son of the buried king, and lawful successor to the throne.

But upon no one did this unadvised action of the queen make such
impression as upon this young prince, who loved and venerated the
memory of his dead father almost to idolatry, and being of a nice
sense of honour, and a most exquisite practiser of propriety himself,
did sorely take to heart this unworthy conduct of his mother Gertrude:
insomuch that, between grief for his father's death and shame for
his mother's marriage, this young prince was overclouded with a deep
melancholy, and lost all his mirth and all his good looks; all his
customary pleasure in books forsook him, his princely exercises and
sports, proper to his youth, were no longer acceptable; he grew weary
of the world, which seemed to him an unweeded garden, where all
the wholesome flowers were choaked up, and nothing but weeds could
thrive. Not that the prospect of exclusion from the throne, his lawful
inheritance, weighed so much upon his spirits, though that to a young
and high-minded prince was a bitter wound and a sore indignity; but
what so galled him, and took away all his cheerful spirits, was, that
his mother had shewn herself so forgetful to his father's memory: and
such a father! who had been to her so loving and so gentle a husband!
and then she always appeared as loving and obedient a wife to him, and
would hang upon him as if her affection grew to him: and now within
two months, or as it seemed to young Hamlet, less than two months, she
had married again, married his uncle, her dead husband's brother, in
itself a highly improper and unlawful marriage, from the nearness of
relationship, but made much more so by the indecent haste with which
it was concluded, and the unkingly character of the man whom she had
chosen to be the partner of her throne and bed. This it was which,
more than the loss of ten kingdoms, dashed the spirits, and brought a
cloud over the mind of this honourable young prince.