1 PLAYER But who – ah woe – had seen the mobled queen –
HAMLET ‘The mobled queen’!
POLONIUS That’s good.
1 PLAYER – Run barefoot up and down, threatening the flames
With bisson rheum, a clout upon that head
Where late the diadem stood and, for a robe,
About her lank and all-o’erteemed loins,
A blanket in the alarm of fear caught up.
Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steeped,
’Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced. (2.2.440-449)
The Player continues, indeed coming to Hecuba, and where Pyrrhus and Priam have been imagined as a series of static images, Hecuba is all frenzied movement and intense emotion—and also, for the moment, silence, sight not sound. But who—ah woe—had seen the mobled queen—whoever had seen her (and mobled, notoriously obscure, means something like veiled)… Hamlet’s struck by the phrase, perhaps because he remembers it, yessss, this is the bit, or because it’s striking him anew. Even Polonius has to concede, mobled, that’s good. The Player continues, seamlessly, and takes his hearers with him, watching this pathetic scene. If you’d seen it, this spectacle—if anyone had seen it—the old queen, run barefoot up and down, threatening the flames with bisson rheum, weeping so violently it was almost as if she could put out the fires (of course she couldn’t, but that’s how much she wept)—and there was a clout upon that head where late the diadem stood, just any old cloth covering her head rather than the crown which she’d worn so recently and, for a robe, about her lank and all o’er-teemed loins a blanket in the alarm of fear caught up. Hecuba’s old, like Priam; she’s exhausted, frail, worn out by her child-bearing, skinny and shrunk (it’s an unsparing evocation of elderly flesh)—and all she has to cover her, manifestly inadequate, is a blanket that she’s grabbed in haste, in terror, as she’s tumbled out of bed on this terrible night. She’s exposed, terrified, pathetic. Who this had seen—whoever had seen this—with tongue in venom steeped, ’gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced. If you’d seen this, you’d have excoriated fortune with all possible vituperation, railed against its rule over humanity. (And in so doing, you’d be as powerless as Hecuba herself, as powerless as the hearers of the speech.)