THE SCENE: Prince Amleth (Hamlet), the rightful claimant to his uncle’s throne, successfully avoided execution by pretending to be a witless idiot. However, some of his enemies, seeking to prove his sanity, concocted a plan to see if he remained so dull when given the chance to engage in some seduction.
THE TEXT: Some people, therefore, declared that his mind was quick enough, and fancied that he only played the simpleton in order to hide his understanding, and veiled some deep purpose under a cunning feint. His wiliness (said these) would be most readily detected, if a fair woman were put in his way in some secluded place, who should provoke his mind to the temptations of love; all men’s natural temper being too blindly amorous to be artfully dissembled, and this passion being also too impetuous to be checked by cunning. So men were commissioned to draw the young man in his rides into a remote part of the forest, and there assail him with a temptation of this nature.
The woman whom his uncle had dispatched met him in a dark spot, as though she had crossed him by chance. Alarmed, scenting a trap, and fain to possess his desire in greater safety, he caught up the woman in his arms and dragged her off to a distant and impenetrable fen. Moreover, when they had lain together, he conjured her earnestly to disclose the matter to none, and the promise of silence was accorded as heartily as it was asked. For both of them had been under the same fostering in their childhood; and this early rearing in common had brought Amleth and the girl into great intimacy.
So, when he had returned home, they all jeeringly asked him whether he had given way to love, and he avowed that he had ravished the maid. When he was next asked where he did it, and what had been his pillow, he said that he had rested upon the hoof of a beast of burden, upon a cockscomb, and also upon a ceiling. For, when he was starting into temptation, he had gathered fragments of all these things, in order to avoid lying. And though his jest did not take aught of the truth out of the story, the answer was greeted with shouts of merriment from the bystanders. The maiden, too, when questioned on the matter, declared that he had done no such thing; and her denial was the more readily credited when it was found that the escort had not witnessed the deed. Thus all were worsted, and none could open the secret lock of the young man’s wisdom.
– Gesta Danorum, Saxo Grammaticus, 12th Century AD
[Image Credit: Amleth og Kuiden by Louis Moe]
