[Footnote 1: This verse not in Q.]
[Footnote 2: destruction.]
[Footnote 3: 'Their destruction they have enticed on themselves by their own behaviour;' or, 'they have crept into their fate by their underhand dealings.' The Sh. Lex. explains insinuation as meddling.]
[Footnote 4: With the concern of Horatio for the fate of Rosincrance and Guildensterne, Hamlet shows no sympathy. It has been objected to his character that there is nothing in the play to show them privy to the contents of their commission; to this it would be answer enough, that Hamlet is satisfied of their worthlessness, and that their whole behaviour in the play shows them merest parasites; but, at the same time, we must note that, in changing the commission, he had no intention, could have had no thought, of letting them go to England without him: that was a pure shaping of their ends by the Divinity. Possibly his own 'dear plots' had in them the notion of getting help against his uncle from the king of England, in which case he would willingly of course have continued his journey; but whatever they may be supposed to have been, they were laid in connection with the voyage, not founded on the chance of its interruption. It is easy to imagine a man like him, averse to the shedding of blood, intending interference for their lives: as heir apparent, he would certainly have been listened to. The tone of his reply to Horatio is that of one who has been made the unintending cause of a deserved fate: the thing having fallen out so, the Divinity having so shaped their ends, there was nothing in their character, any more than in that of Polonius, to make him regret their death, or the part he had had in it.]
[Footnote 5: The 'mighty opposites' here are the king and Hamlet.]
[Footnote 6: Perhaps, as Hamlet talked, he has been parenthetically glancing at the real commission. Anyhow conviction is growing stronger in Horatio, whom, for the occasion, we may regard as a type of the public.]
[Footnote 7: 'thinkst thee,' in the fashion of the Friends, or 'thinke thee' in the sense of 'bethink thee.']
[Footnote 8: 'Does it not rest now on me?—is it not now my duty?—is it not incumbent on me (with lie for stand)—"is't not perfect conscience"?']
[Footnote 9: Note 'my king' not my father: he had to avenge a crime against the state, the country, himself as a subject—not merely a private wrong.]
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