'
Hamlet has listened to the player. In the concluding monologue of the
second act--which is twice as long in the new quarto--we are told of the
effect produced upon his mind when seeing that an actor, who merely holds
a mirror up to Nature--
... but in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd....
... And all for nothing!--For Hecuba?
whilst he (Hamlet), 'a dull and muddy-mettled rascal,' [21] like
John-a-dreams, in spite of his strong 'motive and the cue for passion,'
mistrusts them and is afraid of being guided by them.
All at once, Hamlet feels the weight and pressure of a mode of thought
which declares war against the impulses of Nature, calling man a born
sinner.
Who calls me villain? ...
... Gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha!
'S wounds,[1] I should take it: for it cannot be.
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. [22]
The feelings of Hamlet, until then forcibly kept down, now get the
mastery over him. He gives vent to them in oaths of which he is himself
at last ashamed, when he compares himself to 'a very drab, a scullion,'
who 'must fall a-cursing.'
He now will set to work and get more natural evidence of the King's
guilt.
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