Rosencrantz, “Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? you do, surely, but bar the door of your own liberty, if you deny your griefs to your friend;”—he gives answer, laying bare the selfish motives of the other, “Sir, I lack advancement.”
Suppressing irony, he becomes for a moment serious with them ; “Why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as
if you would drive me into a toil 7” And then that lesson of sarcastic earnestness, to prove that he knew the breed of their friendship and solicitude for him.
“Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me.
You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass : and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. S'blood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe
Call me
what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.” The veil which he deigns to put on before these mean and treacherous ephemera of the court, is of the thinnest coun terfeit ; but with Polonius the mental antics are more pro nounced, for with him he rejoices in spiteful mischief, as when the tiresome old man “fools him to the top of his bent.”
“Do you see yonder cloud’ &c. How thoroughly in the surface all this flippancy was, the soliloquy immediately fol lowing fully proves. The dread purpose is gathering to action, and the mind was never more sad than all this while, under the mask of intellectual buffoonery, for 'tis even now he “could drink hot blood; And do such bitter business, as the day
Would quake to look on.” At this juncture the King re-appears, with his mind thoroughly made up on the point that Hamlet has in him
something dangerous, if his doubts are not also solved on the point of his madness. The play, which has discovered the King to Hamlet, must also have discovered his knowledge of the
