HAMLET         I did love you once.

OPHELIA        Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET         You should not have believed me. For virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.

OPHELIA        I was the more deceived.      (3.1.114-119)

Oooof. The pain here, lashing out, Hamlet being so awful, but also in such agony. I did love you once. It can be sarcastic, detached, isn’t that incredible? who’d believe it? but better, I think, anguished: in another life, a life in which love was a possible thing, I loved you, I really did. And Ophelia can answer angrily: indeed, my lord, you made me believe so, you absolute manipulative bastard, playing games, taking me for a fool—or else desperate, confused, so sad, I thought you did, I thought it was the real thing, you were so lovely. (What she doesn’t ever say is, and I loved you too; is that implicit?) Hamlet has to push back: you should not have believed me; the whole thing seems unbelievable now. I wouldn’t believe me, I wouldn’t trust me, I wouldn’t trust anyone. Then another sting, sarcastic, moralising, but also self-reproaching (probably), bleak: for virtue cannot inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I’m too far gone, too human, you can’t redeem me, loving you can’t redeem me, you loving me can’t save me. Even if you cut away a diseased branch and graft on a new one, the disease can remain, deep in the root. Loving people isn’t enough, they reject you, they die. And so I loved you not. I can’t love anyone. I was the more deceived, is all Ophelia can reply, angry, perhaps, or a howl of anguish, conscious all the time that this incredibly painful, private conversation is being listened to by her father, by the king. How much Hamlet is playing to that hidden audience is a choice that actors must make.