Symbols

The Mousetrap The play within the play: The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet commissions from the actors and stages before Claudius, with the crime against his father reproduced on stage, and which he names, on the spot, The Mousetrap. It is the trap set to catch the king:... The poison The poison that kills the old king, poured into his ear while he slept in the orchard, and that returns, scene after scene, as an instrument of plot and revenge: in the play performed before the court, in the sword Laertes proposes to anoint, in the reserve... An Unweeded Garden The abandoned garden that Hamlet sees in the world in the first soliloquy, a garden that multiplies, possessed by the rancid and coarse things of nature. The image unfolds into the orchard where the old king slept when he was poisoned, into the “something is... Yorick's skull The skull that the gravedigger takes out of the earth while digging Ophelia’s grave, in scene 1 of Act V. It is Yorick’s, the court jester of King Hamlet, father of the prince, buried for twenty-three years; the gravedigger recognizes it because Yorick once... Ophelia's flowers The flowers and herbs that Ophelia carries and hands out after going mad, in scene 5 of Act IV, giving each one a meaning: rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thought, rue, daisy, and the violets she says she no longer has. The flowers return at her death,...