CLAUDIUS      O, this is the poison of deep grief. It springs

All from her father’s death, and now behold –

O Gertrude, Gertrude,

When sorrows come they come not single spies

But in battalions…     (4.5.75-9)

Claudius may be the play’s villain but again and again he gets speeches of penetrating psychological insight, and straightforward reasonableness; this is the beginning of a long outpouring of frustration and fear—and confiding in his wife. O, this is the poison of deep grief; Claudius, like Hamlet, takes grief seriously, can see that Ophelia has been maddened by it—and he reaches for the metaphor of poison, a reminder of his own villainy, as if that, too, is never far from his mind. (Claudius doesn’t, however, respond to Ophelia’s apparent account of Hamlet’s ill-treatment and betrayal.) It springs all from her father’s death, and now behold—a helpless gesture, perhaps. Look at her! Look at the state of her! She’s cracked! (Claudius and Polonius, of course, were content to use Ophelia as a pawn to test Hamlet’s own mental state; they were complicit in her ill-treatment by him.) In a play in which characters only rarely address or refer to each other by name, Claudius’s calling on his wife—O Gertrude, Gertrude—stands out; it could be a Machiavellian ostentatious intimacy, but doesn’t have to be. The consummate politician is only just holding it together, too many plates spinning now: when sorrows come they come not single spies but in battalions. The metaphor of troubles coming as a great overwhelming force—a sea of troubles—rather than orderly, if stealthily, one by one, is given force by the army encountered (and alluded to) in the previous scene. It’s never just one thing, one grief, one scout, one rat. And Claudius, despite his villainy, is right.