Act IV, Scene 7
KING CLAUDIUS
Now must your conscience my acquittance seal,
And you must put me in your heart for friend,
Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear,
That he which hath your noble father slain
Pursued my life.
LAERTES It well appears. But tell me
Why you proceeded not against these feats,
So criminal and capital in nature.
As by your safety, greatness, wisdom, all things else,
You mainly were stirred up.
KING CLAUDIUS O, for two special reasons,
Which may to you perhaps seem much unsinewed,
But yet to me they’re strong. The Queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks, and for myself
—My virtue or my plauge, be it either which—
She is so conjunctive to my life and soul
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her.
The other motive
Why to a public count I might not go
Is the great love the general gender bear him,
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Work like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces, so that my arrows,
Too slightly timbered for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
But not where I have aimed them.
LAERTES
And so have I a noble father lost,
A sister driven to desperate terms
Whose worth, if praises may go back again,
Stood challenger on mount of all the age
For her perfections. But my revenge will come!
KING CLAUDIUS
Break not your sleeps for that. You must not think
That we are made of stuff so flat and dull
That we can let our beard be shook with danger
And think it pastime! You shortly shall hear more!
I loved your father, and we love ourself,
And that, I hope will teach you to imagine…
[Enter MESSENGER with letters.]
How now? What news?
MESSENGER Letters, my lord, from Hamlet
These to your Majesty, this to the Queen.
KING CLAUDIUS From Hamlet?! Who brought them??
MESSENGER Sailors, my lord, they say.
I saw them not. They were given me by Claudio.
He received them of him that brought them.
KING CLAUDIUS Laertes, you shall hear them!
[To MESSENGER] Leave us.
[Reads letter]
High and mighty,
You shall know that I am set naked
On your kingdom. Tomorrow shall I beg leave
To see your kingly eyes; when I shall (first
Asking your pardon) thereunto recount
The occasion of my sudden
And more strange return.
—Hamlet
What should this mean?! Are all the rest coming back?
Or is it some abuse and no such thing??
LAERTES Know you the hand?
Line 56 of Act IV, Scene 7