._ Hamlet
means it was a desecration of the Capitol.]

[Footnote 3: He cannot be familiar with his mother, so avoids her--will
not sit by her, cannot, indeed, bear to be near her. But he loves and
hopes in Ophelia still.]

[Footnote 4: '--Did I not tell you so?']

[Footnote 5: This speech and the next are not in the _Q._, but are
shadowed in the _1st Q._]

[Footnote 6: _--consenting_.]

[Footnote 7: In _1st Quarto_, 'contrary.'

Hamlet hints, probing her character--hoping her unable to understand. It
is the festering soreness of his feeling concerning his mother, making
him doubt with the haunting agony of a loathed possibility, that
prompts, urges, forces from him his ugly speeches--nowise to be
justified, only to be largely excused in his sickening consciousness of
his mother's presence. Such pain as Hamlet's, the ferment of subverted
love and reverence, may lightly bear the blame of hideous manners,
seeing, they spring from no wantonness, but from the writhing of
tortured and helpless Purity. Good manners may be as impossible as out
of place in the presence of shameless evil.]

[Footnote 8: Ophelia bears with him for his own and his madness' sake,
and is less uneasy because of the presence of his mother. To account
_satisfactorily_ for Hamlet's speeches to her, is not easy. The freer
custom of the age, freer to an extent hardly credible in this, will not
_satisfy_ the lovers of Hamlet, although it must have _some_ weight. The
necessity for talking madly, because he is in the presence of his uncle,
and perhaps, to that end, for uttering whatever comes to him, without
pause for choice, might give us another hair's-weight. Also he may be
supposed confident that Ophelia would not understand him, while his
uncle would naturally set such worse than improprieties down to wildest
madness. But I suspect that here as before (123), Shakepere would show
Hamlet's soul full of bitterest, passionate loathing; his mother has
compelled him to think of horrors and women together, so turning their
preciousness into a disgust; and this feeling, his assumed madhess
allows him to indulge and partly relieve by utterance. Could he have
provoked Ophelia to rebuke him with the severity he courted, such rebuke
would have been joy to him. Perhaps yet a small addition of weight to
the scale of his excuse may be found in his excitement about his play,
and the necessity for keeping down that excitement. Suggestion is easier
than judgment.