fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy
life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite
ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of
grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his
voice for the succession (I. ii. 108, III. ii. 355); he will be a father
to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy, and then more and
more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in
England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:

till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my _joys_ were ne'er begun.

Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:

Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],

he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
More--it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
things so quietly that we are apt to miss them--when the King is praying
for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.[82] So we are
inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also