TEXT:
HAMLET
What, the fair Ophelia!
GERTRUDE
Sweets to the sweet: farewell!
I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife;
I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid,
And not have strewed thy grave.
LAERTES
O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble 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:
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made,
To o'ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.
HAMLET
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis? Whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
LAERTES
The devil take thy soul!
HAMLET
Thou pray'st not well.
NOTES:
Ten Times Treble
As we will see throughout this scene, there’s a tendency towards hyperbole. It’s not enough that the woe of Ophelia’s death is trebled, it’s ten times that. This feels like a large number only until Hamlet starts talking about forty thousand, and then a million!
Quick
In contemporary English quick means fast, or rapid, but for Shakespeare it also means alive. As in the line here, it means the opposite of dead. (Don’t be fooled by the western movie that borrows from this line, though - the inference there is that if you aren’t the fastest shooter, you’re dead!)
Mount Pelion
Pelion is a mountain in Thessaly, in the northern part of Greece. It is named after Peleus, the father of Achilles, and was famously the home of the centaur Chiron. It was the location for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the fateful occasion on which Eris, Goddess of Spite, produced the golden apple that led, eventually, to the Trojan War. For our purposes, it’s known from a different story, that of the Titans Ephialtes and Otus, who lifted Mount Pelion and put it on top of Mount Ossa (see later episode!) in their attempt to storm Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece.