object, and feel its highest pleasure in acts of self-denial. It was rather of that kind which women best appreciate—an ardent passion, not a sentimental devotion ; and hence its tinge of selfishness. Yet, having put on his antic disposition with the trappings and suits of madness, he might feel that the kindest act he could perform towards Ophelia would be to concur with her in breaking off their courtship. He might, indeed, have allowed others to tell her that he had gone mad, and have saved her a great fright and agitation of mind ; but, under the circumstances, it cannot be considered unnatural
that he should selfishly enough have rushed into her presence
to take leave of her in the mad pantomime which she describes. His conduct to Ophelia is a mixture of feigned madness, of the selfishness of passion blasted by the cursed blight of fate, of harshness which he assumes to protect himself from an affection which he feels hostile to the present purpose of his life, and of that degree of real unsoundness, his unfeigned “weakness and melancholy,” which is the subsoil of his mind. In the following scene the King explains to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the condition of the Prince in a manner
which implies that at that time he entertained no doubt of the
reality of his madness. “Something have you heard Of Hamlet's transformation ; so I call it, Since not the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was.
What it should be,
More than his father's death, that thus hath put him So much from the understanding of himself, I cannot dream of.”
The King's anxiety to ascertain “if ought to us unknown afflicts him thus,” indicates the unrest of his conscience,
and the fear that some knowledge of his own great crime may lie at the bottom of his nephew's inward and outward transformation. The same fearful anxiety shews itself im mediately afterwards, when the vain half-doting Polonius
