HAMLET’S APOLOGY TO LAERTES.

Johnson, in commenting on the passage (V. ii. 237-255), says:  ’I wish Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the character of a good or a brave man to shelter himself in falsehood.’  And Seymour (according to Furness) thought the falsehood so ignoble that he rejected lines 239-250 as an interpolation!

I wish first to remark that we are mistaken when we suppose that Hamlet is here apologising specially for his behaviour to Laertes at Ophelia’s grave.  We naturally suppose this because he has told Horatio that he is sorry he ‘forgot himself’ on that occasion, and that he will court Laertes’ favours (V. ii. 75 ff.).  But what he says in that very passage shows that he is thinking chiefly of the greater wrong he has done Laertes by depriving him of his father: 

     For, by the image of my cause, I see
     The portraiture of his.

And it is also evident in the last words of the apology itself that he is referring in it to the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia: 

Sir, in this audience, Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil Free me so far in your most generous thoughts, That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house, And hurt my brother.

But now, as to the falsehood.  The charge is not to be set aside lightly; and, for my part, I confess that, while rejecting of course Johnson’s notion that Shakespeare wanted to paint ‘a good man,’ I have momentarily shared Johnson’s wish that Hamlet had made ‘some other defence’ than that of madness.  But I think the wish proceeds from failure to imagine the situation.

In the first place, what other defence can we wish Hamlet to have made?  I can think of none.  He cannot tell the truth.  He cannot say to Laertes, ‘I meant to stab the King, not your father.’  He cannot explain why he was unkind to Ophelia.  Even on the false supposition that he is referring simply to his behaviour at the grave, he can hardly say, I suppose, ’You ranted so abominably that you put me into a towering passion.’ Whatever he said, it would have to be more or less untrue.

Next, what moral difference is there between feigning insanity and asserting it?  If we are to blame Hamlet for the second, why not equally for the first?

And, finally, even if he were referring simply to his behaviour at the grave, his excuse, besides falling in with his whole plan of feigning insanity, would be as near the truth as any he could devise.  For we are not to take the account he gives to Horatio, that he was put in a passion by the bravery of Laertes’ grief, as the whole truth.  His raving over the grave is not mere acting.  On the contrary, that passage is the best card that the believers in Hamlet’s madness have to play.  He is really almost beside himself with grief as well as anger, half-maddened by the impossibility of explaining to Laertes how he has come to do what he has done, full of wild rage and then of sick despair at this wretched world which drives him to such deeds and such misery.  It is the same rage and despair that mingle with other feelings in his outbreak to Ophelia in the Nunnery-scene.  But of all this, even if he were clearly conscious of it, he cannot speak to Horatio; for his love to Ophelia is a subject on which he has never opened his lips to his friend.