HAMLET                     Look you now what follows:

Here is your husband like a mildewed ear

Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed

And batten on this moor? Ha, have you eyes?

You cannot call it love, for at your age

The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble

And waits upon the judgement, and what judgement

Would step from this to this?           (3.4.61-69)

Hamlet really is being unbearable here, but eventually almost laughably so, as well as horrid: look you now what follows, he says, look at this, look what happened next, as he brandishes an image of his uncle Claudius. Here is your husband—and he emphasises is—like a mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother. Such a strange image, and not a coherent one, as if Hamlet’s reaching for something, anything, disgusting, and lights on this bizarre vision of an ear of corn, blighted with mildew, infecting the whole plant. (Which doesn’t make sense even as an image for the comparison of two brothers, but does carry a recollection of the poisoning through the ear; Claudius is imagined as an agent of pollution, malign, infectious.) Have you eyes? LOOK!! Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed and batten on this moor? It’s an image of descent, leaving the sunlit uplands of Hamlet’s father for the inferior pastures below (this makes no sense in terms of animal husbandry, grass is grass; the suggestion that Gertrude is a stupid sheep is probably incidental; batten suggests greed, rapacity)—and there’s an additional pejorative racialised implication, Claudius the moor in comparison to his brother, the golden-haired Greek god. (Of course, if the same actor is doubling the Ghost and Claudius, then Hamlet’s taunts seem even madder.)

Ha, have you eyes?! LOOK! (Hamlet may be forcing his mother to do so, thrusting pictures in her face.) And then a teenage swerve: you cannot call it love, whatever you feel for THIS, this man, my uncle, for at your age the heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble and waits upon the judgement. You’re past all that, surely, beyond infatuation, desire, lust; you should be weighing things up, acting rationally, not being led by base sexual appetite! And what judgement would step from this to this? How could anyone choose that man over this one? It’s completely irrational! (Hamlet can’t cope with the thought of his mother having a sex life–or, even more, a LOVE life–at the same time as he’s completely obsessed with it, of course.)