What It Is
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 rotten” that the sentinels feel in the realm, and into Hamlet’s request to his mother that she not spread the manure over the grass.
Where It Appears
In scene 2 of Act I, alone, Hamlet laments his mother’s hasty marriage and compares the world to an unweeded garden, overrun by what is rotten and coarse. Before that, the court gathered under Claudius showed the opposite: a measured speech, the request that mourning end, and the appearance of order.
In scene 4 of Act I, on seeing Hamlet vanish behind the Ghost, Marcellus says that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.(I.4)
In scene 5 of Act I, the Ghost says that he slept in the orchard, a habit of his afternoons, when Claudius came in and poured poison into his ear, and that the story going around is that a serpent bit him while he slept in the garden. The place of calm becomes the place of the crime.
In scene 2 of Act III, the play performed before the court repeats the setting: the actor-king lies down in the orchard, and the poisoner pours the vial into his ear.
In scene 4 of Act III, Hamlet asks his mother to confess, to repent of the past, and not to spread the manure over the grass, so as not to make it baser: the image of the garden is now an exhortation.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Corruption and decay, Appearance and reality, Death.
- Characters: Hamlet, Claudius, the Ghost, Gertrude.
- Neighboring symbols: The poison, which the orchard keeps, and The Mousetrap, which reenacts it.
- Hamlet, the play.