When Hamlet explains to Polonius that he is reading slanders, and then describes the old man himself as having a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams, yet holds it hardly fair to have it thus set down,--"For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward,"--Polonius, who is nothing if not satirical upon himself, muses apart, saying, "Though this be madness, yet there's method in 't;" and there he blundered as patly into Shakspeare's secret as he did into his own death.
And why do so many actors make Hamlet appear to be conscious of the manɶuvre to throw Ophelia in his way that the King and Polonius may mark his tone from the place where they hide? Shakspeare has left no loop-hole for this supposition that Hamlet, observing the trick, assumes a tone of flightiness towards Ophelia, in order to throw off the spies and make them infer that he is mad. The scene being over, the King is wrong when he says,--
"Love! his affections do not that way tend;"
"Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little, Was not like madness."
Of course it was not; and the whole scene with Ophelia is ruined for Shakspeare's purpose by this modern contrivance of the theatre to deprive Hamlet of his spontaneous and uncalculating mood.
Otto Ludwig notices that his madness is "alluded to by Ophelia as having broken out between the first and second acts; and that is another strange thing in Shakspeare. Then, too, the style, if it was dissimulation, is such as to bring to pass the opposite of what he seems to have intended. So far from being disguised by it he is rather betrayed. And what is the use of any feigning when he does things like that of contriving the mock play? For that betrays him to the King more than it does the King to him. It makes the situation all awry, because the King must now know on what footing he is with Hamlet. At all events, the courtiers keep telling how danger is threatened to the King from Hamlet: they have no means of fathoming the King's offence. They merely presage some danger to the King, and they manifest no surprise. Hamlet must be conscious that he would be in great peril if the King knew that he knew every thing; the King would be put on his defence, and he was quite capable of contriving another murder to forestall retribution for the first one. Why, then, does he keep on feigning? Yet we do not observe that he hits upon any expedients to meet this possible case; it does not even occur to him before he concocts the trial-scene."