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96 the court. He planned it according to his own account, in order to convince himself by the King’s agitation that the Ghost had spoken the truth. This is perfectly clear from ii. 625 ff. and from ii. 80 ff. Some readers are misled by the words in the latter passage:

The meaning obviously is, as the context shows, ‘if his hidden guilt do not betray itself on occasion of one speech,’ viz., the ‘dozen or sixteen lines’ with which Hamlet has furnished the player, and of which only six are delivered, because the King does not merely show his guilt in his face (which was all Hamlet had hoped, ii. 90) but rushes from the room.

It may be as well to add that, although Hamlet’s own account of his reason for arranging the play-scene may be questioned, it is impossible to suppose that, if his real design had been to provoke an open confession of guilt, he could have been unconscious of this design.

(e) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of the plan of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of using his ‘sword’ or his ‘arm.’ And this is so just as much after he has returned to Denmark with the commission in his pocket as it was before this event. When he has told Horatio the story of the voyage, he does not say, ‘Now I can convict him’: he says, ‘Now am I not justified in using this arm?’

This class of theory, then, we must simply reject. But it suggests two remarks. It is of course quite probable that, when Hamlet was ‘thinking too precisely on the event,’ he was considering, among other things, the question how he could avenge his father without sacrificing his own life or freedom. And assuredly, also, he was anxious that his act of