Hamlet interrupts the busybody Polonius with mocking “news” of his own.

Quintus Roscius Gallus, the Roman actor born as a slave, who lived from circa 126 BC to 62 BC. The Riverside Shakespeare notes: “News about him would be stale news indeed.”

mole: blemish (figurative).

pales and forts: establishments (the image is of reason as a protective fortress around the self).

o'er-leavens…manners: “causes an excess in what would otherwise be acceptable behavior (over-leavened bread rises or swells too much)” [Arden Shakespeare].

plausive: socially approved.

Beginning with the example of drunken revelry hurting the reputation of the Danes, Hamlet articulates a general principle of flawed greatness, with drunkenness serving as a sort of epitome of the flaw. He describes how the overgrowth of some quality or habit, such as a fondness for drink, breaks down a person’s reason and distorts their behavior.

(Note that he ascribes no guilt on account of the flaw, since we don’t choose our natures. We are in this sense to our manners born.)

In On Shakespeare (1986), Northrop Frye asks:

“If purgatory is a place of purification, why does the Ghost come from it shrieking for revenge? and why does purgatory, as the ghost describes it, sound so much as if it were hell? The Ghost’s credentials are very doubtful by all Elizabethan texts for such things” (Frye 86).

However, questioning the Ghost’s report of his confinement to purgatory on the basis of his call for revenge is itself questionable on a couple of levels. First, the Ghost isn’t fully purified by his own account; and second, why should we assume that revenge is an unholy motivation?

Here and later, the Ghost frames revenge as duty, and we might assume that this framing would make sense to the audience. Hamlet after all emerged out of a tradition of revenge tragedies, from Seneca’s Thyestes to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.

Here Shelley rises to the height of his prophetic voice, expressing an idea that lies at the core of Romantic philosophy: that by turning our focus from petty human concerns to the majesty of nature, we can glimpse the beauty, terror, and truth of the world–and grasp the falsehood inherent in “civilized” creeds and systems.

In the following lines he positions poets like himself as interpreters of the “voice” that calls to us from nature.

As for the “Large codes of fraud and woe,” an example of this given by the NAEL is the “Divine Right of Kings;” the idea that monarchs gain their power through grace of God and thus owe no explanation nor justification to other mortals. To someone who looks purely at Nature, as embodied by the “great Mountain,” such a blood-stained concept can have no steady basis.

Linking Nature’s splendor to moral (that is, human) virtue, is something we can also observe in these famous lines of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned.”

The character attracted so much bile from fans–mostly lonely men in lonely rooms–that Anna Gunn took to the NYT editorial page to vent about it.

JUDGE FOR YOURSELF:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr3XK9FkNCY

Shout to classic Seinfeld:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV7m6IIN_tI

While there are many talented performers today, it is generally agreed that none of them can turn the world on with a smile.

http://vimeo.com/37255195

Ophelia questions Laertes' assertion that Hamlet’s affections are nothing more than typical youthful lust. Laertes doubles down on his opinion.

The seriousness of Hamlet’s feelings for Ophelia becomes one of the key questions (or mysteries) of the play; see the “Doubt thou” poem in 2.2 and “I did love you once” in 3.1.