HAMLET                     O answer me,

Let me not burst in ignorance but tell

Why thy canonized bones hearsed in death

Have burst their cerements, why the sepulchre

Wherein we saw thee quietly interred

Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws

To cast thee up again.            (1.4.45-51)

What’s going on? What does this mean? asks Hamlet, in effect, but mostly—as well as filling silence and shock with words, not letting the Ghost or anyone else get a word in edgewise—he’s creating for his listeners, onstage and off, a vivid, violent picture of just how shocking this is. O answer me—tell me!—let me not burst in ignorance, I’m beside myself, I’m desperate to know, to the point of bursting (an oddly childlike image, but skewed: bursting to know, rather than to tell, wanting to learn secrets rather than keep them) tell me why thy canonized bones hearsed in death, your body, which was buried in hallowed ground, reverently, SHUT UP, in a coffin, in a tomb—because, DEAD—why your bones have burst their cerements, exploded out of your winding sheet (early modern winding sheets were tied securely top and bottom). Tell me why the sepulchre wherein we saw thee quietly interred—the tomb where you were buried, decently, calmly, ‘at rest’—tell me why your very tomb has oped his ponderous and marble jaws to cast thee up again. The image is grotesque, a terrible, blasphemous parody of the Resurrection, the body bursting out of its shroud, being vomited forth out of the grave, which has—equally grotesquely—swallowed it, like a monster, with its massive stony jaws. A hell mouth. What the HELL is going on?