The brook started crying as soon as he saw her coming. There was something about her face and her manner that reminded him of a girl who’d fallen into him years ago. Her song was so sad. Her arms full of flower crowns. She did not seem as though she might be coming to crown him king. She looked likely to lose her footing on one of those slippery rocks in his bank. She was wearing clothes that suggested she had not spent much time in nature. She was lost in her own world. He thought, “If she falls, I’ll do my best to toss her back on to the bank. I’ll bring her to a rock. I’ll catch her in the weeds.” He had a million plans but he knew none would really work.

By the time that tree branch broke and unceremoniously dumped her into the water, the brook was crying was so hard he could barely feel her land.

Now I’m seeing sexual allusions everywhere. Maybe because I tried so hard to repress them when I had to say this speech everyday – but pendent boughs?
I mean, once we start looking at hanging things, it is hard not to go to a sexual place when the idea of long cocks have been introduced in the line before.

Also hanging circular flowers over dangling limbs? I mean…
And, listen, in the hands of a different writer, I’d write this whole line of thought off as an accident – a slip of the mind.
But Shakespeare was not one to shy away from some ring imagery.

Here’s the thing – we can’t completely ignore the hoar/whore leaves in the line before, alongside these long purples. I mean, why on earth is Gertrude bringing up a flower that looks like a cock? I mean, sure, maybe there were some long purples AKA Dead Men’s Fingers AKA some word for cock used by shepherds in these fantastic garlands. But Gertrude doesn’t need to reference them and if she does need to mention them, she doesn’t need to reference their more “liberal” name. It’s like she’s asking us to picture purple dicks and then asking us to imagine dead men with fingers like purple dicks. It’s WEIRD. Gertrude doesn’t make any other sexual allusions the whole play and here in her recounting of Ophelia’s death, she’s gone with two, in the first two lines of the speech. It is really mysterious.

Every Gertrude I’ve ever seen (including myself) just rides through these references, just puts her shoulder to the wheel of her most dignified Queen face and leans on the rest of the poetry.

But I’m long past an era of wanting to do things correctly and appropriately. Now, I’d like to lean into this weirdness, to make it as odd and out of joint as it seems, to not smooth over the strange choice to make a dick joke in the middle of a poetic death speech.

Or what if Gertrude came in all muddy and covered in flowers herself? What if she witnessed this and tried to save Ophelia and she has one of these garlands in her hand and just looking sat those long purples makes her laugh? I’d be interested in a production that made that choice – to watch her almost lose it – and then pull it together for the rest of the play.

I really don’t go in much for the Original Pronunciation stuff – AKA OP. I find it a bit pedantic and proscriptive. But I think that is because I am an American Shakespeare advocate and I resist any notion of a correctness of the language – particularly when it comes to a language movement out of the UK. I have been fighting the perception that Shakespeare “should be” spoken in an English accent for my whole career. I will not yield to a British “correct” pronunciation now.

HOWEVER. That said. I am surely very grateful for the scholarship in this field as it yields up some interesting questions and explanations. Ben Crystal’s explanation of “From hour to hour we ripe and ripe and hour to hour we rot and rot” is full of interesting allusions to whores and STDs.

Which brings me to my question now. If Elizabethans would have heard “from hour to hour” as “from whore to whore” – I’d like to understand these hoar leaves. Because I hear “whore leaves” no matter how I say it. “Whore leave” “ore leaves” I drop the “h” it still sounds like “whore” and why on EARTH would the Queen of Denmark be using a word that sounds like “whore” in the middle of a beautiful speech recounting an innocent young woman’s death. Is she trying to make Laertes furious by using language that is insulting to his sister’s memory? I understand that “hoar” means old or grey but that’s not what it SOUNDS like – and my experience with this writer means I can never ignore the SOUND of something. So this is one of those times wherein it would be very useful to know the OP. Maybe it would all become clear.

The Queen just cuts right to the chase. She’s not stalling. She doesn’t start with “This is hard to say.” And some other gearing up phraseology. No, she just comes right out and tells Laertes the terrible facts.

If she weren’t the Queen of Denmark, she’d make a pretty good cop or a doctor.

I’d like this sort of person to be the one to tell me bad news.

This is one of my favorite lines. It manages to express the feeling of troubles stacking up relentlessly as they do tend to do, while simultaneously personifying that trouble in an almost whimsical way. I see the woes as bedraggled soldiers walking along a dusty road and they keep giving each other flat tires by stepping on each other’s heels. And the one who has been trod upon looks back at the trodder and gives him a steady glare and a fist shake, as well as a few choice swear words. The trodder apologizes, tries to ingratiate himself to the one he’s stepped upon and is very shortly trod upon himself by the man behind him.