“Why, look you there! Look how it steals away! My father, in his habit as he lived! Look where he goes, even now, out at the portal.”
The Queen saw nothing of the figure gliding away, and told Hamlet that it must be the coinage of his brain, the sort of delusion which madness was very cunning in.
“Madness!” echoed Hamlet; and he bade his mother note that his pulse beat as calmly as her own, and that it was not madness which he uttered. Bring him to the test, he said, and he would re-word the matter, which madness could not do. In short, his words were so convincing that the Queen could no longer refuse to believe them. Before they parted, she promised to adopt a very different mode of behaviour from her usual pleasure-loving frivolity, and not to allow herself to be persuaded by the crafty Claudius that anything her son might say or do arose from madness.
“Do you not come your tardy son to chide?”
“I must to England; you know that?” asked Hamlet.
“Alack, I had forgotten; it is so arranged,” said the Queen.
“There are letters sealed,” said Hamlet, “and my two schoolfellows, whom I will trust as I will adders fanged—they bear the mandate. Let the knavery work; for ’tis sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard, and it shall go hard but I will delve one yard below their mines, and blow them at the moon.”