ual flourish announce the arrival of the King and
Queen; the Ministers of State precede them, and the Court ladies; the
pretentious gravity of Polonius' brow; the dreamy innocence of Ophelia.
The sovereigns seat themselves, the Queen looks smilingly around her as
of old. All is easy, bright, and festive. All goes on as if this
horrible revolution were the most natural thing in the world. Oh, that
he could avoid the sight of it! Oh, that he could be quit of it all!

"Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"

Although the nervous horror of his address to the Ghost is greater,
there is no speech in which Hamlet betrays so deep an agitation as in
this. He struggles for utterance, repeats himself, mingles oaths and
axioms, confuses and then annihilates time in the breathless tumult of
his soul. "Why, she, _even she_. O Heaven!" What can he say? what is
vile enough? "A _beast_

"that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourned longer--married with my uncle."

In this opening speech we see at once the immediate relation of the
feeling of life-weariness so prevalent throughout the play to this
supreme emotion; we see also his comprehensive criticism of the world
branching from the same root--

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world!
Fie, on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden;"

and

"Frailty, thy name is woman."

These themes are developed Act by Act, we can follow them to the
graveyard scene, and to the moment before death.

And it is not unnatural that Hamlet's grief should assume a
comprehensive form. The Queen had drawn the world in her train. Nobles
and people, councillors and courtiers, the honoured statesman, the
artless maiden, had joined her, had connived, were her accomplices. They
had, parted among them, all the vices appropriate to _her_ Court, _her_
people. The world was betrayed to Hamlet in all its meanness and
littleness: and he looked at it to see if he could discover the secret
of his mother's treason, as Lear would anatomize the heart of Regan to
account for her ingratitude. In attacking it he is attacking her guilt,
in its inferior forms and obscure disguises. It is the nest of her
depravity, and the small vices are but hers in the shell, and the whole
is a vast confederacy of evil. Here a