HAMLET                                 Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed

Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty –

GERTRUDE                            O speak to me no more!

These words like daggers enter in my ears.

No more, sweet Hamlet.       (3.4.89-94)

Actually Hamlet was just pausing for breath, and he now returns to this verbal and moral assault with renewed vigour and prurient specificity: nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed—slippery with sweat, stinking of sex (rank is a very Hamlet and Hamlet word, excessive, rotten, overgrown)—stewed in corruption, absolutely luxuriating in your sin (and a stew is a brothel), honeying and making love over the nasty sty… Everything that’s been churning around in Hamlet’s mind is now on the outside; it’s as if he too—in a play filled with voyeurs and secret watchers—has seen and watched things that he shouldn’t have, that he now can’t stop describing, because he can’t get them out of his head. Honeying suggests the cooing of sweet nothings by lovers, but it adds another layer of stickiness to this greasy, sweating pit, where animals, pig-like, roll around, reduced to base appetite.

Well. Well. Well might the reader or audience say, with Gertrude, O speak to me no more! (Aren’t you just a bit OBSESSED, Hamlet? Do you think you might have a PROBLEM?) These words like daggers enter in my ears—and of course she’s terrified, too, with Polonius already dead, he’s got nothing to lose, that Hamlet’s now going to kill her too. It’s almost incidental that the dagger is phallic. No more, sweet Hamlet. Indeed.