I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?

(Hamlet in Hamlet by William Shakespeare)

There is something uniquely embarrassing about such a direct declaration of love. Hamlet’s ‘I loved Ophelia’ hits hard because it comes as an angry defence to the suggestion that he did not. The line springs out at us as a body from a grave; a maimed lion roaring back to life; back to wounded feeling.

The loving lion’s antagonist is Laertes, Ophelia’s brother, who has moments before taken up his sister in his arms. It is the brother in the role of ardent lover that incenses Hamlet’s rage; the brother that leaps into the grave so the stage directions tell us. Hamlet is having none of it: lover must come before brother. Lover must claim first and only soil-space within the beloved’s grave.

Hamlet claims that Laertes grief is nothing but a ‘false emphasis’, a charade; and Laertes himself a ‘wonder-wounded hearer’ who stands by waiting for the ‘wandering stars’ to conjure grief for him. Hamlet is not impressed by Laertes’s passive form of grieving. This is not how to grieve.

And so Hamlet aggressively announces himself to the punily grieving Laertes - so far unaware of his presence - because it seems obvious to Hamlet at least that he should be chief mourner. This second declaration is Hamlet’s first real acceptance of being and it marks the end of the existential snare that has caught him so far: the overwhelming question of ‘to be or no to be?’ Here he is, by the graveside of his beloved, ready to claim the reality of his love. Tragically, he embraces love and life too late, which is what makes this declaration so absurd and doubly embarrassing:

It is I,

Hamlet the Dane!

What follows is an undignified love-scuffle between two men determined to prove the superiority of their affection. Hamlet’s ‘I loved Ophelia’ soon turns into a wager, an inflated emotional bet. Forty thousand brothers - 40,00 of Laertes - would not equal in sum the quantity of his love for Ophelia. And then comes the vital question, the summation of this extravagant declaration: ‘what would thou do for her?’

What do you intend to do? What can you do for her? What will you do for her? Hamlet the Dane, who has failed to act, who has been emotionally negligent for so long — who up until now has had little real plot to his character — demands to know this of his opponent: what is it you will do for her, for the woman I love now dead and lying in an unfilled grave?