Poison's Dark Works in Renaissance England by Wilson Miranda;

Author:Wilson, Miranda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Old Hamlet promises to reveal not only the how, but the why, of his own end in a way that will also unveil the ongoing envenoming of Denmark and its people. Especially when he turns from the “ear of Denmark” to the poisoned “porches” of his own ears, he rehearses that connection familiar from the Roose trial onward: every individual poisoned body marks a general threat to both the state and its subjects.[142]

Old Hamlet’s description of his death serves an equally familiar purpose. He offers to his son a description of the poisoned body that makes sense of its sudden shift from a state of health to death. After “hebenon” (1.5.62) enters him, his skin erupts in the leprous lesions so often seen as proof of poison in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[143] In his details, however, Old Hamlet does more than replicate the communal surface readings so persuasive in the early 1600s. He reveals an individual and internal process that could only be known through the postmortem. He tempts his son, and the play’s audience, with the specialized knowledge available to those who have explored the interior spaces and structures of the human body. Before noting the crust that “tetter barked” his skin with leprous sores, Old Hamlet first describes the ways the hebenon changes the internal space of his body (1.5.71–72).

Swift as quicksilver it courses through

The natural gates and alleys of the body,

And with a sudden vigour it doth posset

And curd, like eager droppings into milk,

The thin and wholesome blood. (Hamlet, 1.5.66–70)

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