Can Hamlet really Capture the Conscience of the King?

Hamlet, we all remember, wanted ‘to catch the conscience of the king’. For catch the OED has ‘to seize or take hold of, to ensnare, to deceive, to surprise … to take, to intercept … to seize by the senses or intellect, to apprehend’; the term derives originally from hunting and fishing, though it also had in the 16th century our modern connotation of to ‘catch out’. It would have been a very revealing thing to do, to catch the conscience of a king. ‘Conscience’ at the time didn’t only have our modern sense of internal moral regulation but also meant ‘inward knowledge or consciousness’; the dictionary cites a 1611 usage as meaning ‘inmost thought, mind, heart’. To catch the conscience of a king would be radically to expose his most private preoccupations and, in the words of the dictionary, to expose ‘the faculty or principle which judges the moral quality of one’s actions or motives’.