The castle.
THE KING, QUEEN, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN enter .
THE KING.—These sobs have a cause; these deep heaves of your heart, they must be explained; it is fitting that we understand them. Where is your son?
THE QUEEN, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. —Leave us a moment. ( They leave .) Ah! my good lord, what have I seen this evening?
THE KING.—What, Gertrude! how is Hamlet?
THE QUEEN.—Mad, like the sea and the wind, when they contend together for the mightiest. In his frenzied fit, hearing something stir behind the tapestry, with his drawn rapier he whips the air, he cries: “A rat! a rat!” and in this seizure of his brain, he kills the good old man without seeing him.
KING.—O heavy crime! It would have happened to us as much had we been there. His liberty is full of threats for all; for yourself, for us, for everyone. Alas! how shall we answer this bloody event? It will fall back on us, whose foresight should have kept this young man in his madness on the alert, bridled, and far from all haunting. But such was our love that we would not understand what was proper to do, and we acted like a man afflicted with a shameful disease, who, to avoid disclosing it, lets it feed on the very marrow of his life. Where is he gone?
QUEEN.—Draw aside the body he hath slain; and upon it his very madness, like a little gold in an ore of base metals, shews itself pure. He weeps for what he hath done.
KING. O Gertrude, come! The sun will no sooner touch the mountains, than we will send him on board. As for this dreadful deed, we must both use all our majesty and address to cover and excuse it. Hola! Guildenstern ( Enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . ) Friends, go both of you, take some reinforcement with you; Hamlet, in his madness, hath slain Polonius, and dragged him out of his mother’s closet. Go, seek him; speak to him properly; and carry the body into the chapel: I pray you, make haste. ( Exit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . ) Come, Gertrude; we will summon our wisest friends, and at the same time make known to them what we intend to do, and what is unhappily already done. So we are fortunate that calumny,—whose murmur, running around the world, hurls, as straight as the cannon to its mark, its poisoned charge,—yet misses our name, and strikes only the insensible air. Oh! come! my soul is full of discord and dread.
(They go out.)
