GERTRUDE                Alas, how is’t with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse? Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep, And as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm Your bedded hair like life in excrements Start up and stand on end. O gentle son, Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look? (3.4.112-120) Gertrude’s terrified, […]

HAMLET         Do you not come your tardy son to chide That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by Th’important acting of your dread command? O say! GHOST            Do not forget! This visitation Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. But look, amazement on thy mother sits! O step between her and her fighting soul. Conceit in weakest bodies […]

HAMLET         A murderer and a villain, A slave that is not twentieth part the kith Of your precedent lord, a vice of kings, A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, That from a shelf the precious diadem stole And put it in his pocket, – GERTRUDE                No more! HAMLET                                 – a king of shreds and patches – Enter Ghost. Save me and hover o’er […]

HAMLET                                 Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty – GERTRUDE                            O speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet.       (3.4.89-94) Actually Hamlet was just pausing for breath, and he now returns to this verbal and moral assault with renewed vigour and […]

HAMLET                     Rebellious hell, If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones, To flaming youth let virtue be as wax And melt in her own fire; proclaim no shame When the compulsive ardour gives the charge, Since frost itself as actively doth burn And reason pardons will. GERTRUDE                O Hamlet, speak no more. Thou turn’st my very eyes into my soul And there I see such black and grained spots As will leave there their tinct.          (3.4.80-89) Hamlet […]

HAMLET                     Sense, sure, you have – Else could you not have motion. But sure, that sense Is apoplexed, for madness would not err Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thralled But it reserved some quantity of choice To serve in such a difference. What devil was’t That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind? Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, Ears without hands or […]

HAMLET                     Look you now what follows: Here is your husband like a mildewed ear Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed And batten on this moor? Ha, have you eyes? You cannot call it love, for at your age The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble And waits upon the judgement, and what judgement Would step from this to […]

HAMLET         Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers: See what a grace was seated on this brow, Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man; This […]

HAMLET                     O, such a deed As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul, and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words. Heaven’s face does glow O’er this solidity and compound mass With heated visage as against the doom, Is thought-sick at the act. GERTRUDE                Ay me, what act That roars so loud and thunders in the index?       (3.4.43-50) Hamlet still hasn’t finished accusing his mother of doing terrible things, such a deed as from the […]

GERTRUDE    What have I done that thou dar’st wag thy tongue In noise so rude against me? HAMLET                                 Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty, Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows As false as dicers’ oaths…     (3.4.37-43) Gertrude can be RAGING, how bloody […]