GERTRUDE    There is a willow grows askant the brook

That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.

Therewith fantastic garlands did she make

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name

But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.

There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook.    (4.7.164-173)

It’s the strangest speech, and in many ways I think the obvious, clichéd question—how does Gertrude know all this? was she there? if so, why didn’t she DO something?—isn’t the point. It’s a set piece of ekphrastic description, describing the scene as if it were (already) a painting—but it’s also possible to see it as an odd attempt to give comfort by softening, concealing, distracting rather than explaining: your sister’s drowned but look, flowers! For a rhetorically trained audience, it’s meticulously giving the circumstances of the event, making it credible and creditable through the thickness of the description. And, after all, Laertes has asked where? Gertrude is answering his question.

There is a willow grows askant the brook—you know the one, the one that grows at an angle, leaning over (and everyone knows ‘the brook’, clearly)—that shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream. It’s an old willow, perhaps, gnarled, with silver-white leaves (a flashback to Polonius, Ophelia’s singing of his white hair?)—and the brook runs mirror-smooth, reflecting the leaves. (The sentence lengths are interesting, beginning with just two lines, as if Gertrude is initially tentative, warming up. Then four. Then another four. Delaying, dilating) Therewith fantastic garlands did she make—did Ophelia make her garlands initially of willow, sign of unrequited or rejected love? possibly (and there are lots of textual messes around here)—but if she did use the willow, it was only as a base (which makes sense for a garland; willow’s whippy, strong, pliable, easily woven); she added crowflowers, nettles, daisies—buttercups or ragged robin, the purple or white flowers of the nettle, the white and yellow daisies; these garlands are so colourful—and long purples, some kind of wild orchid, perhaps? that liberal shepherds give a grosser name but our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them. The country people have a rude name for them—generally explained as something phallic—but the chaste modest girls, they call them—something even more disturbing apparently. (The garlands become momentarily morbidly animated, as these dead digits are woven into them, or weave them.) It’s as if—with this particularly weird, ill-judged addition—Gertrude is putting off the next movement of the story. Flowers are pretty; look at the pretty flowers.

There on the pendent boughs, the overhanging branches, her crownest weeds clambering to hang—she was trying to hang her garland, her crown of flowers over the stream, clambering, climbing, but it’s ungainly, all those skirts, the bulk of fabric—an envious sliver broke. Snap. The tree is given agency; the tree was jealous, malicious; it was the tree’s fault, not hers. (Ophelia is more passive even than being described as having lost her footing, for instance.) It wasn’t her fault! (She didn’t jump, she didn’t even fall: she was pushed!) When down the weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook. She fell with her flowers, at one with them—and the stream itself was already grieving for her.