CLAUDIUS                  But stay, what noise?

Enter GERTRUDE.

GERTRUDE    One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,

So fast they follow. Your sister’s drowned, Laertes.

LAERTES        Drowned! O, where? (4.7.160-163)

It’s one of the best jump cuts, needle-scratches anywhere: but stay, what noise? Screaming, crying, from Gertrude, from someone else? Crackling radios, sirens? Do Claudius’s goons try to stop her coming in? Just when Claudius and Laertes have been plotting away, just when Claudius seems to be back in control, life (or rather death) intrudes. Gertrude’s enigmatic in her opening; it can be stunned, bitter, resigned: one woe doth tread upon another’s heel, so fast they follow. She’s recapitulating Claudius’s own observation about sorrows coming not single spies but in battalions, one terrible thing after another; here Gertrude imagines sorrow as a kind of pile-up, a desperate procession where tragedies come so thick and fast they trip over each other, run into each other’s backs. Then she steels herself, or perhaps there’s no other way to say it, other than the stark, horrible truth: your sister’s drowned, Laertes. Drowned has the emphasis in the line, a resounding hollow, a pit, a moan, and it’s that which Laertes repeats back. Drowned! And a numb, odd follow-up, with the terrible illogic of shock and grief, not what?! or how? or when? but, O, where?