THE KING AND THE BODY
Hamlet. The body is with the king, but the king is
not with the body. The king is a thing—
(Hamlet, iv, 2, 29)
I can best convey the meaning of these words by a series of mental steps. The sentence is very delusive; it was intended to be so by Shakespeare. As Rosencrantz was supposed to see nothing but pure nonsense in such a statement, being too shallow to understand Hamlet, it was necessary for Shakespeare to put the sentence in such a form that it would appear the same to us, at first blush; thus we should see how perfectly insane it seemed to the two king's-messengers. At the same time its meaning is perfectly open, and was intended to be open by Shakespeare, to those who had the feeling and insight to understand Hamlet. Let the reader exercise a little patience, therefore, if at first he does not catch it. Afterwards I shall explain what relation it bears to the play as a whole.
The idea that Hamlet is here expressing is as follows:
To a dead man, a king does not exist. The king has no being, is nothing, to a dead man, because the dead man is not conscious of him. But to a live king, a dead man does exist.
