TEXT:
HAMLET (continued)
Look you now, what follows:
Here is your husband; like a mildew'd 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 hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment: and what judgment
Would step from this to this? Sense, sure, you have,
Else could you not have motion; but sure, that sense
Is apoplex'd; for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thrall'd
But it reserved some quantity of choice,
To serve in such a difference. What devil was't
That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman-blind?
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope.
O shame! where is thy blush?
NOTES:
Pharoah’s Dream
In the Book of Genesis, Pharoah has a dream in which he sees seven fat cows and seven healthy ears of corn consumed by thinner - or mildewed - leaner cows and corn. Happily Joseph, exiled from Canaan after his brothers sold him into slavery and then imprisoned thanks to the machinations of the wife of Potiphar, is brought in to interpret the dreams and he becomes a valued member of the pharoah’s court.
The First Quarto is an early text of the play, and is at least 1500 lines shorter than the better-established texts known as Q2 (the Second Quarto) and F1 (the First Folio). It was all but lost until the splendidly-named Sir Henry Bunbury found a copy of it in the 1820s, and the text has provoked intense debate for nearly 200 years. Since the text is significantly different to the more familiar versions of Q2 and F1, I refer to it only when there are especially illuminating passages worth mentioning. It was given the full scholarly treatment by the excellent Arden Shakespeare in 2007, when as part of the 3rd Series it was printed in its own right, alongside the F1 text. You can find more details of that edition by clicking here.
Vulcan was the blacksmith of the gods, associated with his Greek equivalent Hephaistus. He created Mercury’s magical sandals, and was responsible for a variety of other gifts. He was unhappily married to Venus, and was notoriously ugly and even deformed in some versions of his story.
Hey-Day
Hamlet means something like ‘high spirits’ or vigorous activity here. Our sense of hey-day as the zenith of vigour or capacity emerged a little later, but can still impart some meaning to the phrase.
Hoodman’s Blind
Versions of Blind Man’s Buff, or Marco Polo, or as Hamlet calls it ‘Hoodman’s Blind’ appear in playgrounds or swimming pools all over the world and throughout history. According to wikipedia, a version of the game in Ancient Greece was known as “copper mosquito”. (Sadly I have no idea why!) Hamlet mentions the game here to infantilise Gertrude, to berate her for being duped by some devil into picking Claudius - because for him there can be no other logical explanation.