Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? . . . .
Try what repentance can: What can it not?
Yet what can it, when one can not repent.
Throughout the whole speech the mind of the guilty monarch fluctuates between hope and despair; and Hamlet, seeing him on his knees, exclaims: “now might I do it, pat; and now I’ll do it;” but again falls to moralizing, and puts it off to a more convenient season.
Hamlet’s first soliloquy, before he has seen the Ghost, (act first, scene second,) turns on the queen’s inconstancy in forgetting his father and marrying his uncle so soon: “But two months dead!” “A beast that wants discourse of reason, would have mourned longer.” And his conversation with Horatio immediately after is to the same effect:
The funeral bak’d meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
In his interview with the queen in act third, scene fourth, where he compares the picture of his father with that of his uncle, he dwells on the same topic. See also the dumb show in act third, scene second, and the dialogue between the Player King and Player Queen. Every line of these speeches illustrates the theme.