of her wicked
life; and, taking her by the wrist, he held her fast, and made her sit
down. She, affrighted at his earnest manner, and fearful lest in his
lunacy he should do her a mischief, cried out; and a voice was heard
from behind the hangings: 'Help, help, the queen!' which Hamlet
hearing, and verily thinking that it was the king himself there
concealed, he drew his sword and stabbed at the place where the voice
came from, as he would have stabbed a rat that ran there, till the
voice ceasing, he concluded the person to be dead. But when he dragged
for the body, it was not the king, but Polonius, the old officious
counsellor, that had planted himself as a spy behind the hangings. 'Oh
me!' exclaimed the queen, 'what a rash and bloody deed have you done!'
'A bloody deed, mother,' replied Hamlet, 'but not so bad as yours, who
killed a king, and married his brother.' Hamlet had gone too far to
leave off here. He was now in the humour to speak plainly to his
mother, and he pursued it. And though the faults of parents are to be
tenderly treated by their children, yet in the case of great crimes the
son may have leave to speak even to his own mother with some harshness,
so as that harshness is meant for her good, and to turn her from her
wicked ways, and not done for the purpose of upbraiding. And now this
virtuous prince did in moving terms represent to the queen the
heinousness of her offence, in being so forgetful of the dead king, his
father, as in so short a space of time to marry with his brother and
reputed murderer: such an act as, after the vows which she had sworn to
her first husband was enough to make all vows of women suspected, and
ail virtue to be accounted hypocrisy, wedding contracts to be less than
gamesters' oaths, and religion to be a mockery and a mere form of
words. He said she had done such a deed, that the heavens blushed at
it, and the earth was sick of her because of it. And he showed her two
pictures, the one of the late king, her first husband, and the other of
the present king, her second husband, and he bade her mark the
difference; what a grace was on the brow of his father, how like a god
he looked! the curls of Apollo, the forehead of Jupiter, the eye of
Mars, and a posture like to Mercury newly alighted on some
heaven-kissing hill! this man, he said, had been her husband. And then
he showed her whom she had got in his stead: how like a blight or a
mildew he looked, for so he had blasted his