Shakespeare's part, or whether we should understand Hamlet to be speaking of suspicion as if it were certainty, I cannot myself determine; nor do I find the slightest notice of this passage in any of the numerous commentaries which I have examined.* The next words—

are difficult to interpret. They may mean that Hamlet was so certain that his suspicion of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was well-founded, that he determined to be revenged upon them; and, by this act of severity, to strengthen his mind for the more important purpose he had in hand, namely the killing of the King. If he could conquer his weakness, and subdue his scruples of conscience sufficiently to work upon these two false-hearted courtiers a most signal act of vengeance; and granting that he should, before doing so, be able to assure himself that Claudius, in sending him to England, was sending him to a treacherous death; he might naturally hope, should he succeed in returning safe to Denmark, to find himself no longer hesitating for one moment to fulfil, to the uttermost point, the ghost's charge of vengeance.

The whole effect of this scene, apart from its intrinsic beauty of language and grandeur of conception, is to raise our interest to a much higher point; and I cannot agree with those who consider that at this point the play ought to have ended; however elaborate may be the episodes, which somewhat check the progress of the main action in the two last acts, our curiosity, as to what is to follow, is so skilfully whetted in this scene, that a more abrupt conclusion to the play would be as ineffective as it would be inartistic.

* See Additional Notes, No. 5.

PART III.

THE fourth act opens with a short but significant scene: the persons present are the King, the Queen, Rosencrantz, and Guidenstern. The Queen has evidently just returned from her interview with Hamlet. In fact, the action at this point of the play is continuous. The King speaks first :KING. There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves: You must translate: 'tis fit we understand them. Where is your son?

QUEEN. Bestow this place on us a little while.

[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.

What the Queen has to reveal is for the King's ears alone; not even the supple fidelity of the two courtiers entitles them to the privilege of being admitted into the royal confidence. When they are gone the Queen continues:

KING.

Ah, mine own lord, what have I seen to-night!
What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?

QUEEN. Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend
Which is the mightier: in his lawless fit,
Behind the arras hearing something stir,
Whips out his rapier, cries a rat, a rat!"
And in this brainish apprehension kills
The unseen good old man.

66

This speech is certainly, at first sight, a most puzzling one; we have just heard Gertrude give her son the most solemu assurance that she will not reveal to his uncle the fact that his madness is assumed; therefore we must understand that she is now deliberately deceiving Claudius, and affecting to believe in the reality of Hamlet's madness. Otherwise it would seem that the Queen had only pretended to believe her son was not mad, and that she was now giving his uncle fresh cause to put some restraint on him. The meaning of her conduct becomes much more intelligible on reference to the Quarto of 1603.

In that edition a subsequent scene between the Queen and Horatio,* to which I have before alluded, makes it clear that the author's intention was to represent the Queen now as helping Hamlet's counterplots against the treachery of Claudius. In order to do this, she could adopt no better device than to pretend a most thorough belief in the genuineness of her son's madness, knowing, as we have seen, from the latter part of the preceding act, she did, that Hamlet had determined to go to England agreeably to the advice, or rather the command, of Claudius.

As doubts and fears of discovery thicken around the guilty Claudius, his sententious bursts of plausible hypocrisy become more and more specious. He overflows with nice morality. It would seem as if, not content with treacherously robbing his brother of his crown, his Queen, and his life, he had also pilfered his philosophy. Listen to his exquisite and pathetic complaint :

Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answer'd !
It will be laid to us, whose providence

Should have kept short, restrain'd and out of haunt,
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 ith of life.

We almost feel inclined to bring out our handkerchiefs and weep for this poor injured uncle, whose impracticable nephew was always trying his angelic patience, till at last even its limit was reached, and it could endure no more, The first actor who has the courage to represent Claudius as the plausible smiling villain he really was, with features so expanded by conviviality that even the pangs he suffered from the ingratitude of his dear brother's son, whom he loved with such a disinterested love, "could grave no wrinkle there;" who attempts to realise Shakespeare's conception, so exquisitely sarcastic, yet so true to nature, instead of representing the seducer of Gertrude as a beetle-browed villain, on whose brain and shoulders all the melodramas for the last fifty years seem to have left their fearful weight-the first actor who has courage to effect this innovation will, I venture to predict, create at once a great sensation and a greater success.

The Queen's next speech contains a beautiful touch; in answer to the inquiry of Claudius, where Hamlet is gone, she says:

* See Appendix M.

To draw apart the body he hath kill'd:
''er whom his very madness, like some ore
Among a mineral of metals base,

Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.

This shows that Hamlet's affectation of something which seemed like brutality, at the end of the last scene, was not long sustained; and that the suffering of his gentle nature, when the excitement under which he had committed this misdirected deed of violence had passed away, was greater than he cared to show before those whom he wished to believe in his assumption of insanity. Claudius has not yet exhausted his vein of moral indignation

this vile deed

We must, with all our majesty and skill,
Both countenance and excuse.

The two courtiers are summoned back

Ho, Guildenstern!

It is a remarkable fact, that the inseparability of these two charming young men is so great, that it is only necessary to call one for both to appear. They remind us of nothing so much as of a well-fed pair of lap-dogs, each so jealous of the other that neither will let his companion out of his sight, in case he should receive a greater share of caresses and food from their master's hand. They are commissioned to seek Hamlet out, to find where he has put the body, and bring it into the chapel. The King's last words in this scene, addressed to Gertrude, foreshadow the tragic events that are near at hand—

O, come away!

My soul is full of discord and dismay.

[Exeunt.

The next scene, a very short one, commences with Hamlet's entrance from the lobby where he has placed the body of Polonius, with the words

Safely stowed.

The voices of the two concordant courtiers are heard from within, calling

Hamlet! Lord Hamlet!

Hamlet hears, but apparently does not recognise them. It is not very clear what Shakespeare's intention is in this scene, to which we find no parallel in the earliest edition of the play (4to, 1603), the greater portion of the dialogue which follows being embodied in that edition with the second scene of the third act. Hamlet could never have believed that by hiding the body of Polonius he could conceal the circum

stances of the hapless Lord Chamberlain's death; it is more
probable that his conduct, at this point, is regulated by the
desire to keep up the assumption of madness than by any
other purpose.
Certain it is that on the entrance of Rosen-
crantz and Guildenstern he assumes towards them an ironical
incoherence, very different from the rational sarcasm with
which he had hitherto treated them.

Ros. What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?
HAM. Compounded it with dust, whereto 'tis kin.

Ros. Tell us where 'tis, that we may take it thence

And bear it to the chapel.

HAM. Do not believe it.

Ros. Believe what?

HAM. That I can keep your counsel and not mine own. Besides, to be demanded of a sponge !* what replication should be made by the son of a king?

Ros. Take you me for a sponge, my lord?

HAM. Ay, sir; that soaks up the king's countenance, his rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the king best service in the end; he keeps them, like an ape, in the corner of his jaw; first mouthed, to be last swallowed: when he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.

Ros. I understand you not, my lord.

HAM. I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.

Ros. My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.

HAM. The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing

GUIL. A thing, my lord?

HAM. Of nothing: bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after. [Exeunt.

We need only compare the above with Hamlet's language to these same courtiers immediately after the play scene, to see that he gives rein to his eccentric humour more completely than he has yet done in the presence of any one, except Polonius.

In the next scene the King enters, attended. The speech, which he addresses to those about him, is a kind of apology for the leniency which he has shown towards Hamlet.+ The King has a very difficult part to play; he dares not leave unpunished such a deed of violence as Hamlet has committed in killing Polonius; at the same time he dares not openly punish Hamlet on account of his popularity: so he remains between two dilemmas, and though the course which he takes is, in his position, the safest one, he does not succeed, as we shall see further on, in exonerating himself from the suspicion

The comparison of courtiers to a sponge is found in other works of this period. See Additional Note, No. 5A.

+ In the Quarto, 1603, this speech, or, rather, the speech which corresponds to it, is addressed to the Queen alone. See Appendix N.