Page:The Stratford gallery.djvu/46

30 Henceforth, self-dedicated to retribution, Hamlet counterfeited a harmless insanity, with fantastic tricks and "wild and whirling" words, calculated to distract attention from his secret purpose.

The king and queen, believing that the death of his father had occasioned this deplorable result, devised amusements to divert his mind: a company of players having been summoned to court, Hamlet seized the opportunity, and made use of them to prove to his own satisfaction the truth of the ghost's communication. He contrived for their representation a play, to be performed before the king, which should reproduce to the life the scene of his father's murder, as described by the ghost—the wife marrying with the poisoner of her husband.

The snare was successful; the guilty fears of the king betrayed him; with incoherent exclamations he interrupted the play, and retreated, all aghast, from the apartment.

Immediately after this scene of confusion, Queen Gertrude summoned Hamlet to her closet, intending to remonstrate with him upon his indecorous behavior; and during the somewhat violent altercation between them, he heard a noise behind the hangings of the room. Suspecting that the king was concealed there, he exclaimed, in an assumed frenzy, "A rat! a rat!" and pierced the arras with his sword, thereby killing the wily old statesman, Polonius, who had been posted to take note of the interview.

This fatal mistake served as a pretext for sending Hamlet out of the country—there being much disaffection among the people consequent upon the unwarrantable murder of Polonius; and the king despatched him to England, with secret papers providing for his assassination immediately on his arrival. The ship being attacked by pirates on the voyage, Hamlet boarded their vessel during the fight, and the king's creatures put off at once, leaving him to his fate. The pirates, on learning the rank of their captive,