GERTRUDE     Sweets to the sweet. Farewell.

I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife:

I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid,

And not have strewed thy grave.     (5.1.232-235)

Sweets to the sweet; it can jar, be just the next instalment in Gertrude’s prettifying of Ophelia’s death—more flowers!—but at the same time it’s kind, helpless, futile—what more can be done indeed? Ophelia has such a strong association with flowers and here they are, their perfume made present in Gertrude’s words. And Ophelia can be sweet, and fragile as the flowers. Farewell; the flowers are thrown, or let fall, a finality to it, and a passivity. Then an admission—is it just cold comfort to Laertes, or the statement of a genuine possibility? I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife—and there’s such maternal concern in my Hamlet, and wife not bride; partly it avoids the repetition of bride with the next line, but it’s imagining a now-lost future for Hamlet too (and at this stage, does Gertrude think he’s dead? or just in England?), a marriage, not simply a wedding. I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, and not have strewed thy grave. Again in this play a wedding is brought into intimate, indecorous proximity to a funeral, and the grave becomes a bed, eroticised—but it’s an inversion of the play’s opening, instead of a funeral changed to a wedding, here there’s a (potential) wedding giving way to a funeral. More than Ophelia is being buried here, as Gertrude strews her flowers.