HAMLET         This heavy-headed revel east and west

Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations:

They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase

Soil our addition, and indeed it takes

From our achievements, though performed at height,

The pith and marrow of our attribute.

So oft it chances in particular men

That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,

As in their birth wherein they are not guilty

(Since nature cannot choose his origin),

By their o’ergrowth of some complexion

Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,

Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens

The form of plausive manners –      (1.4.17-30)

Hamlet’s only just getting going, showing his nervousness by going on and on about how to interpret and extrapolate from Danish drinking customs: it’s what he DOES, he THINKS and TALKS. (I doubt I have ever heard most of this speech performed.) A bit of moral censoriousness to start with: this heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. All this drinking, we’re mocked for it all over the world, censured and condemned. (The early modern stereotype of the Dane is indeed a drunkard. With a great fondness for decorating his clothes with lots of ribbons, apparently, too.) They clepe us drunkards, call us drunks, and with swinish phrase soil our addition; they make us out to be drunken pigs! It’s the only thing that anyone says about us (is there a recollection here of having been mocked in Wittenberg, written off as another Danish drunk?) Indeed it takes from our achievements, though performed at height, the pith and marrow of our attribute. No matter what else we do, feats of arms, great honours: that’s who we are. Drunks. Drunken Danish pigs.

Then he becomes more abstract, more philosophical, thinking about moral character in people: so oft it chance in particular men that, for some vicious mole of nature in them, as in their birth wherein they are not guilty (since nature cannot choose his origin)—it’s the same with people, isn’t it? Just one little character flaw becomes their whole personality, the thing that defines them, but it’s not as if they’ve chosen to be like that? And by their o’ergrowth of some complexion, some tendency of their personality getting out of control, coming to dominate, oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, something which overcomes their rationality (a striking, slightly scary evocation of the irrational breaking through, destroying the rational). Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens the form of plausive manners, that little tic, that way of doing things that goes over the top, like bread that’s been made with too much yeast, out of control—swollen, grotesque even—it’s unseemly, not the done thing.

(This is a single sentence and there’s more to come of it. It’s Hamlet Hamlet-ing, gabbling but, even more, piling clause upon subordinate clause, more nouns and adjectives than verbs, more thinking and qualifying and THINKING and talking and THINKING than doing. At the level of grammar and syntax more than diction. Never mind the hendiadys, look for the delayed verbs.)