Scene Seven
[A Room in the Castle]
Enter King and Laertes.
King. Now must your conscience my acquittance seal,
And you must put me in your heart for friend,
Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear,
That he which hath your noble father slain 4
Pursu'd my life.
Laer. It well appears: but tell me
Why you proceeded not against these feats,
So crimeful and so capital in nature,
As by your safety, wisdom, all things else, 8
You mainly were stirr'd up.
King. O! for two special reasons;
Which may to you, perhaps, seem much unsinew'd,
But yet to me they are strong. The queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks, and for myself,— 12
My virtue or my plague, be it either which,—
She's so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her. The other motive, 16
Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general gender bear him;
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone, 20
Convert his gyves to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber'd for so loud a wind,
3 knowing: intelligent, or, convinced
5 Pursu'd: sought
7 capital: punishable by death
10 unsinew'd: weak
14 conjunctive: closely united
17 count: legal indictment
18 general gender: common people
20 spring; cf. n.
21 gyves: leg-irons; cf. n.
22 slightly timber'd: of too light a wood
