HAMLET                     Within a month,

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears

Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,

She married. O most wicked speed! To post

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets,

It is not, nor it cannot come to good;

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.    (1.2.153-9)

Within a month: Hamlet keeps coming back to this again and again; it’s a particular unit of mourning and remembering and remembrance, in pre-Reformation practice its end marked by the month’s mind, a mass or masses a month after a death. She couldn’t even wait that long! She couldn’t stop herself! Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her galled eyes—and now he’s suggesting that his mother’s grief at his father’s death was fake, her tears were unrighteous, crocodile tears—while her face was still tear-stained, and her eyes were still red with weeping: she married. SHE MARRIED. Unbelievable. (Hamlet’s good at vivid, sensual detail: here there’s a glimpse of a bride, her eyes still swollen and pink, traces of tears on her cheeks, even as she smiles at her new husband.) O most wicked speed! Not just indecorous, but wrong, deeply wrong. To post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets: Hamlet’s becoming more prurient, more closely focused on his mother’s sexuality, her inability (as he’s representing it) to control her own desires. Not just speed, indecent haste, but dexterity, a sense of manipulation, sleight of hand, even. It was all so neatly done, a fait accompli. The sheets are incestuous because Gertrude has married her brother-in-law, prohibited by church law and generally regarded as icky—and with the spectre of Henry VIII looming at least a bit. Sheets make Hamlet’s revulsion particularly about sex, so there’s a double taboo of sorts, that his mother’s married his uncle, and that she’s a sexual being at all. It is not, nor it cannot come to good. This isn’t going to end well: you never spoke a truer word, boy.

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue. Hamlet’s seen people approaching, and he can’t say any of this to anyone—and he was just getting going, too, really getting down to the guts of it—so he’ll have to go back to suppressing what he’s thinking or feeling, even though keeping it bottled up feels like he’s going to burst, the pressure, the pain, the loneliness of it. Hatred, disgust, and fascination; love and grief.