General
The Lines I Love Part 4
30 Dec 2025
In our occasional series, theatre insiders pick a favourite Shakespeare speech and tell us why they love it. In this, part five, Bell Shakespeare’s Head of Education Joanna Erskine shares her choice with Andy McLean.
While men do most of the talking in Hamlet (there’s many famous lines spoken by the Danish Prince alone) one of the most mysterious speeches is uttered by a woman about another woman. The way Gertrude tells Laertes how his sister, Ophelia, died is deeply strange and morbidly fascinating, as Joanna Erskine explains:
“The poetry in Gertrude’s words is undeniably beautiful—she describes the landscape and the plants in detail (including an eery reference to purple flowers known as ‘dead man’s fingers’). But it’s a curious way for her to break such tragic news to Laertes. Has she witnessed Ophelia’s drowning or is she passing on a first-person account? Does grief make her talk too much? Perhaps her evocative retelling is intended to calm Laertes down and break the news gently? Shakespeare was a master of his craft, so I think he’s deliberately left these questions open for actors, directors and audiences. It’s such an intriguing speech.”
Here are Gertrude’s words in full:
There is a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.