Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/172

 accounting for symptoms of madness, but to be making a confidant of his mother; he begs her not to betray the secret object of his strange behavior. This seems to her to be the very quintessence of madness, to confess to her that he is feigning it out of craft, and to suppose that she would not apprise her husband, who must be the special object of that craft and most in danger from it. He must be indeed preposterously mad; so in parting she pretends to receive his confidential disclosure:—

"Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, And breath of life, I have no life to breathe What thou hast said to me."

She may safely promise that, when she means to repair to the King with quite a different version of Hamlet's condition, the very one upon which he counts to keep the King deceived. And in the next scene she conveys her strong impression to him:—

What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?

Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit, Behind the arras hearing something stir, He whips his rapier out, and cries, "A rat!" And in his brainish apprehension kills The unseen good old man.

She is the mother of the physiological criticism which issues from insane asylums to wonder why Hamlet is not an inmate: and Hamlet himself, by deceiving his mother, furnished to psychological criticism the text that he was mad in craft. Between the lines of the genuine Hamlet you can read that Shakspeare belonged to neither school.