Soothsayer: a person supposed to be able to foresee the future. The word literally means “a sayer of truth”–“sooth” being an archaic word for “truth,” as in the old-fashioned expression “Forsooth!”

beteem: allow, permit (Shakespeare’s Words).

Hamlet claims his father loved his mother so tenderly, he wouldn’t so much as let the wind blow too harshly across her face.

William Wordsworth picks up on the image of wind as rough or gentle visitor in the opening of The Prelude (1850):

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings…

The final scene of Hamlet is one of the most orchestrated in Shakespeare. Unusual attention is given to music and sounds. Claudius’s drums and cannonfire (supposedly celebrating Hamlet) give way to “warlike” cannons and drums announcing the arrival of Fortinbras, who in turn orders further cannonfire (saluting the dead, especially Hamlet) at the end of the play.

Becomes the field: suits the battlefield.

Fortinbras effectively says: “If we were on a battlefield, this brutality would make sense, but we’re in a royal court, so it’s insane.” Breaches of context and of expectation are a running theme in Hamlet, from the opening line onward.

Riverside Shakespeare glosses (2nd ed., p. 1233):

of memory: unforgotten.

my vantage: i.e. my opportune presence at a moment when the throne is empty.

As the Riverside’s language suggests, Fortinbras’s “sorrow” is probably about as sincere as Claudius’s “grief” in 1.2. His ascension negates King Hamlet’s major military achievement, completed the day Prince Hamlet was born: defeating Old Fortinbras. As Young Fortinbras takes over the Danish throne (with Prince Hamlet’s dying consent), King Hamlet’s achievement is undone after just one generation.

Officially, to attack the king is treason. But under the private code of honor or code of revenge to which Hamlet is supposedly bound, Claudius is the traitor and Hamlet is doing his duty as an honorable son.

Not all critics have accepted this implicit moral framework at face value; and Shakespeare’s audience might not have, either. In Hamlet and Revenge (1971), Eleanor Prosser argues that “…the ‘popular’ attitude toward revenge [in Shakespeare’s England] was far more complex than has been generally assumed” (p. 4). Harold Skulsky, in the essay “Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in Hamlet” (1970), contends that “For better or for worse, honor in Denmark is a young man’s game–and one suspects for worse, if what the characters have to say about youth is any indication.”

Hamlet finally performs his work of revenge. Or does he? Does the killing come too late to matter? In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Harold Bloom argues that “Claudius is not slain as an act of vengeance–only as a final entropy of the plotted shuffling” (p. 411).

Bloom also quotes Marc Shell’s Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (1993), which overturns Freud in arguing: “What is really unique about Hamlet is not his unconscious wish to become patricidal and incestuous, but rather his conscious refusal to become patricidal and incestuous.” Bloom adds: “…it is remarkable that Hamlet will not kill Claudius until he knows that he himself is dying, and that his mother is already dead” (Bloom p. 419).

Gustave Moreau, Hamlet, V, 2 (Hamlet killing Claudius), 19th c.