Hamlet's Soliloquy: Now might I do it pat, now he is praying (3.3.77-100)
Annotations
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scann'd:
A villain kills my father; and for that, (80)
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought, 'Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage? (90)
No!
Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At game, a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't;
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays:
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.
"Hamlet tells us also that Claudius is an arrant sensualist, and his picture of Claudius in the queen's bed is of a sort to turn the stomach. But what can Hamlet know of the intimacies of the conjugal chamber? We must fall back on the explanation that Claudius' general character justifies Hamlet's imaginative description. Unfortunately for Hamlet, no one else in the play finds Claudius unchaste. There is no gossip about the sensuality of his relations with Gertrude, such as there is about the sensuality of Antony's relations with Cleopatra. We have no account of other women he has debauched, as we have a list of Macbeth's villainies. We have no pregnant comment in this play such as Ulysses makes of Cressida" [Howard Mumford Jones, The Charges Against King Claudius]. Read on...
"Hamlet tells us also that Claudius is an arrant sensualist, and his picture of Claudius in the queen's bed is of a sort to turn the stomach. But what can Hamlet know of the intimacies of the conjugal chamber? We must fall back on the explanation that Claudius' general character justifies Hamlet's imaginative description. Unfortunately for Hamlet, no one else in the play finds Claudius unchaste. There is no gossip about the sensuality of his relations with Gertrude, such as there is about the sensuality of Antony's relations with Cleopatra. We have no account of other women he has debauched, as we have a list of Macbeth's villainies. We have no pregnant comment in this play such as Ulysses makes of Cressida" [Howard Mumford Jones, The Charges Against King Claudius].