Hazlitt calls this ghastly, livid wrath, ‘a refinement in malice, to excuse his own want of resolution.' A shallow plausibility, demolished by that resolute pass through the arras, aimed an instant later, at this same King of shreds and patches! And besides, there is the drama to consider. To kill the King then, would have been an anticlimax and the play have been cut short, as it would also had the King, and not Polonius, been behind the arras! both these instances the plot required that the King should live, but Hamlet showed himself perfectly willing to kill him out of hand if caught eavesdropping.

In

The main sorrow of the Ghost is the manner of his taking off:

Cut off even in the blossom of my sin,

sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

Hamlet's main sorrow is less his father's

sudden death, than eternal doom.

Once

fully abandoned to the terrible temptation

which besets him, once mad enough to 'dare damnation,' he is not going to sell his soul for a song; not going to kill the King at his prayers: he will give measure for measure, eternal doom, for eternal doom. The depths of faith are revealing darker possibilities of revenge; but the whole frightful passage is a fiendish suggestion, vividly presented, rather than deliberately embraced. It is the first wild, natural imprecation of a son for the first time SURE that his uncle is the assassin of his father. This bitter certainty transforms him for the moment almost into a demon; and though his conscience reasserts its sway, this is clearly the mood in which he afterwards meets his mother. Had the Prince known that the King, far from being truly repentant, was sending him to his death in England, he would assuredly have slain the wretch upon the spot and the play would have had a totally different ending. Shakespeare's art avoided the anticlimax in both these situations.

Polonius is playing the eavesdropper once too often: how dexterous, sly, and busy he is:

Pol.

Look you, lay home to him: Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with.

And that your grace hath screen'd and

stood between

Much heat and him. I'll sconce me
even here.

Pray you be round with him.

She means to be round with him,' to 'lay
home to him.' 'I'll warrant you,' she
says; 'Fear not me.' She is very bold
and confident and self-contained. She is
used to conquest.
Her dominion over
both her royal husbands was supreme:
the first is true and tender to her, even in
that sulphurous prison-house to which her
fickle beauty helped to doom him: the
second quotes her, though she must then
be near fifty, as the central sun round
which he circles.

W

She's so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in its sphere,
I could not but by her.

She is morally weak, but otherwise strong: fascinated by a brute, but not cognizant of his crime: the slave of one sin, yet the mistress of more than one virtue. The character is not an uncommon one. Her prostitution cannot be sufficiently detested; but there is not the shadow of a ground to suppose her conscious of the fratricide. As often happens with these magnetic unfortunates, her tender-heartedness survives her personal degradation. She has a kind word for everybody, and it flows unaffectedly from her heart: but, once roused, she displays the spirit of an Amazon. When the mutineers overbear the officers and break the doors, she strides between the armed rabble and the craven King, with a flash of the same fierce wrath which her son inherits.

How cheerfully on the false trail they cry!
O this is counter, you false Danish dogs. —

Not easily crushed, this fair, false, haughty matron: not easily shaken off, with one wave of the lion's mane, like Polonius and Guildenstern. The encounter is stern from the start.

Ham. Now, mother, what's the matter? Queen. Hamlet, thou hast thy father much of fended.

Ham. Mother, you have my father much offended.

Queen. Come, come, you answer with an idle

tongue.

Ham. Go, go, you question with a wicked

You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife;

And

would it were not so! you are

my mother.

Queen. Nay, then, I'll set those to you that can

speak.