PLAYER KING Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too,
My operant powers their functions leave to do,
And thou shalt live in this fair world behind
Honoured, beloved, and haply one as kind
For husband shalt thou –
PLAYER QUEEN O, confound the rest!
Such love must needs be treason in my breast.
In second husband let me be accurst:
None wed the second but who killed the first.
HAMLET That’s wormwood! (3.2.167-175)
The King is pragmatic—and he may be visibly ailing: Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too. I’m old, I’m not going to be around much longer; my operant powers their functions leave to do. I’m slowing down, seizing up, and my body doesn’t work so well anymore. I’m dying, love, and thou shalt live in this fair world behind. I’m going to have to leave you, and go somewhere you can’t follow. But you, you’ll remain here honoured and beloved—by others as by me—and haply one as kind for husband shalt thou—The King envisages his wife remarrying; he hopes that she will find someone who will love and honour her as much as he does (he echoes, more or less, the words of the marriage service). But the Queen is having none of it: O, confound the rest! Don’t say it, don’t even think it! It’s impossible! I couldn’t! It would be a betrayal of our love, of you, of myself; such love must needs be treason in my breast. In second husband let me be accurst (more in the fact of marrying at all than in the nature of the husband? but both are probably implied?)—and then, as it were, the killer: none wed the second but who killed the first. That’s how extreme and unthinkable a thing it’d have to be, for me to remarry, as mad as marrying your murderer! Impossible! Hamlet can’t contain himself, he’s on the edge of his seat, watching, watching: that’s wormwood! bitter poison to my mother, and to my fratricidal, regicidal uncle! (I wonder if there’s a particular and typical association between wormwood and weaning—in R&J the Nurse recalls weaning Juliet by laying wormwood to her dug, smearing her breast with the bitter substance so that the child will be repelled—if so there’s an additional charge to the disgust and betrayal that Hamlet feels towards his mother, the rupture between them, too. But wormwood as a bitter thing is pretty standard.)