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Give o'er: stop, call off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ8cjlEMLR0

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As Hamlet soon explains, she won’t: like Gertrude, she will betray her husband by marrying his murderer.

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The Riverside Shakespeare notes:

offense: offensive matter (but Hamlet quibbles on the sense “crime”).

jest: i.e. pretend.

Hamlet uses “poison” here in the sense of “offend,” choosing the word to rattle Claudius. He implicitly contrasts the characters' fictional acts with Claudius’s actual offenses “in the world.”

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anchor’s cheer: “hermit’s fare” (Riverside Shakespeare).

The Player Queen appears to model Hamlet’s “ideal” of grief for a king–a state very much like the one he’s been in since the play’s beginning. Compare:

Denmark’s a prison. (2.2)

I have of late–but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (2.2)

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There is a sense in which Gertrude is cursed–or, at least, “wretched” and doomed–in her choice of a second husband. Claudius is the cause of her husband’s death, her son’s estrangement, and ultimately of her own death as well.

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See note on “what means this” above.

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A restatement of “truth will come to light” above, and a famous Shakespearean phrase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHcJaP5P1-0

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This dumb-show probably sketches out the plot of the play.

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Is Ophelia innocently asking him for clarification as to what’s happening in the dumb show? Or does she already suspect the hidden meaning of the play? Her persistent (nervous?) questioning might suggest the latter.

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

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loath and unwilling: cold and resistant (toward his advances).

The “seems” here once again puts us in mind of the seeing vs. being distinction in Hamlet and Gertrude’s first exchange.

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