For this same lord, I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so, To punish me with this and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister. His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at III. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for Polonius.) Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards? Well, in the _next_ scene (IV. ii.) we see him _alone_ with the body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings. And his first words are, 'Safely stowed'!] [Footnote 38: Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.] [Footnote 39: He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving (V. ii. 218). His contrary statement (II. ii. 308) is made to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.] [Footnote 40: See Note B.] [Footnote 41: The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to me Shakespeare simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a very touching picture he draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in the opening lines of the play, would never drive him to suicide, but it makes him indifferent to the issue of the trial, as all his speeches in the trial-scene show.] [Footnote 42: Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in particular. 'Your' is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that 'your water is a sore decayer of your ... dead body.'] [Footnote 43: This aspect of the matter leaves _us_ comparatively unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious words to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet's mind.] [Footnote 44: It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (III. iv. 150): Repent what's past; avoid what is to come; And do not spread the compost on the weeds To make them ranker.] [Footnote 45: If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length--the speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it _is_'--he will understand what, surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so; and still less that she understood it so).] [Footnote 46: See Note D.] [Footnote 47: See p. 13.]