the King, Hamlet is again in his most antic disposition of mind. His sarcastic irony to his two old school-fellows, whom he now trusts as he would adders fanged, is more directly insulting than before. They are sponges that soak up the King's countenance, the ape's first morsel, first mouthed, last swallowed.
Still he throws a thicker cloak of counterfeit un
reason over his sarcasm than he has done before.
His replies,
“The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing — ” of nothing: bring me to him. Hide fox, and
&4
all after ;”
his answers to the King, “Farewell, dear mother,” “My mother: Father and mother is man and wife; man and wife
is one flesh ; and so, my mother"—are fairly on a par in unreasoning suggestiveness with his reply to Polonius. “For if the sun breed maggots,” &c.
These mad absurdities are
never altogether meaningless, and never altogether foreign to the natural train of his own thoughts. The description of
Polonius at supper, “not where he eats, but where he is eaten,” is the foreshadowing idea of the serious and earnest
meditations on the mutability of matter in which he indulges over the church-yard skulls. “A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” And thus, “A king may go a progress,” &c. 'Tis the very same speculation as that so seriously expressed to his friend.
“To what base uses we may return, Horatio ! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find
it stopping a bung-hole This is the philosophy he had learnt at Wittenburg, and which he toyed with to the last.
He had learned, indeed, its
inadequacy to explain all things, by sights which make “us fools of nature, So horribly to shake our disposition,
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.”
