HAMLET Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves – believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. (3.1.120-129)
Get thee to a nunnery! and whether Hamlet means convent (where you’ll be safe, shut away from desire, from the world, from men) or brothel, it doesn’t make much difference; either he’s yelling at Ophelia, calling her a whore, or he’s focusing his disgust with himself and with the whole sorry state of being human on her. I think I’d incline to the convent, it seems more of a piece with Hamlet’s twisted, self-loathing logic in the rest of the speech, expressed as a kind of bitter, abusive, hectoring concern. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? Avoid all that, don’t bring anyone else into this terrible world. Men are appalling, and I include myself in that: I am myself indifferent honest, he continues, I’m not a BAD person, I do my best, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. Actually I’m a terrible person, I wish I’d never been born. (Hamlet’s denial of reproductive futurity to Ophelia parallels his own nihilism, his own suicidal ideation.) I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious—not on current evidence, mate, you’re mostly quite quiet, a bit mardy, doing your tortured soul thing, and revengeful is the thing you’re notably failing to be, you’re just acting out—but he ploughs on, I have more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. I’m a really, really bad bastard; there’s not enough hours in the day to undertake all my villainy, that’s if I were ever able to work out how to do it. No, really, I’m just a TERRIBLE PERSON. (There’s a glimpse of Lear here: ‘I will do such things— | What they are yet I know not but they shall be | The terrors of the earth!, 2.4.) What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves – believe none of us. All men are bastards. All of us, that’s all we can do, all we can be, we have no choice. And you mustn’t believe a word we say! A desperate final plea, even, as if he can’t believe what he’s saying, how appallingly he’s behaving, as she looks at him with outrage, anguish, fear. So he goes again, running out of steam, repeating again his ridiculous instruction: go thy ways to a nunnery. Go on.
As a campaign against domestic/intimate partner violence in New Zealand put it, uncompromisingly, ‘she is not your rehab’…