eep
melancholy, and lost all his mirth and all his good looks; all his
customary pleasure in books forsook him, his princely exercises and
sports, proper to his youth, were no longer acceptable; he grew weary
of the world, which seemed to him an unweeded garden, where all
the wholesome flowers were choaked up, and nothing but weeds could
thrive. Not that the prospect of exclusion from the throne, his lawful
inheritance, weighed so much upon his spirits, though that to a young
and high-minded prince was a bitter wound and a sore indignity; but
what so galled him, and took away all his cheerful spirits, was, that
his mother had shewn herself so forgetful to his father's memory: and
such a father! who had been to her so loving and so gentle a husband!
and then she always appeared as loving and obedient a wife to him, and
would hang upon him as if her affection grew to him: and now within
two months, or as it seemed to young Hamlet, less than two months, she
had married again, married his uncle, her dead husband's brother, in
itself a highly improper and unlawful marriage, from the nearness of
relationship, but made much more so by the indecent haste with which
it was concluded, and the unkingly character of the man whom she had
chosen to be the partner of her throne and bed. This it was which,
more than the loss of ten kingdoms, dashed the spirits, and brought a
cloud over the mind of this honourable young prince.

In vain was all that his mother Gertrude or the king could do to
contrive to divert him; he still appeared in court in a suit of deep
black, as mourning for the king his father's death, which mode of
dress he had never laid aside, not even in compliment to his mother
upon the day she was married, nor could he be brought to join in
any of the festivities or rejoicings of that (as appeared to him)
disgraceful day.

What mostly troubled him was an uncertainty about the manner of his
father's death. It was given out by Claudius, that a serpent had stung
him: but young Hamlet had shrewd suspicions that Claudius himself was
the serpent; in plain English, that he had murdered him for his crown,
and that the serpent who stung his father did now sit on the throne.

How far he was right in this conjecture, and what he ought to think of
his mother, how far she was privy to this murder, and whether by her
consent or knowledge, or without, it came to pass, were the doubts
which continually harassed and distracted him.