ich kept him from proceeding
to extremities. Moreover, he could not help having some scruples upon
his mind, whether the spirit which he had seen was indeed his father, or
whether it might not be the devil, who he had heard has power to take
any form he pleases, and who might have assumed his father's shape only
to take advantage of his weakness and his melancholy, to drive him to
the doing of so desperate an act as murder. And he determined that he
would have more certain grounds to go upon than a vision, or apparition,
which might be a delusion.

While he was in this irresolute mind there came to the court certain
players, in whom Hamlet formerly used to take delight, and particularly
to hear one of them speak a tragical speech, describing the death of old
Priam, King of Troy, with the grief of Hecuba his queen. Hamlet welcomed
his old friends, the players, and remembering how that speech had
formerly given him pleasure, requested the player to repeat it; which he
did in so lively a manner, setting forth the cruel murder of the feeble
old king, with the destruction of his people and city by fire, and the
mad grief of the old queen, running barefoot up and down the palace,
with a poor clout upon that head where a crown had been, and with
nothing but a blanket upon her loins, snatched up in haste, where she
had worn a royal robe; that not only it drew tears from all that stood
by, who thought they saw the real scene, so lively was it represented,
but even the player himself delivered it with a broken voice and real
tears. This put Hamlet upon thinking, if that player could so work
himself up to passion by a mere fictitious speech, to weep for one that
he had never seen, for Hecuba, that had been dead so many hundred years,
how dull was he, who having a real motive and cue for passion, a real
king and a dear father murdered, was yet so little moved, that his
revenge all this while had seemed to have slept in dull and muddy
forgetfulness! and while he meditated on actors and acting, and the
powerful effects which a good play, represented to the life, has upon
the spectator, he remembered the instance of some murderer, who seeing a
murder on the stage, was by the mere force of the scene and resemblance
of circumstances so affected, that on the spot he confessed the crime
which he had committed. And he determined that these players should play
something like the murder of his father before his uncle, and he would
watch narr