Hamlet being come to his mother, she began to tax him in the roundest way with his actions and behavior, and she told him that he had given great offence to _his father_, meaning the king, his uncle, whom, because he had married her, she called Hamlet’s father. Hamlet, sorely indignant that she would give so dear and honored a name as father seemed to him, to a wretch who was indeed no better than the murderer of his true father, with some sharpness replied, “Mother, _you_ have much offended _my father_.” The queen said that was but an idle answer. “As good as the question deserved,” said Hamlet. The queen asked him if he had forgotten who it was he was speaking to. “Alas!” replied Hamlet, “I wish I could forget. You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife; and you are my mother: I wish you were not what you are.” “Nay, then,” said the queen, “if you show me so little respect, I will set those to you that can speak,” and was going to send the king or Polonius to him. But Hamlet would not let her go, now he had her alone, till he had tried if his words could not bring her to some sense of her wicked life; and, taking her by the wrist, he held her fast, and made her sit down. She, affrighted at his earnest manner, and fearful lest in his lunacy he should do her a mischief, cried out: and a voice was heard from behind the hangings, “Help, help the queen;” which Hamlet hearing, and verily thinking that it was the king himself there concealed, he drew his sword, and stabbed at the place where the voice came from, as he would have stabbed a rat that ran there, till the voice ceasing, he concluded the person to be dead. But when he dragged forth the body, it was not the king, but Polonius, the old officious counselor, that had planted himself as a spy behind the hangings. “Oh me!” exclaimed the queen, “what a rash and bloody deed have you done!” “A bloody deed, mother,” replied Hamlet, “but not so bad as yours, who killed a king and married his brother.” Hamlet had gone too far to leave off here. He was now in the humor to speak plainly to his mother, and he pursued it. And though the faults of parents are to be tenderly treated by their children, yet in the case of great crimes the son may have leave to speak even to his own mother with some harshness, so as that harshness is meant for her good, and to turn her from her wicked ways, and not done for the purpose of upbraiding. And now this virtuous prince did in moving terms represent to the queen the heinousness of her offense, in being so forgetful of the dead king, his father, as in so short a space of time to marry with his brother and reputed murderer: such an act as, after the vows which she had sworn to her first husband, was enough to make all vows of women suspected, and all virtue to be accounted hypocrisy, wedding contracts to be less than gamester’s oaths, and religion to be a mockery and a mere form of words. He said she had done such a deed, that the heavens