ABSTRACT

With these lines, Hamlet charges his mother with both bad hospitality and good housekeeping: she has observed the everyday imperatives of thrift but broken the ritual calculus of mourning. By overlaying wedding onto funeral, Gertrude has failed at hospitality’s core law: not just failing to mourn, but neglecting to treat every hospitable occasion as exceptional. Hamlet is not alone in recognizing Gertrude’s imperfect hospitality, but he does see more clearly what may be at stake in the haste of her remarriage. Hamlet’s words respond in partial correction to the observation that Horatio has just made: “Indeed, my lord, it follow’d hard upon.” For Hamlet, Gertrude has not only moved too quickly from funeral to wedding, she has, in practice, conflated them. Gertrude’s “seconding” brings about a category confusion-of sex and death, wedding and funeral-but it also interrupts the natural sequence that should run from father to son. In Horatio’s language, the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius moves hastily: it follows “hard upon” the funeral. Hamlet’s image, though, is locked in time: in it, time seems to have stopped; marriage and funeral are overlaid as if the meats served at a funeral stayed in place on the very table where, having grown cold, they are served upon occasion of a wedding. What’s moving hard and fast for Horatio is locked in a cruel stillness for Hamlet-cold and tabled.