ABSTRACT
Hamlet’s soliloquy at the end of II.ii begins with his reaction to the first player’s tears for Hecuba and ends with his plan to ‘catch the conscience of the King’ in a dramatic mousetrap. This chapter aims to suggest in what manner a few familiar stories of ‘guilty creatures sitting at a play’ might have led informed spectators to anticipate a play-scene which included bait for the conscience of the Queen and to expect the murder of old Hamlet to be among Hamlet’s charges against her. So oblique – not to say subliminal – a hint at Hamlet’s suspicion of his mother’s complicity in the murder of his father and at his unconfessed design to include her conscience among the targets of his play would at least be congruous with the general obliquity of his behaviour towards her in the central acts of Hamlet.
