reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (III. iv. 150):

Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker.]

[Footnote 45: If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's
that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length--the
speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it _is_'--he will understand what,
surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost
boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about
his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so;
and still less that she understood it so).]

[Footnote 46: See Note D.]

[Footnote 47: See p. 13.]

[Footnote 48: _E.g._ in the transition, referred to above, from
desire for vengeance into the wish never to have been born; in
the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue'; in the scene at Ophelia's grave.
The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the psychological
movement in these passages.]

[Footnote 49: Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably
intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of
self-control. The Queen's description of him (V. i. 307),

This is mere madness;
And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
Anon, as patient as the female dove,
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.

may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to
excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see
further Note G.]

[Footnote 50: Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.]

[Footnote 51: Cf. _Measure for Measure_, IV. iv. 23, 'This deed
... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.']

[Footnote 52: III. ii. 196 ff., IV. vii. 111 ff.:
_e.g._,

Purpose is but the slave to _memory_,
Of violent birth but poor validity.]

[Footnote 53: So, before, he had said to him:

And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Would'st thou not stir in this.

On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance see Note D.]

LECTURE IV

HAMLET

The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's
character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone,
explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To
attempt such a demonstration here would obv