The strain of self-accusation is loud and clear. Where’s your father?īetween the two injunctions to go to a nunnery, Hamlet presents a fairly exhaustive revelation of his new selfhood. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. The lecture begins with the scene’s signature line: Hamlet proceeds to give Ophelia in a wild and extreme form the same lesson that Laertes and Polonius have urged on her.
His letters and tokens, the life of another Hamlet, a man who wanted above all to be believed in his love suit, now rest in his hands-the ocular proof that his suit is not believed. Ophelia is twice unsuccessful at handing back the packet (‘I pray you now receive them,’ ‘Take these again’), and in the end seems to force it into his hands (‘There, my lord’). Women, love, sweetness, gifts, and marriage are no longer for him.
As he says more conventionally later in the scene, ‘I did love you once’. He is announcing in words what the wordless visit conveyed. Metrical stress puts a telling spin on the first ‘I’ that probably passes to the second: Not I, I never gave you aught. Obeying her instructions, Ophelia returns his ‘remembrances.’ Hamlet first denies giving her anything: ‘No, not I. As this scene unfolds, we will learn that fair is a highly charged word for Hamlet. But I hear bitter sarcasm in ‘The fair Ophelia!’ It was, after all, the summary site of this fairness, her countenance, that Hamlet visited her closet to hold before him and stare at closely.
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