and she punctuates its close with a strange “Amen."

 "What?" cries the Nurse, surprised to find, as she thinks, Juliet so willing to take her advice. And Juliet replies, with bitter sarcasm;— 

Well, thou hast comforted me marvellous much. 

Go in; and tell my lady I am gone, 

Having displeased my father, to Laurence’ cell,

To make confession and to be absolved.

There is no need to tell you how Juliet got from Father Laureuce & potion which enabled her to counterfeit death, and so escape the marriage with Count Paris that threatened her, Look rather at the effect the rumour of her death has upon Romeo. 

As in banishment at Mantua, eagerly waiting for news of his wife, when his servant arrives with the tale that:-- 

Her body sleeps in Capel monument, 

And her immortal part with angels lives. 

The shock drives all the nonsense out of Romeo, and the real good stuff that was in him comes to the top at last. 

Juliet is dead--a fact he cannot sentimentalise away. There is no more toying with grief for him, All the conceits and fancies he used to indulge in have dropped out of his speech as he answers his servant with — 

Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars! 

Thou knowst my lodging: get me ink and paper, 

And hire post horses; I will hence tonight. 

It is thus that Romeo enters into his manhood. He is far from being heroic character yet, by any means, he is still swayed by the impulse of the moment. He has not learned that the patient endurance of loss is nobler than rash rebellion against it. But that is a lesson that only comes with the years; and, meanwhile, he has learned that the whole world, weighed in the balance against Juliet and her love, is worth nothing. -

Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might

Smote the chord of self, which, dying, passed in music out of sight. The thought of Juliet dead has done more for Romeo than even his knowledge of her living. Of course, if he had been completely master of his passions there would have been no tragedy; for Juliet was not dead. If Romeo had only had patience, Friar Laurence would have seen them reunited by and bye. Yet there is something noble even in the utter abandonment of his grief; and, somehow, though we feel that his suicide is rash, and worse than rash, the human heart rises up with its “Well done!” When it hears Romeo apostrophise the deadly potion he has purchased from the Apothecary: -- 

Come cordial, and not poison; go with me To Juliet's grave.

The story of Hamlet and Ophelia is a striking contrast to that we have just been considering, One is simple; the other is highly complex, Where Juliet is strong, Ophelia is weak; and, whereas Romeo errs through being over-rash, Hamlet errs through allowing thought to breed in him a fatal hesitancy when action is required. 

At the opening of the play, we find Hamlet brooding over his father's death, and rendered suspicious by the remarriage of his mother within a month of that sad event. He was passionately fond of both parents; And the doubts that have forced themselves into his mind torture him till he is almost ready to end them by taking his own life. 

Before time has dad an opportunity to assuage his grief, or to dull his suspicions, he meets his father's Ghost, and learns that his worst forebodings were only too true. Thenceforth life contains for him one purpose, and one purpose only--to be revenged on his uncle.

But how? The simple, straightforward way would have been to seek out the King immediately, and kill him then and there. That was Hamlets first passionate impulse when he heard the Ghost's story; and, if he had obeyed it, all would have been well. No doubt he would have obeyed it if Claudius had been beside him at the time. But Claudius was some distance away; and, as soon as the Ghost disappeared, the white heat of Hamlet's rage cooled down, and he began to think. 

That was the fatal weakness in Hamlet's character, thoughts crowded in upon him so thickly that they blurred his sight, and made it impossible for him to determine the right course of action. I suppose we have all experienced something of the same sort in a greater or less degree how when we have some important decision to make. Several courses of action lie open to us, and specious reasons are forthcoming for all of them, and even for doing nothing at all, maybe, out just letting things slide. Just look at Hamlet. First of all, he was not sure whether he should confide in his bosom friend Horatio, or not. Then he was not sure in which way he should kill his uncle, If any of you ever find yourselves in Hamlet's position, and feel it laid upon you as a sacred duty that you should go out and kill somebody, you will find, when you come to think things out, that there is a surprisingly wide range of choice before you of the ways in which you may commit a murder. Hamlet's is a refined nature, and he cannot bring himself to such a vulgar piece of butchery as sticking his uncle in cold blood. So he evades the difficulty for the time-being by determining to feign madness, so that he may choose the fitting moment for getting even with his uncle, and so make the murder, when it is committed, seem a little less ghastly. 

Note, too, how subtly, I spite of all Hamlet's humming and hawing, when swift action is required. Shakespeare keeps our sympathies from straying from his hero, by making him fully alive to his own weakness. Indeed, Hamlet sums up his own character for us when he complains how often--

The native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought, 

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turns awry, 

And lose the name of action. 

But there are two other points to be noticed in regard to Hamlet here, over and above his lack of resolution. From the time the Ghost speaks to him, he feels himself to be a man set apart--a man under a divine injunction to do a bit of work that is innately repulsive to him, and straitened till it is accomplished. He feels himself, in that regard, beyond the power of choice. He shrinks from the task before him, but dare not leave it undone.-- 

The time is out of joint:--O cursed spite 

that ever I was born to set it right, 

he cries. And again, after he has Killed Polonius,-- 

Heaven hath pleased it so, 

To punish me with this, and this with me, 

That I must be their scourge and Minister.

In fact, one feels, in watching the play, that, to use Goethe's words, Fate has planned the story; it issues from a deed of terror, and to deed of terror its hero is continually driven. 

The other point to be noted is that, while the revelation of his uncles treachery shakes his faith in his fellow-men, the discovery of his mother's share in the plot completely shatters his faith in womankind. There could not have been a more loving wife than she was to his father, he thought.-- 

Why, she would hang on him, 

As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on. 

And yet, within a month of her husband's death, she had married again-- 

Married with my uncle, 

My father's brother, but no more like my father 

Than I to Hercules. 

And so, to him, the conclusion of the whole matter is:"Frailty, thy name is woman!”

We see Hamlet, then, bowed down by the knowledge that he-is the chosen instrument for a deed of retribution which the innate weakness of his character renders almost impossible of accomplishment. We are face to face, in short, with the tragedy of a soul staggering, and ultimately falling, under a burden greater than its strength. Or, to use Goethe's famous metaphor, we see an oak tree planted in a costly vase, the oak tree grows, and, as its roots expand, they shatter the vase to pieces. 

In such a crisis as that in which Hamlet found himself, the love of a strong, true-hearted woman would have been Hamlet's salvation. Unfortunately, the woman whom Hamlet loved, and who returned his love, was neither strong nor true-hearted, Ophelia is the daughter of the King's Chamberlain, Polonius-- a man who has been a shrewd, but superficial, observer of men and things in his day, and is now fast falling into his dotage. |He hears that Hamlet has been paying his daughter attentions, and, thinking that the Prince is only amusing himself, and that Ophelia's reputation is in danger, he bids her deny herself to her lover. Thus, at the very time when Hamlet is staggering under the revelation which the Ghost has made to him, he is deprived of the solace of her companionship, and irritated by her refusal to see him. Naturally, he tortures himself with the thought that probably she, too, like his mother, is fickle and untrue:-- 

For life is thorny, and youth is vain, 

And to be wroth with one we love 

Doth work like madness in the brain. 

At last, to solve his doubts, he bursts in upon her privacy in the guise of a man bereft of his wits. “He falls to such perusal of my face As he would draw it”, says Ophelia, when describing the incident to her father. It is as if Hamlet would read her very soul. 

Then Polonius, thinking that perhaps he has misjudged Hamlet after all, hastens to tell the King and Queen that he has discovered the cause of Hamlet's madness, and to arrange the little plot-- quite an innocent one in itself, by the way, though it precipitates the tragedy-- which is to prove that cause the true one. 

The King and Polonius send for Hamlet to meet them in a certain room in the Castle at Elsinore, but arrange that he shall meet Ophelia there instead. Meanwhile, they hide themselves in order that, unseen, they may witness the encounter between the two lovers, Ophelia, simple and docile always, makes the fatal blunder of consenting to be a party to their stratagem.  

On the stage, the King and Polonius are usually found, in the scene which follows, revealing their presence to Hamlet by incautiously pushing their heads out from behind a curtain. There is no such Jack-in-the-box "business" in the play itself. Moreover,it is quite unnecessary, and destroys the subtlety of the scene as Shakespeare conceived it. in a later scene, Shakespeare makes Polonius get himself killed through inadvertently disclosing his presence behind the arras in the Queen's closet. Surely Shakespeare was not so barren of dramatic resource that he had to fall back upon the same stage trick twice in the same play. 

Hamlet, remember, comes into the room fully expecting to see Polonius and the King. The latter expressly says to the Queen in the scene which goes before this one:"We have closely sent for Hamlet hither". Hamlet did not , therefore, just blunder into the room by accident. But, though they have asked him to meet them there, he does not see them in the room when he arrives; and he waits for them to join him. Wrapped up in his own thoughts as usual, he does not notice at first that Ophelia is present. When he does see her, remember, she is in the attitude of prayer; and he addresses her in language which shows that he is still clinging to his faith in her, at least, out of all her sex-- 

Nymph, in thy orisons 

Be ail my sins remembered. 

This is Ophelia's great opportunity. Will she prove brave and open hearted, like Juliet? If she does, she has the chance to make of Hamlet what she pleases. Alas! instead of going to him and speaking the truth straight out, her very first words are one of those little insincerities from which some women never seem able to snake themselves free:-- 

Good my lord, 

How does your honour for this many a day? 

She is pretending, you see, and quite falsely, that the temporary break in their intercourse has been due to Hamlet's coldness, not to her father's command. Perhaps it is hardly fair to women to call that sort of thing insincerity. lt is no use trying to generalise about women; and one of the things we have great reason to be thankful for in these modern days is that the relations between the sexes are on a much franker footing. Still, it is the nature of the sex to be elusive--to seek to cover up their tracks, so to speak--and Ophelia chose one of their many ways of doing it. Men are so used to it that, as a rule, they are prompt to recognise it for what it is, and, indeed, rather enjoy it. But there are times when that sort of thing is sadly out of place--times when instead of amusing, it stings and maddens a man, and Hamlet happened to be in that frame of mind. Therefore, when Ophelia, woman-like, tries to put her lover in the wrong still further by returning his presents, and telling him that he had proved unkind, Hamlet's suspicions are at once aroused; and, Looking her straight in the eye, he demands of her: "Are you honest?" 

Many people think that Hamlet is inconsistent here; that the scene is unintelligible, and renders the whole play unintelligible. The inconsistency may be admitted; but is not the admission one of the highest possible tributes to the perfection of Shakespeare's art? 

Just consider for a moment. Here we have Hamlet urged on by filial affection and his sense of justice to avenge his father's murder, and conscious that, until that bitter business is ended, the dear delights of love are not for him. On the other hand, there is Ophelia, and he loves her. Is he to break her heart and ruin his own happiness, by a ruthless coldness? lf any of you have ever been, as Hamlet was, torn between conflicting duties, you will hardly consider it matter for reproach that you were swayed sometimes by the one and sometimes by the other, and that you did not always act with logical coherence and precision. So Hamlet, having first laid his scarred heart on the altar of duty in that terrible sentence:"I loved you not", bids Ophelia seek the friendly shelter of a nunnery from such arrant knaves as he--with a lingering hope, perhaps, at the back of his mind that, when his revenge is accomplished, he word be free to claim her as his own. 

Then suddenly he bethinks him of the errand upon which he had come, and the most natural question in the world rises to his lips. He had been waiting for Polonius, whom he had come expecting to see: who so likely to be able to explain the cause of Polonius' absence as Polonius' own daughter so Hamlet interrupts his slandering of himself to ask: "Where is your father?" 

It is a crucial moment, Hamlet's suspicions had been aroused before. They return upon him now with tenfold force. If Ophelia had only gives him proof of her love by warning him that he was being spied upon, she might have saved him in spite of all. At least she would have saved him his faith in womanhood. If she had even lied to him brazenly, you feel, she might have accomplished something. But no. She hesitates, and is lost. She fears her father, and dare not tell Hamlet the truth. Yet, loving Hamlet as she does, she cannot lie to aim without blenching, and the words:"At home, my lord", come with a guilty falter. 

That is the spark to Hamlet's gunpowder, "Let the door be shut upon him, that he play the fool nowhere but in his own house", he cries, he sees that Ophelia is lying to him, and at once he leaps to the conclusion that she, his soul's idol, is, like the rest of women, as false as hell; and his overcharged heart bursts forth into a torrent of hysterical and unmanly rage. When next he meets Ophelia in the play scene-- his words to her are instinct with mockery, not love. 

Perhaps you think I nave been too hard upon Ophelia. I have no wish to be. She was not a designing woman, She was not even consciously deceitful. She was only weak, and therefore to be pitied, not blamed. Indeed, it is her utter helplessness that makes her such a pathetic and attractive figure. Her father's harsh counsel grates upon her finely— strung nature. Her heart whispers to her higher truths than any to which he can give utterance. But she fears to act upon its promptings; and so, with neither guide nor friend to lean upon, she goes her solitary way, sorely beset on all sides, and buffeted most by the man who loved her best. For Hamlet did love her, in spite of all-- 

I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers

 Could not, with all their quantity of love, 

Make up my sun, 

is his heartbroken cry to the mourners round her grave. Therefore, if Hamlet had been a strong man, Ophelia's weakness might not have mattered much, while, if Ophelia had been a strong woman, She might have infused some of her strength into Hamlet. But Ophelia was little better than a child; and the help and counsel that Hamlet so sorely needed never reached him. It is quite in keeping with Ophelia's character that, when she nears of her father's death, she goes out of her wits. 

It is, to my thinking, one of the most beautiful touches in all Shakespeare what it is left to Horatio, the owe strong, honest man in all that servile court, to succour her, and bring her some relief in the extremity of her madness. lt is he who pleads with the Queen for her, and wins her that access to the royal presence which she desires. And Ophelia, distraught though she is, is not slow to feel that she has found a friend at last, and to reward him in her own sweet, womanly way. 

You remember that scene where she comes in with flowers in her apron, and a chaplet of weeds upon her head. If things had gone well with her, she would have been queen of Denmark some day. That wreath of wayside flowers was Ophelia's Coronation. The flowers in her apron she proceeds to give away; and perhaps most of us, when we watch her, think that is all there is in it. But that is to miss the whole point of the scene. Flowers had a language of their own in those days, which Shakespeare's audience knew well; and every word and gesture in the scene is packed with meaning. Ophelia does not give the flowers away indiscriminately: each goes to the right recipient. When she gives pansies and rosemary to her brother, it is, as he sees very well, “a document in madness--thoughts and remembrance fitted." “There's rosemary, that's for remembrance: pray you, love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts". When she gives fennel to the King, it is as the emblem of flattery, and columbines, it is as the emblem of ingratitude. Rue, the “herb of grace", she hands to the queen, and then takes some herself, saying "You must wear your rue with a difference", meaning that the Queen had a different reason for repentance than Ophelia had. The next flower that she picks up is a daisy; and she is on the point of giving it to Horatio when she bethinks herself. Nowadays, we generally regard the daisy as a symbol of modesty. ‘Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower", as Burns says. But in Shakespeare's time it was the emblem of dissimulation:-- 

Smooth dissimulation, skilled to grace 

A devil's purpose with an angel's face. 

She cannot, therefore, give a daisy to Horatio. Dissimulation and he have nothing in common, He is the type of faithful friendship. So she puts the daisy back into her apron again, and looks for a violet, the floral emblem off faithfulness, to give him instead. But she cannot find one, All she can do is to hold out her empty hand to him and say:-- 

"I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died".

Ophelia's final exit is of a piece with that scene for beauty. After singing: -- 

His beard was as white as snow, 

All flaxen was his poll: 

He is gone, he is gone, 

And we cast away moan;

God ha' mercy on his soul,-- 

as if conscious of her own approaching end she adds, like a parting benediction on the world she had found so graceless:--"And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God be wi' you", Any actress who plays Ophelia has failed to enter into the spirit of her part if she does not, after those lines, pass from the stage with the house in silence, as if hushed by a great bereavement.

A hapless pair of lovers, truly; and Ophelia the more hapless of the two. Hamlet did at least accomplish his purpose at the last. He did finish he work ‘that was given him to do, even though it cost him his love of his hearts blood to do it. All Ophelia's heartbreak brought her nothing but that crown of wild flowers. 

Return to the ABB Works Main Page: