closet: private chamber, bedroom.

ere: before.

frame order.

start: digress.

A polite way of saying: put a check on your babbling and stop changing the subject so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEgh8TUlpQc

vouchsafe: grant.

Hamlet says he’d be happy to hear a “whole history,” not just a word, from Guildenstern, but in their ensuing conversation he continually interrupts, changes the subject, and mocks both Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. He is being insincere here–he has very little patience for these two old “friends.”

A. C. Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904):

In the elation of success–an elation at first almost hysterical–Hamlet treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are sent to him, with undisguised contempt.

belike: likely.

perdy: per Dieu, by God.

Triumphant with the success of his plan, Hamlet calls for the court musicians (recorder players) and happily chatters nonsense–the equivalent of “If the king doesn’t like the comedy, then it’s likely he doesn’t like it, by God.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c9jEvXMm0c

in his retirement marvellous distempered: extremely out of sorts in his private chamber.

Hamlet (continually interrupting, in his giddily triumphant mood) makes another crack about Claudius’s drinking habits.

In an instance of polysemy, Hamlet/Shakespeare plays on several meanings of the word “foil”:

• a fencing sword
• a character that provides a contrast with another. (In this sense, Laertes and Hamlet are foils throughout the play; so are Hamlet and young Fortinbras.)
• a hindrance or agent of defeat (as a verb: to prevent someone’s success)

Hamlet is paying Laertes a punning compliment by saying that Laertes’s superior skills will contrast markedly with his own–will shine like a star against the night sky. (This suggests another sense of foil: “a thin layer of metal placed under a gem in a closed setting to improve its color or brilliancy.”) However, he may also be sneaking in some subtle trash talk.

In this scene, a foil is using a foil to foil a plan, but ends up foiled by the foil with a foil.

black: villainous.

time agreeing: time being on my side (“Confederate season” means the same thing).

else…seeing: nobody else watching.

Parallels “How fares our cousin Hamlet?” above.

dire property: deadly properties.

In “usurping” the King’s life, Lucianus of course also usurps the throne–and the natural order of things.

Riverside Shakespeare note: “Misquoted from an old play, The True Tragedy of Richard III.” The play would have been of obvious interest to Shakespeare, who wrote his own tragedy of Richard III.