Every time a male character cries in Shakespeare, he gets all full of shame and self-flagellation and every time, I want to play him Rosey Grier singing “It’s alright to cry.” I grew up listening to this song but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized Rosey Grier was actually a pretty bad ass tough guy football player. So it’s even more alright to cry, little boy, when a man such as this tells you it’s alright. It’s alright to cry little boy. I know some big boys who cry too.

These phrases don’t hold together so much. Clearly Laertes is distraught (with good reason.) But even though the words are disjointed and the sense shifts and clicks and stops and starts, it is all metrically pretty even (aside from the feminine ending of the first line.)
It’s as if Laertes, even in his grief, cannot let go of convention. He speaks in ten beat lines, though the iambs are up and down and he keeps interrupting himself. He’s crying but won’t give himself time or space to cry. There is no obvious pause in this flow of words – there is no spot for him to stop and get emotional. But instead, the stopped up nature of his feeling comes out in his broken up speech.

What a different story this would be if Ophelia hadn’t drowned but instead just drank too many glasses of water and had to pee really badly?
And Laertes still had this line and was super upset – but he was just upset about Ophelia overdoing her drinking water.
Laertes would be a kind of perfect drama queen in that scenario.

There are quite a lot of drownings in classical literature. I don’t know whether this is because people just drowned more often – like maybe they didn’t learn to swim at summer camp like a lot of modern folk do – or if it’s more that there’s a certain metaphorical pleasure in the concept of drowning. It leaves so many opportunities for correlations to the water of tears and the water that took the loved one’s life.

I don’t know if I’m just lucky – but I’ve never lost anyone to drowning. In literature, though, I have lost a lot of the beloved characters – either the characters themselves, like Ophelia or the authors like Virginia Woolf.

It’s elemental, I suppose that’s part of its appeal.

While I feel pretty sure that this wouldn’t be the first question I would ask upon learning that a loved one had drowned, I do recognize that many unlikely questions or thoughts arise in a moment like this.

I mean – let’s say I heard my beloved was in a fatal car accident. The street it happened on wouldn’t be nearly so important as what happened – and how it happened. But I suppose the question of where does help us place on unfathomable event. It helps us imagine the unimaginable. If I cannot imagine my loved one dead, at least I might be able to imagine the place. If I cannot believe it, at least the place will ground the sense of it SOMEWHERE.

In a writing workshop I took a while back, we were tasked with writing a first person account of our own death. At least, I think that’s what the assignment was. Or maybe it was just meant to be a fear? Anyway I wrote mine as if I were drowning – and the memory of writing it is almost as visceral as the times where I thought I might drown. I don’t know why drowning is so potent for me. A past life death perhaps?

The fear of it was once so strong, I didn’t really learn to swim for fear of taking my feet off the bottom for more than a moment or two. Which I know isn’t logical. One would think a fear of drowning would make me want to know how to avoid it. But pretty much the extent of my anti-drowning skills were several variations of the Dead Man’s float.

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.

Laertes! What ARE you doing buying such a fatal unction? Didn’t your father teach you better than that? Doesn’t seem particularly honorable to go around poisoning people (or animals or anything) with a deadly potion. You know who kills people with poison in plays like this? Villains, that’s who.
Did you set out to be a villain?
And you bought it from a mountebank?!
Is that a reputable source for deadly substances?
At least go to an apothecary! That’s what Romeo did.
I mean – it doesn’t turn out so well for him – but at least he bought his death-giving stuff from a guy with a reputation! I don’t know, Laertes, this was a particularly shady move. Sometimes, when I watch the play, I feel kind of bad for you, like, you didn’t really deserve to get caught up in this tragic melee – like maybe you SHOULD have been king. But then I think about THIS decision and I think…yeah, that getting hoisted with your own petard thing ain’t so unjust, now that I think it through.

Anointing is generally reserved for sacred objects or sacred heads. Saints are anointed, I think. I imagine it as a kind of blessing, but with oil.
But Laertes is going to anoint his sword with poison. He’s trying to get around the whole murdering thing by covering it in trappings of religion.

This seems to be one of the finest tricks of a religion to proclaim clearly and distinctly “Thou shalt Not Kill” but put a little asterisk next to it that leads to a footnote of exceptions.

*Except in cases of revenge, or holy purpose, or if your sword is anointed or it’s your dad that got killed. In that case – go for it.

If this play were called Laertes and all the scholars spent years analyzing his actions and his lines, this moment would be much analyzed. It might be Laertes’ tragic flaw. People like to say that Hamlet’s flaw is his inaction (a questionable, though much repeated thesis) but Laertes’ flaw might well be his gullibility, his willingness to be a pawn in Claudius’ game. His impetuousness gets him into the throne room and into his sister’s grave with Hamlet – but it is his susceptibility to be manipulated that REALLY gets him killed.