* * * * *

Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where
the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you
hear?

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense
that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And
what has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer
upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his
father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for
some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as
a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the
crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust
him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any
sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock
of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on
him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was
weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether
Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be
sure, as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his
father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him

As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.

He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then
within a month--'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'--she married
again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and
loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous
wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of
old family affection, but in such a way that her son was force