Enter POLONIUS.
Pol. My lord, he's going to his mother's closet.
Behind the arras' I'll convey myself,

To hear the process; I'll warrant, she'll tax him
home;

And, as you said, and wisely was it said,
"Tis meet, that some more audience, than a mother,
Since nature makes them partial,2 should o'erhear
The speech, of vantage. Fare you well, my liege;
I'll call upon you ere you go to bed,
And tell you what I know.
King.

Thanks, dear my lord.
[Exit POLONIUS.
O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon't,
A brother's murder !-Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will;4
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother's blood?
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens,
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy,
But to confront the visage of offence?

And what's in prayer, but this two-fold force,-

To be forestalled, ere we come to fall,

Or pardon'd, being down? Then I'll look up;

My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer

But, in our circumstance and course of though
'Tis heavy with him: And am I then reveng'd,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No.

Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage;
Or, in the incestuous pleasures of his bed;
That has no relish of salvation in't:
At gaming, swearing; or about some act

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven:
And that his soul may be as damn'd, and black,
As hell, whereto it goes." My mother stays:
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

The King rises and advances.

[Exit.

Much heat and him. I'll silence me e'en here.

Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder!-'Pray you, be round with him.11

That cannot be ; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?
in the
corrupted currents of this world,
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice;
And oft 'tis seen, the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: But 'tis not so above:
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature and we ourselves compell'd,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: What can it not?
Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?
O, wretched state! O, bosom, black as death!
O, limed soul; that, struggling to be free,
Art more engag'd! Help, angels, make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees! and, heart, with strings of
steel,

Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe ;
All may be well!

Why, this is hire and salary," not revenge.
He took my father grossly full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May
And, how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?

1 See King Henry IV. Part I. Act ii. Sc. 4.
Matres omnes filiis

2

In peccato adjutrices, auxilij in paterna injuria Solent esse'Mer. Heaut. Act v. Sc. 2. 3 Warburton explains of vantage, by some op. portunity of secret observation.' I incline to think that of vantage,' in Shakspeare's language, is for advantage, commodi causa.

4 i. e. though I was not only willing, but strongly inclined to pray, my guilt prevented me."

5 i. e. caught as with birdlime.

6 That would be scann'd' that requires considera. tion, or ought to be estimated.

7 The quarto reads, base and silly.

8 Shakspeare has used the verb to hent, to take, to lay hold on, elsewhere; but the word is here used as a substantive, for hold or opportunity.

9 Johnson has justly exclaimed against the horrible nature of this desperate revenge; but the quotations of the commentators from other plays contemporary with and succeeding this, show that it could not have been so

Queen.

I'll warrant you; Fear me not-withdraw, I hear him coming.

[POLONIUS hides himself.

Enter HAMLET.

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 tongue.
Queen. Why, how now, Hamlet?
Ham.

What's the matter now?

Queen. Have you forgot me?

Ham.

No, by the rood, not so: 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 car

speak.

Ham. Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge;

You

Where you may see the inmost part of you.
go not, till I set you up a glass
Queen. What wilt thou do? thou wilt not mur-
der me?

Help, help, ho!

Pol. [Behind.] What, ho! help!

Ham

Dead, for a ducat, dead.

How now! a rat? [Draws.

[HAMLET makes a pass through the Arras. Pol. [Behind.] O, I am slain.

[Falls, and dies.

In times of less horrifying to the ears of our ancestors. civilization, revenge was held almost a sacred duty; and the purpose of the appearance of the ghost in this play is chiefly to excite Hamlet to it. The more fell and terrible the retributive act, the more meritorious it seems to have been held. The King himself in a future scene, when stimulating Laertes to kill Hamlet, says, 'Revenge should have no bounds.' Mason has ob served that, horrid as this resolution of Hamlet's is, 'yet some moral may be extracted from it, as all his subsequent misfortunes were owing to this savage refinement of revenge.'

Queen. O, me, what hast thou done?
Ham.

Is it the king?

Nay, I know not: [Lifts up the Arras, and draws forth POLOQueen. O, what a rash and bloody deed is this! Ham. A bloody deed; almost as bad, good mother,

NIUS.

As kill a king, and marry with his brother.'
Queen. As kill a king!
Ham.
Ay, lady, 'twas my word.
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
(To POLONIUS.
I took thee for thy better; take thy fortune:
Thou find'st to be too busy, is some danger.
Leave wringing of your hands; Peace; sit you down.
And let me wring your heart: for so I shall,
If it be made of penetrable stuff:

If damned custom have not braz'd it so,

That it be proof and bulwark against sense.

A combination, and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,"
To give the world assurance of a man:
This was your husband.-Look you now, what fol-
lows:

Here is your husband; like a mildew'd ear,
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes?
You cannot call it, love: for, at your age,
The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment; And what judgment
Would step from this to this? [Sense, sure you
have,

8

Else could you not have motion: But, sure, that

sense

Is apoplex'd for madness would not err;
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thrall'd,
But it reserv'd some quantity of choice,

To serve in such a difference.] What devil was't

Queen. What have I done, that thou dar'st wag That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman blind?

Queen.

Ah me, what act,

That roars so loud, and thunders in the index ?4
Ham. Look here upon this picture, and on this;
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See, what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperion's curls; the front. of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;
A station' like the herald Mercury,
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;

1 There is an idle and verbose controversy between Steevens and Malone, whether the poet meant to represent the Queen as guilty or innocent of being accessory to the murder of her husband. Surely there can be no doubt upon the matter. The Queen shows no emotion at the mock play when it is said

"In second husband let me be accurst,

None wed the second but who kill'd the first.'— and now manifests the surprise of conscious innocence upon the subject. It should also be observed that Hamlet never directly accuses her of any guilty participation in that crime. I am happy to find my opinion, so expressed in December, 1823, confirmed by the newly discovered quarto copy of 1603; in which the Queen in a future speech is made to say

24

But, as I have a soul, I swear by heaven, I never knew of this most horrid murder." takes off the rose

From the fair forehead of an innocent love,' &c. One would think by the ludicrous gravity with which Steevens and Malone take this figurative expression in. a literal sense, that they were unused to the language of poetry, especially to the adventurous metaphors of Shakspeare. Mr. Boswell's note is short and to the purpose. 'Rose is put generally for the ornament, the grace of an innocent love.' Ophelia describes Ham

let as

The expectancy and rose of the fair state.' 8 The quarto of 1604 gives this passage thus:Heaven's face does glow

O'er this solidity and compound mass
With heated visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.'

4 The inder, or table of contents, was formerly placed
at the beginning of books. In Othello, Act ii. Sc. 7, we
have an inder and obscure prologue to the history of
foul and lustful thoughts.'

5 It is evident from this passage that whole length pictures of the two kings were formerly introduced. Station does not mean the spot where any one is placed, but the act of standing, the attitude. So in Antony and Cleopatra, Act iii. Sc. 3:

'Her motion and her station are as one.'

[Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope.10]

O, shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,
If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,
And melt in her own fire :12 proclaim no shame,
When the compulsive ardour gives the charge;
Since frost itself as actively doth burn,

And reason panders will.

Queen.

O, Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained' spots
As will not leave their tinct.

sis, xli.

7 i. e. to feed rankly or grossly: it is usually applied to the fattening of animals. Marlowe has it for to grow fat. Bat is the old word for increase; whence we have battle, batten, batful.

9 Sense here is not used for reason; but for sensa. ||tion, feeling, or perception: as before in this scene:That it be proof and bulwark against sense.' Warburton, misunderstanding the passage, proposed to read notion instead of motion. The whole passage in brackets is omitted in the folio.

9 The hoodwinke play, or hoodman blind, in some place, called blindmanbuf.—Baret. It appears also to have been called blind hob. It is hob-man blind in the quarto of 1603.

10 i. e. could not be so dull and stupid.

11 Mutine for mutiny. This is the old form of the verb. Shakspeare calls mutineers mutines in a subse. quent scene; but this is, I believe, peculiar to him: they were called mutiners anciently. 12 Thus in the quarto of 1603:-

Why, appetite with you is in the wane,

Your blood runs backward now from whence it came; Who'll chide hot blood within a virgin's heart, When lust shall dwell within a matron's breast? 13 Grained spots; that is, dyed in grain, deeply imbued.

14 i. e. greasy, rank, gross. It is a term borrowed from falconry. It is well known that the seam of any animal was the fat or tallow; and a hawk was said to be enseamed when she was too fat or gross for flight. By some confusion of terms, however, to enseam a hawk' was used for to purge her of glut and grease;' by analogy it should have been unseam. Beaumont and Fletcher, in The False One, use inseamed in the same manner :

'His lechery inseamed upon him.' It should be remarked, that the quarto of 1603 reads incestuous; as does that of 1611.

I do repent: But heaven hath pleas'd it so,-
To punish me with this, and this with me;i
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night!-
I must be cruel, only to be kind:

Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.-
But one word more, good lady.

Queen.

What shall I do?

Ham. Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you, his mouse ;2
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,

Or padling in your neck with his damn'd fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,

But mad in craft. "Twere good, you let him know;
For who, that's but a queen, fair, sober, wise,
Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib,

Such dear concernings hide? who would do so?
No, in despite of sense, and secresy,
Unpeg the basket on the house's top,

Let the birds fly; and, like the famous ape,

To try conclusions," in the basket creep,

And break your own neck down.

ACT IV.

SCENE I. The same. Enter King, Queen,
ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN.

King. There's matter in these sighs; these pro-
found heaves:

You must translate: 'tis fit we understand them:
Where is your son?

Queen. Bestow this place on us a little while. 1a—
[To ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN,
who go out.

Ah,13 my good lord, what have I seen to-night!
King. What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?
Queen. Mad as the sea, and wind, when both
contend14

Which is the mightier: In his lawless fit,
Whips out his rapier, cries, A rat! a rat!
Behind the arras hearing something stir,
And, in this brainish apprehension, kills
The unseen good old man.

King.

O, heavy deed!
It had been so with us, had we been there:
His liberty is full of threats to all;

To you yourself, to us, to every one.

Alas! how shall this bloody deed be answer'd?

It will be laid to us, whose providence

Queen. Be thou assur'd if words he made of breath, Should have kept, short restrain'd, and out of haunt, 1

And breath of life, I have no life to breathe

What thou hast said to me.*

Ham. I must to England; you know that?
Queen.

Alack,

I had forgot; 'tis so concluded on.
Ham. [There's letters seal'd: and my two school-
fellows,-

Whom I will trust, as I will adders fang'd,-
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way,
And marshal me to knavery: Let it work;
For 'tis the sport, to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petar:19 and it shall go hard,
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon: 0, 'tis most sweet,
When in one line two crafts directly meet.-]
This man shall set me packing.

I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room :11
Mother, good night.-Indeed, this counsellor
Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,
Who was in life a foolish prating knave.
Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you :-
Good night, mother.

This mad young man: but, so much was our love,
We would not understand what was most fit;
But, like the owner of a foul disease,
To keep it from divulging, let it feed
Even on the pith of life. Where is he gone?

Queen. To draw apart the body he hath kill'd:
O'er whom his very madness, like some ore,
Among a minerali of metals base,
Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done,

King. O, Gertrude, come away!
The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch,
But we will ship him hence; and this vile deed
We must, with all our majesty and skill,
Both countenance and excuse.-Ho! Guildenstern!
Enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.
Friends both, go join you with some further aid:
Hamlet in madness hath Polonius slain,

9 This and the eight following verses are omitted in the folio.

10 Hoist with his own petur. Hoist for hoised. To [Exeunt severally; HAMLET dragging in hoyse was the old verb. A petar was a kind of mortar

POLONIUS.

1 To punish me by making me the instrument of this man's death, and to punish this man by my hand.' Thus 2 Mouse, a term of endearment formerly. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy-Pleasant names may be invented, bird, mouse, lamb, puss, pigeon,' &c.

3 i. e. reeky or fumant; reekant, as Florio calls it. The King has been already called the bloat king, which hints at his intemperance. In Coriolanus we have the reechy neck of a kitchen wench. Reeky and reechy are the same word, and always applied to any vaporous exhalation, even to the fumes of a dunghill.

4 The hint for Hamlet's feigned madness is taken from the old Historie of Hamblett already mentioned. 5 For paddock, a toad, see Macbeth, Act i. Sc. 1: and for gib, a cat, see King Henry IV. Part I. Act i.

Sc. 2.

6 To try conclusions is to put to proof, or try experi ments. See Merchant of Venice, Act ii. Sc. 2. Sir John Suckling possibly alludes to the same story in one of his letters: It is the story after all of the jackanapes and the partridges; thou starest after a beauty till it be lost to thee, and then let'st out another, and starest after that till it is gone too.'

7 The quarto of 1603 has here another remarkable

variation :

'Hamlet, I vow by that Majesty

That knows our thoughts and looks into our hearts,
I will conceal, consent, and do my best,
What stratagem soe'er thou shalt devise.'

used to blow up gates.

11 It must be confessed that this is coarse language for a prince under any circumstances, and such as is not called for by the occasion. But Hamlet has purposely chosen gross expressions and coarse metaphors, throughout the interview with his mother, perhaps to make his appeal to her feelings the more forcible. Something may be said in extenuation. The word guts was not anciently so offensive to delicacy as it is at present; the courtly Lyly has used it in his Mydas, 1592; Stanyhurst often in his translation of Virgil, and Chapman in his version of the sixth Iliad :

in whose guts the king of men imprest His ashen lance.'

In short, guts was used where we now use entrails.
12 This line does not appear in the folio, in which
Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are not brought on the
stage at all.

13 Quarto-Ah, mine own lord.
14 Thus in Lear :--

- he was met e'en now,
As mad as the vex'd sea,
15 Out of haunt means out of company.

Frequentia, a great haunt or company of folk. Thus in Antony and Cleopatra :—

'Dido and her Sichæus shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.'
And in Romeo and Juliet:

We talk here in the public haunt of men.

16 Shakspeare, with a licence not unusual among his contemporaries, uses ore for gold, and mineral for mine. Bullokar and Blount both define or or ore, gold; of a golden colour.' And the Cambridge Dic8 The manner in which Hamlet came to know that tionary, 1594, under the Latin word mineralia, will he was to be sent to England is not developed. He ex-show how the English mineral came to be used for a presses surprise when the king mentions it in a future scene; but his design of passing for a madman may account for this.

mine. Thus also in The Golden Remaines of Hales of Eton, 1693 Controversies of the times, like spirits in the minerals, with all their labour nothing is done.'

Ham. Of nothing: bring me to him.
and all after.
SCENE III. Another Room in the same.
King, attended.

King. I have sent to seek him, and to find the
body.

How dangerous is it, that this man goes loose!
Yet must not we put the strong law on him:
He's lov'd of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes;
And, where 'tis so, the offender's scourge is weigh'd,
But never the offence. To bear all smooth and even,

1 The blank was the mark at which shots or arrows
were directed. Thus in The Winter's Tale, Act
Sc. 3:-

'Out of the blank and level of my aim.'

ii.nothing.' Johnson would have altered Of nothing' to Or nothing; but Steevens and Farmer, by their superior acquaintance with our elder writers, soon clearly showed, by several examples, that the text was right.

2 The passage in brackets is not in the folio. The wordsSo, haply, slander,' are also omitted in the quartos; they were supplied by Theobald. The addition is supported by a passage in Cymbeline :

Whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue
Out-venoms all the worms of Nile, whose breath
Rides on the posting winds, and doth bely
All corners of the world.'

3 But soft,' these two words are not in the folio.
4 Here the quarto, 1603, inserts that makes his
liberality your storehouse, but,' &c.

5 The omission of the words doth nuts,' in the old copies. had obscured this passage. Dr. Farmer proposed to read like an ape an apple. The words are now supplied from the newly discovered quarto of 1603. 6 He's but a spunge, and shortly needs must leese, His wrong got juice, when greatness' fist shall His liquor out.' Marston, Sat. vii. 7 Hamlet affects obscurity. His meaning may be The king is a body without a kingly soul, a thing-of