But look! amazement on thy mother sits; O, step between her and her fighting soul.
The queen also, with all her faults, remains constant in her affection for Hamlet, and “lives, almost, by his looks.” Ophelia is constant in her love,—to insanity and a watery grave; and Hamlet makes fine _speeches_ on constancy of purpose. His soliloquy in act first, scene fifth, is in a noble strain:
“Remember thee!” Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat, In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records, . . . . . . . . And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, etc.
But his “remembrance” is like that of a man who “beholdeth his natural face in a glass, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.”
The word _craft_ properly signifies art, ability, dexterity, skill, as well as cunning and dissimulation—and all these qualities have a close relation to discretion.
The _pretended_ madness of Hamlet is therefore illustrative of the theme; just as the _real_ madness of Lear is illustrative of the theme of that play. The dissimulation of Hamlet, however, is not such as to lessen our esteem for his character. Surrounded as he is with spies and enemies, we feel that it is a justifiable stratagem. It is worthy of remark that Edgar employs a similar means of defense in the Play of King Lear; and that as Shakspeare’s love of contrast has led him thus to oppose the assumed madness of Edgar to the real madness of Lear, so here we have the real madness of Ophelia opposed to the assumed madness of Hamlet.
Hamlet displays craft also (but still a justifiable craft,) in his device of the play, “to catch the conscience of the king.” And when he has succeeded, he triumphs in this proof of his own skill, with a very natural vanity. “Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers, (if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me,) etc., get me a fellowship in a cry of players?” In his interview with his mother, (the picture scene,) he dwells chiefly on her _want of discernment_; and, at the conclusion of the scene, alluding to his “two schoolfellows,” he boasts that he will “delve one yard below their mines, and blow them at the moon;” a feat which he very fully accomplishes. But after all he feels and acknowledges that he is a mere instrument in the hands of a higher power.