LAERTES Thought and afflictions, passion, hell itself
She turns to favour and to prettiness.
OPHELIA
(Sings.)
And will ’a not come again?
And will ’a not come again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy deathbed.
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
Flaxen was his poll.
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God a’ mercy on his soul.
And of all Christians’ souls. God buy you. [Exit.] (4.5.180-192)
Thoughts and afflictions, passion, hell itself she turns to favour and to prettiness. Laertes’s line can be overlooked because of how the desperate pathos, the sheer spectacle of Ophelia can dominate the scene, but it’s key, a kind of despairing, bitter wonder. It’s Laertes as (literary) critic: is this what art does, is suffering somehow bearable if you put it into song, dramatize it? No, the answer would usually be, in modern productions, this can’t be allowed to work like that. Ophelia can be angry as well as pathetic, she can chant furiously, harshly, rather than warbling sweetly. Prettiness in particular is very readily made ironic, its polysyllables and double-t able to be mockingly trivialised—prettiness? all that deep pain? that baffled bereftness?
But Ophelia carries on, singing, chanting, howling the truth. And will ’a not come again? And will ’a not come again? Is this it, the simple fact of death? No, no, he is dead—repeating it, yet again, as if to a child—go to thy deathbed. And you could be too… He never will come again. (It’s Polonius, but it’s Hamlet too, and a world of loss and abandonment.) His beard was as white as snow, flaxen was his poll. White haired, white-bearded, an old man, but too soon… (And there’s scope for Gertrude in particular to be arrested by this, if it’s a description of Old Hamlet, as much as of Polonius.) But it doesn’t have to describe Polonius, even, for the truth of loss to resound, bell-like, a terrible tolling: he is gone, he is gone, and we cast away moan. All this lamentation, it passes too. It doesn’t change anything.
A kind of conclusion? God ’a mercy on his soul, that’s all that can be hoped for, prayed for now. And of all Christian souls, all of us, all of us, and me, me. God buy you, God be with you. And with me, with me.
