But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. [22]

The feelings of Hamlet, until then forcibly kept down, now get the
mastery over him. He gives vent to them in oaths of which he is himself
at last ashamed, when he compares himself to 'a very drab, a scullion,'
who 'must fall a-cursing.'

He now will set to work and get more natural evidence of the King's
guilt. He begins to entertain doubts as to those mystic views by
which he meant to be guided. He mistrusts the apparition which he
had called an honest ghost ('true-penny'):--

The spirit that I have seen
May be the Devil: and the Devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape. Yea, perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this. [23]

Over weakness the Devil is potent; all flesh is weak. What mode of
thought is this? What philosophy taught this doctrine? Hamlet's
weakness, if we may believe Polonius, [24] has been brought on by
fasting and watching.

Over melancholy, too, the Devil is powerful. Are we not here in the
sombre atmosphere of those who turn away their reason from ideal