Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/33

 of heaven. The ruin of an ideal leaves him cruelly unjust to the creature of flesh and blood. It is the strangest love-story on record. Never throughout the play is there one simple and sincere word uttered by lover to lover. The only true meeting of Hamlet and Ophelia is the speechless interview in which he reads her soul, despairs, and takes a silent and final farewell. Even in the letter, written prior to the terrible announcements of the Ghost, there is a conventional address and a baffling conclusion. After the silent parting, no true word, except when passion carries him away to undeserved reproach, is uttered by Hamlet to Ophelia. His love has for the first time its outbreak at her grave, when the pity of it for a moment restores his lost ideal. Never to Horatio, never to himself in soliloquy, does he utter the name of Ophelia.

Whether Shakespeare's choice and treatment of the Hamlet story was in any way connected with the history of Leicester, Essex, and the mother of Essex, or with the history of Mary Queen of Scots and Darnley, cannot be considered here. I do not think that a good case has been made out for either hypothesis.

The references to other plays of Shakespeare than Hamlet are to act, scene, and line as found in the Globe Shakespeare.

I have to thank two learned students of Elizabethan literature, Mr. W. J. Craig, editor of The Oxford Shakespeare, and Mr. H. C. Hart, for aid kindly given to me in the preparation of this volume.