O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
     Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! 
     Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
     His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!  O God!  God! 
     How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
     Seem to me all the uses of this world! 
     Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
     That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
     Possess it merely.

Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe.  And what has caused them?  The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it.  It was not his father’s death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as a place full only of things rank and gross.  It was not the vague suspicion that we know Hamlet felt.  Still less was it the loss of the crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind.  It was the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother’s true nature, falling on him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was weakened by sorrow.  And it is essential, however disagreeable, to realise the nature of this shock.  It matters little here whether Hamlet’s age was twenty or thirty:  in either case his mother was a matron of mature years.  All his life he had believed in her, we may be sure, as such a son would.  He had seen her not merely devoted to his father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him

     As if increase of appetite had grown
     By what it fed on.

He had seen her following his body ‘like Niobe, all tears.’  And then within a month—­’O God! a beast would have mourned longer’—­she married again, and married Hamlet’s uncle, a man utterly contemptible and loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an eruption of coarse sensuality, ’rank and gross,’[44] speeding post-haste to its horrible delight.  Is it possible to conceive an experience more desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result anything but perfectly natural?  It brings bewildered horror, then loathing, then despair of human nature.  His whole mind is poisoned.  He can never see Ophelia in the same light again:  she is a woman, and his mother is a woman:  if she mentions the word ‘brief’ to him, the answer drops from his lips like venom, ‘as woman’s love.’  The last words of the soliloquy, which is wholly concerned with this subject, are,