The Hamlet Project

Almost every other instance of the word ‘gall’ is in the context of irritation – of bothering or bugging someone. In Italian that would be molestare which always sounds even worse than bothering or galling.
Now we pretty much use gall to do with something presumptive or irritating. That or the gall bladder. We don’t use it in the sense of irritating someone – which is the way it’s often used in Shakespeare and we even more rarely see it used this way – which, I have discovered, was one of the first definitions, to gall would be to create an irritation of the skin. A tiny little bother – a small disturbance of the peace of the skin. Laertes isn’t saying he’s going to BOTHER Hamlet or frustrate him, he’s just going to irritate his skin a bit, give him a tiny scrape and the deadly work of the poison will begin.