Hamlet (II.ii.445-97): Priam, King of Troy, is killed by Neoptolemus (aka. Pyrrhus), son of Achilles.

Shakespeare sees this killing of the King of Troy by Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus as a key moment for Hamlet, while he is planning to murder the King of Denmark, for Hamlet requires the First Player of the visiting troupe to recite a description of this event derived from Book II of Virgil's Aeneid, in which Pyrrhus takes revenge on Troy for the killing of his father Achilles by Paris:

Pyrrhus at Priam drives; in rage strikes wide;
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword
The unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium,
Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top
Stoops to his base; and with a hideous crash
Takes prisoner Pyrrhus' ear: for lo! his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverend Priam, seem'd i' the air to stick:
So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood;
And, like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
But as we often see, against some storm,
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region; so, after Pyrrhus' pause,
A roused vengeance sets him new a-work;
And never did the Cyclops' hammers fall
On Mars's armour, forg'd for proof eterne,
With less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword
Now falls on Priam. (II.ii.472-492).

In looking at this passage what stands out for one unmistakably is the deliberately short line "Did nothing." The metrics themselves impose imobility on the stage. Clearly, before such a crucial assassination, hesitancy cannot be avoided, indeed action may be an error, for the Cyclops parallel suggests that violence is ineffective and ultimately self-destructive, as was their attack on Gods "eterne" such as Mars. Indeed, traditionally some Trojans escaped with Aeneas to found Rome which conquered Greece.

Shakespeare anticipates this interpretation sympathetic to Priam in The Rape of Lucrece, when he makes Lucrece lament his killing which she sees in a painting of the fall of Troy:

I'll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue;
And drop sweet balm in Priam's painted wound,
And rail on Pyrrhus that hath done him wrong,
And with my tears quench Troy that burns so long;
And with my knife scratch out the angry eyes
Of all the Greeks that are thine enemies. (1747-52)


A detail of an Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 520 BC–510 BC, from Vulci; Louvre Museum; Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Sully, room 39, case 6; Canino Collection, 1837; Photographer: Marie-Lan Nguyen (2006). Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)