Needless to say, directors have to make some choices. Helena Faucit Martin, Shakespeare's Female Characters, Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh, 1888. It comes from the head, and not from the heart - it is a string of euphemisms, which almost justifies Laertes' warning to his sister, that the "trifling of Hamlet's favour" is but "the perfume and suppliance of a minute." Hamlet loves, I have always felt, only in a dreamy, imaginative way, with a love as deep, perhaps, as can be known by a nature fuller of thought and contemplation than of sympathy and passion. The very language of his letter to Ophelia, which Polonius reads to the king and queen, has not the true ring in it. I do not forget what he says at her grave: But I weigh his actions against his words, and find them here of little worth. I cannot, therefore, think that Hamlet comes out well in his relations with Ophelia. Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson, Shakespeare's Heroines:Characteristics of Women (1889), AMS Press, New York, 1967. I do think, with submission, that the love of Hamlet for Ophelia is deep, is real, and is precisely the kind of love which such a man as Hamlet would feel for such a woman as Ophelia. The author of the finest remarks I have yet seen on the play and the character of Hamlet, leans to this opinion. I have even heard it denied that Hamlet did love Ophelia.
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