s very uneasy, and then more and
more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in
England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:

till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my _joys_ were ne'er begun.

Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:

Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],

he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
More--it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
things so quietly that we are apt to miss them--when the King is praying
for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.[82] So we are
inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also
Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end
shaped the King's no less.

For--to return in conclusion to the action of the play--in all that
happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not
define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is
there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works
its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.
And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For
these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the
other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy,
seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious
paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing
them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it
puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed
this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he
_must_ fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twis