This means that Claudius received this information before he walked in to this scene and is therefore not just responding to Ophelia but to the possibility that Laertes will show up and see it – or show up and depose him – or just generally make trouble. It’s a lot to hold in the background – to watch a woman go mad, all the while knowing her brother is not far away, volatile and ready to explode. I guess I have timeline questions, though. Because did Laertes start heading from France as soon as he heard about his father’s death or before? How long has this plan been in progress?
And how long did it take to get from France to Denmark back in the day? I’m guessing that’s not a SHORT journey. And so if he came the second he heard about his father and then traveled … we’re actually talking about a fairly serious gap in time. Is it a week since the arras? I guess that’s enough time for an Ophelia to go crazy.

He starts off kindly enough with this thought.

Yes, Ophelia is divided from herself and her judgment. She is disassociative and outside her own norm.
But then he kicks her while she’s down – calling her a picture and a beast. Not directly, of course – but he first says she’s divided from her judgment and adds that people without judgment are pictures or animals. Ipso facto and so on.
Pictures is funny, though. We are pictures without judgment? Pictures?! Pictures are an awfully static analogy for a person without their judgment.
A person without judgment may be many things – but still as a picture is not one of them. A beast, I can see. That analogy makes sense. Maybe what that last sentence is about is Claudius choosing the better analogy. And he settles on the same one Hamlet found for man if his chief nature be but to sleep and feed.

Claudius? Is that you? Admitting to a mistake?
You’re clearly not a contemporary politician, that’s for sure. Of course, the mistake was to bury a man in secret and he calls it green, not wrong. That is, it might suggest that there’s a way to bury a man in secret with more practice and experience.
Meanwhile, I love greenly as a descriptor of behavior. If we could get all of us to use adverbs again more frequently – I vote for more of this one.
Also, hugger-mugger is a glorious word that I would like dis-interred.

Claudius is generally really good at politics – but this sending Hamlet to England business is kind of a political mistake. With Hamlet gone, people are free to think whatever they want and they are likely to be predisposed to be on Hamlet’s side. So by sending Hamlet away, he’s got no murderer and thereby probably casts some suspicions on himself. If he’d kept Hamlet nearby, he’d have had to have some kind of public justice. Hamlet would likely not deny his murder of Polonius. I guess the danger, though, would be that in confessing to Polonius’ murder, he might reveal why he killed him, which might reveal Claudius’ actual murder.

There’s a song that always made me laugh called “Railroad Bill”. In it, the folksinger is trying to get the subject of the song to cooperate with his wishes. He wants Railroad Bill to climb up a tree and rescue a kitten but Bill refuses. They go back and forth for a bit until a series of violent events sweep through and kill Bill. The cat comes down and has some milk. Bill is survived by a wife and two small children. I think of a violent author of his own remove like this – as if Railroad Bill sang the song about himself.

Next up in disingenuous griefs…Claudius mourning the loss of the man he sent away to his death.
It would be funny if he forgot that Gertrude doesn’t know about the execution order for Hamlet and he started to say “your son dead” and then caught himself to say “gone.”
It’s so much fun to watch someone caught in a lie.

Hmmm. Not QUITE first, Claudius. FIRST you killed her king – and potential future father in law. THEN you watched as her boyfriend rather cruelly broke up with her and then flirted with her again in front of the whole court. So…yes. FIRST in all the ways you might not be implicated. FIRST.

Ready the Sorrow Regiment.
They gear up over the hill ready to attack.
They don’t need to wear armor.
There’s no way to fight them.
Sorrows are unbeatable and sure, occasionally they travel on their own but usually they bring their friends. They hit you once, then again and again. They knock you around until you think you’ll never get back up again.
It’s better to let them pass- fighting them only makes it worse. Perhaps it will be years before you’re confronted with the Sorrow Battalion again.

There’s something about this emphasis on ALL that raises some red flags, some questions. Because what is Claudius hiding that he needs to say “All”? It’s obvious that Polonius’ death is the trigger. And the other major contender for madness might be her dysfunctional relationship with Hamlet – which Claudius would have no motivation to hide.
It’s like – the use of the word “all” and its placement at the beginning of the sentence seem to make it pop. Sure. You could read it with a regular iambic pentameter rhythm and unemphasize it – But then you’re emphasizing “from” – which is generally weird.
Emphasizing a preposition when there’s a word like “all” around is not USUALLY the most effective way in to a sentence. But you could do that.
Still, though, that ALL is sitting there like a big neon sign for me. All All All. Nothing to see here.
Which, again, supports my very weird counter narrative of Claudius being somehow implicated in Ophelia’s madness. I mean I wouldn’t put it past him.

Or perhaps it is the release of deep grief.
Grief does sharpen everything – it brings things into focus.
Everything seems both flatter and heightened at once.
The important things rise up and everything else blends into one another.
I can see how things that have been long repressed might bubble up and take center stage.
But I’m not sure it’s poison.
It is a kind of clarity – even if it triggers madness.