[Footnote 4: He would have him think of life and its doings as of awful import. He gives his son what warning he may.]
[Footnote 5: An end is like agape, an hungred. 71, 175.]
[Footnote 6: The word in the Q. suggests fretfull a misprint for frightful. It is fretfull in the 1st Q. as well.]
[Footnote 7: To blason is to read off in proper heraldic terms the arms blasoned upon a shield. A blason is such a reading, but is here used for a picture in words of other objects.]
[Footnote 8: —in appeal to God whether he had not loved his father.]
[Footnote 9: The horror still accumulates. The knowledge of evil—not evil in the abstract, but evil alive, and all about him—comes darkening down upon Hamlet's being. Not only is his father an inhabitant of the nether fires, but he is there by murder.]
[Page 52]
As meditation, or the thoughts of Loue,
May sweepe to my Reuenge.[1]
Ghost. I finde thee apt,
And duller should'st thou be then the fat weede[2]
[Sidenote: 194] That rots it selfe in ease, on Lethe Wharfe,[4]
[Sidenote: rootes[3]
Would'st thou not stirre in this. Now Hamlet heare:
It's giuen out, that sleeping in mine Orchard, [Sidenote: 'Tis]
A Serpent stung me: so the whole eare of Denmarke,
Is by a forged processe of my death
Rankly abus'd: But know thou Noble youth,
The Serpent that did sting thy Fathers life,
Now weares his Crowne.
[Sidenote: 30,32] Ham. O my Propheticke soule: mine Vncle?[5]
[Sidenote: my]