Act iv. sc. 2.
'Ros'. Take you me for a spunge, my lord?
'Ham'. Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his
authorities, &c.
Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had passed through his mind before;—in fact, in telling home-truths.
Act. iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother concerning the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself—she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is instanced in the close:—
My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel.
'Ib.' Gentleman's speech:—
And as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every ward—
They cry, &c.
Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of judgment in Shakspeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, 'rational and consequential,' reflection in these lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions.
'Ib.' King's speech:—
There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.