his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [16] about his frame of
mind, confirms us in the belief that he has remained faithful to the
intention declared in the first act--'Look you, I will go pray'--so
as to prepare himself, like many others, to contemplate passively
a world sinful from its very nature, and therefore not to be changed
and bettered.

This scene is, in the first quarto, a mere hasty sketch, but faintly
indicated. In the second quarto it is, so to say, a new one; and a
comparison between the two need, therefore, not be instituted.

Before his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet, for a few
moments, gives up his brain-racking thoughts of penitence; he even
endeavours to philosophise, as he may have done at the University
of Wittenberg before he allowed himself to be lured into dreamland.
He utters a thought--'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so'--which occurs in an Essay of Montaigne, and is thus given
by Florio (127):--

'If that what we call evil and torment be neither torment nor evil,
but that our fancy only gives it that quality, is it in us to change
it?' [17]

Hamlet then pictures his mental condition in words of deepest sincerity.
In order to fully understand this description, we have once more to
refer to an Essay of Montaigne, [18] in which he asserts that man is
not furthered by his reason, his speculations, his passions; that
they give him no advantage over other creatures. A divinely appointed
authority--the Church--confers upon him 'those great advantages and
odds he supposes to have over other creatures.' It is she that seals