"I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife."
What a remembrance, extorted from death, of the old love that he never could conceal from the mother's instinct which was so fond and clear! He listens thus to despair reclaiming former hopes, and it draws his spirit backward, so that the body cannot move and the tongue dare not break this sacred silence of his retrospection. Therefore, Laertes has plenty of time to rant like Pistol in a tavern. His exaggerated action plunges into the grave of Hamlet's reverie and breaks it up. The Prince is forced into disgust at hearing a man vaunt love against his own. All scruples are shrivelled up in anger; and he instinctively assumes the tone he hears. The old ironical disgust for sham makes the imitation perfect. Afterward, to Horatio, he acknowledges that he forgot himself:--
"But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me Into a towering passion."
And this passion broke open his respect and prudence, and let loose the first cry of his love that had ever reached the ears of others. Else it would have lain buried with Ophelia in the silence of her lover's breast.
It was too much,--to discover at such a moment what used to be his mother's expectations; to see the sprinkling of those flowers that should have been for marriage; to have the old conviction return, that marriage was impossible for him,--a man whose bed, watched by a ghost, could have no other tenant; to recall how he ousted love, that revenge might occupy. It was too much for this heart of sensitive and noble strain to see the dead girl, and catch through the rant of Laertes that her prince had indirectly caused her death. His solid flesh could not melt: the coffin chilled it. But how long could he listen to this man, whose affected furor showed him to be a person incapable of deep passion? It fans all that smoulders in him into smoke and flame. In the rage of a temperament whose trick it always was to baffle itself, and in the bitterness of being reminded by her cold beauty that he had to surrender it while it was too young to die,--it is too masterful. He bursts into Laertes's vein with its own style,--
"Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou,"
but soon checks himself with a half apology, and subsides.