“And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!— Pray you, undo this button; thank you, sir,— Do you see this? Look on her—look—her lips— Look there, look there!”[75:1]
Lear is dead; he has rejoined his belovèd daughter; he has been “dismissed with calm of mind, all passion spent.” What greater consummation could we desire?
There is little need to insist upon the grandeur and pathos of Lear, and, happily, with our next subject of study, the need is equally small. Yet Shakespeare’s presentation of Ophelia is utterly different from his presentation of Lear. The madness of Lear we are able to trace from its first symptoms; we follow it through all its involutions and are present at its partial cure. Ophelia we see but once after she “becomes distract.” A brief word of introduction, and she appears; a few broken words and snatches of song and she has left us. A brief re-entry and she has passed us again, and all is over—all save the report of her death. Lear is an old man, predisposed to insanity by a passionate temper and a mind weakened by old age. Ophelia is a young girl, a “Rose of May,” whose loss of reason excites in us not so much terror as sheer pity. With Lear the crisis is brought on by thwartings of the will, followed by the severest physical exposure and shock. With Ophelia the cause is mental shock following the deepest of sorrows. Lear dies half-sane; Ophelia is never restored to her right mind,—her death is not shewn to us like that of Lear. There is a reason for these differences. Ophelia is no tragic personage and our sympathies are not to remain for long with her misery. She must disappear, lest she should destroy all our interest in the main plot. And thus we must not expect to find the depth in her character which we find in the character of Lear.
Before her affliction wins for her our sympathy, Ophelia stands in our estimation far below Shakespeare’s other heroines. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that at times, like Isabella in “Measure for Measure,” she is actually repellent, and for exactly the opposite reason. She is passive and reserved, gentle to the point of weakness, a tool in the hand of any man who could gain her confidence. This is the reason for her mind giving way. Throughout her life, she has leaned for support, not on her own strength, but upon the strength of her father and her brother. Her father is murdered, her lover distracted, her brother far away—and Ophelia herself is unable to stand alone.