OPHELIA (Sings.)

        They bore him bare-faced on the bier

        And in his grave rained many a tear.

Fare you well, my dove.

LAERTES         Hadst thou thy wits and didst persuade revenge

It could not move thus.

OPHELIA         You must sing ‘a-down a-down’, an you call him ‘a-down-a’. O how the wheel becomes it. It is the false steward that stole his master’s daughter.

LAERTES         This nothing’s more than matter.      (4.5.160-168)

Ophelia once again sings a fragment of a mourning song, obsessively reimagining a funeral in which the body is not decently shrouded, let alone concealed by coffin and pall, but bare-faced on the bier—so that the suggestion that the mourners in his grave rained many a tear is all too easily transferred to the body itself, rain falling on his exposed, pathetically vulnerable face. Fare you well, my dove, would be more appropriate addressed to a lover than to father (or brother); Ophelia’s muddled, trying to find some kind of order in her abandonment, her sense of being utterly bereft: why does everyone she loves have to leave her? (She doesn’t seem to recognise Laertes.) Why can’t love (present here only as an implicit rhyme, dove) last?

Laertes seems to speak both to and past her: hadst thou thy wits and didst persuade revenge it could not move thus; even if you were urging me to avenge our father’s death, and whatever has brought you to this state, it wouldn’t be as effective a motivation as the sight of you in this state! This isn’t what Ophelia wants to hear, she wants the others—not just  her brother—to join in with her song, to sing the refrain: you must sing ‘a-down a-down’, an you call him ‘a-down-a’, back and forth, answering each other. O how the wheel becomes it, notoriously opaque, but perhaps wheel here is the refrain, the possibility that in this fragmented nonsense, something might still add up, fit together, make sense. But it’s only fleeting, as she changes her focus (her tune) again: it is the false steward that stole his master’s daughter, and it doesn’t really matter if this is an actual story (many possible analogues) or a version of her relationship with Hamlet, what matters again is both the betrayal and Ophelia attempting to find some shape in narrative, a precedent in story or song, that will make sense of her plight, that will enable her to feel less alone.

This nothing’s more than matter, suggests Laertes; it doesn’t need to make sense to make sense.