ardon thereunto) recount th'Occasions_
[Sidenote: the occasion of my suddaine returne.]
_of my sodaine, and more strange returne._[12]
Hamlet.[13]
What should this meane? Are all the rest come backe?
[Sidenote: _King_. What]

[Footnote 1: 'would convert his fetters--if I imprisoned him--to graces,
commending him yet more to their regard.']

[Footnote 2: _arm'd_ is certainly the right, and a true Shaksperean
word:--it was no fault in the aim, but in the force of the flight--no
matter of the eye, but of the arm, which could not give momentum enough
to such slightly timbered arrows. The fault in the construction of the
last line, I need not remark upon.

I think there is a hint of this the genuine meaning even in the
blundered and partly unintelligible reading of the _Quarto_. If we leave
out 'for so loued,' we have this: 'So that my arrows, too slightly
timbered, would have reverted armed to my bow again, but not (_would not
have gone_) where I have aimed them,'--implying that his arrows would
have turned their armed heads against himself.

What the king says here is true, but far from _the_ truth: he feared
driving Hamlet, and giving him at the same time opportunity, to speak in
his own defence and render his reasons.]

[Footnote 3: _extremes_? or _conditions_?]

[Footnote 4: 'With many a tempest hadde his berd ben
schake.'--_Chaucer_, of the Schipman, in _The Prologue_ to _The
Canterbury Tales_.]

[Footnote 5: --hear of Hamlet's death in England, he means.

At this point in the _1st Q._ comes a scene between Horatio and the
queen, in which he informs her of a letter he had just received from
Hamlet,

Whereas he writes how he escap't the danger,
And subtle treason that the king had plotted,
Being crossed by the contention of the windes,
He found the Packet &c.

Horatio does not mention the pirates, but speaks of Hamlet 'being set
ashore,' and of _Gilderstone_ and _Rossencraft_ going on to their fate.
The queen assures Horatio that she is but temporizing with the king, and
shows herself anxious for the success of her son's design against his
life. The Poet's intent was not yet clear to himself.]

[Footnote 6: Here his crow cracks.]

[Footnote 7: _From_ 'How now' _to_ 'Hamlet' is _not in Q._]

[Footnote 8: Horatio has given the sailors' letters to Claudio, he to
another.]

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