Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/174

 When Hamlet explains to Polonius that he is reading slanders, and then describes the old man himself as having a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams, yet holds it hardly fair to have it thus set down,—"For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward,"—Polonius, who is nothing if not satirical upon himself, muses apart, saying, "Though this be madness, yet there's method in 't;" and there he blundered as patly into Shakspeare's secret as he did into his own death.

And why do so many actors make Hamlet appear to be conscious of the manœuvre to throw Ophelia in his way that the King and Polonius may mark his tone from the place where they hide? Shakspeare has left no loop-*hole for this supposition that Hamlet, observing the trick, assumes a tone of flightiness towards Ophelia, in order to throw off the spies and make them infer that he is mad. The scene being over, the King is wrong when he says,—

"Love! his affections do not that way tend;"

but right when he adds,—

"Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little, Was not like madness."

Of course it was not; and the whole scene with Ophelia is ruined for Shakspeare's purpose by this modern contrivance of the theatre to deprive Hamlet of his spontaneous and uncalculating mood.

Otto Ludwig notices that his madness is "alluded to by Ophelia as having broken out between the first and