In the next scene the king and queen employ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as spies upon Hamlet; and, to ascertain whether he loves Ophelia, the king and Polonius agree to hide behind the arras, whilst the latter, as he expresses it, “looses his daughter to him” in the lobby. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make several attempts to sound Hamlet, but, as they report to the king and queen—act third scene first—he “with a crafty madness keeps aloof.” In act third, scene fourth, Polonius again plays the eaves-dropper in order to overhear the conversation between Hamlet and his mother, and Hamlet, hearing him, and supposing him to be the king, makes a pass through the arras and kills him.
I took thee for thy better; take thy fortune;
Thou find’st, to be too busy, is some danger.
(3.) Inquisitiveness.
Inquisitiveness is a very prevalent feature of the play. There are the challenging of sentiments—ghost-seeing—the sending and receiving of messages—soliloquies—(a species of self-examination,)—and the conversation is to an unusual extent made up of questions and answers. To this head may also be referred, (at any rate the reader will at once recognize their relation to the central idea,) the riddles of the old grave-digger in the church-yard scene, (act fifth, scene first,) and his witty evasions of Hamlet’s questions. Also Hamlet’s refined speculations, in which, as Horatio says, he “considers the matter too curiously;” as, when he shows in act fourth, scene third, how a “worm may go a progress through the guts of a beggar;” and “traces the noble dust of Alexander till he finds it stopping a bung-hole,” in act fifth, scene first; and in his reflections on the lawyer’s skull, and on that of “poor Yorick.”
(4.) Flattery.
In act third, scene third, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vie with each other in flattering the king. In act fourth, scene seventh, the king flatters Laertes respecting his skill in fencing. Osric plays the flatterer when he agrees with Hamlet first that it is very hot, then cold, then hot again; and Polonius, when he sees the cloud in the shape of a camel first, then of a weasel, and then of a whale, according as Hamlet directs. In act second, scene second, Hamlet says to Rosencrantz: “My uncle is king of Denmark; and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty, an hundred ducats a-piece for his picture in little.” And in act third, scene second, he teaches the use of flattery:
Why should the poor be flattered?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,