She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son.  If she had sense to realise Hamlet’s purpose, or the probability of the King’s taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered torture in those days.  But perhaps she was too dull.

The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic.  She is perfectly serene.  Things have slipped back into their groove, and she has no apprehensions.  She is, however, disturbed and full of sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires.  These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even more common than the death of a father.  But then she meets her death because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his success.  And more:  when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet: 

     No, no, the drink, the drink,—­O my dear Hamlet,—­
     The drink, the drink!  I am poison’d. [Dies.

Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as Shakespeare?  Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic with a realism so daring and yet so true to ‘the modesty of nature’?

* * * * *

King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves.  But he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically.  On the one hand, he is not without respectable qualities.  As a king he is courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests.  He nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and address.  His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means to the crown.[81] His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being dead.  In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (III. i. 49 f., III. iii. 35 f.).  Nor is he cruel or malevolent.

On the other hand, he is no tragic character.  He had a small nature.  If Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance—­a mildewed ear, a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking.  People made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he evidently put little reliance on their loyalty.  He was no villain of force, who thought of winning his brother’s crown by a bold and open stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in his pocket.  He had the inclination of natures physically weak and morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing.  His instinctive predilection was for poison:  this was the means he used in his first murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet executed by deputy.  Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first thought was always for himself.