LAERTES                                O, treble woe

Fall ten times double on that cursed head

Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense

Deprived thee of. Hold off the earth awhile,

Till I have caught her once more in mine arms.

[Leaps in the grave.]

Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead

Till of this flat a mountain you have made

T’o’ertop old Pelion or the skyish head

Of blue Olympus.       (5.1.235-243)

Laertes does NOT like the suggestion that Ophelia could have married Hamlet, that Hamlet could have been his brother-in-law: O, treble woe fall ten times double on that cursed head whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense deprived thee of. No, you know what, SCREW HAMLET, damn him to hell and back and then some (3 x 10 x 2 x woe). This is all his fault—for killing Polonius and so precipitating Ophelia’s madness and death? it’s actually not clear—he’s the one to blame, he’s the reason you lost your reason. Then, even more dramatically, and perhaps an implied stage direction; it seems that the corpse (on a bier, shrouded, not in a coffin) has already been lowered into the grave, and the gravedigger has made to start filling it in, Gertrude having already thrown her flowers. No, don’t! Hold off the earth awhile, just a little longer, till I have caught her once more in mine arms. I need to give my little sister one last hug! And it seems pretty unambiguous that he does indeed jump in (so it has to be big enough). Laertes is defiant, embracing his sister’s lifeless body: now pile your dust upon the quick and dead—go on, bury us both—till of this flat a mountain you have made t’o’ertop old Pelion or the skyish head of blue Olympus. I don’t CARE anymore, just shovel it in, cover me in earth, pile it up so high that it’s higher than the highest mountain, so high that it reaches to the gods, in an act of futile human hubris, as simultaneously futile and histrionic as Laertes’s own actions now.