I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
     To let his madness range,

—­these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene.  His first comment on the death of Polonius is,

     It had been so with us had we been there;

and his second is,

     Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered? 
     It will be laid to us.

He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit.  He won the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of her!), but also by ‘witch-craft of his wit’ or intellect.  He seems to have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on the person he addressed (’that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’).  We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man’s desire to return to Paris (I. ii. 42 f.).  Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even annoyance.  He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity.  He had evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his objects,—­that he could trick men and manage them.  Unfortunately he imagined he could trick something more than men.

This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to his ruin.  He has a sanguine disposition.  When first we see him, all has 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 Hamlet’s indiscretion served him well.  The power that shaped his end shaped the King’s no less.