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Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we—as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole—
Taken to wife. Nor have we herein barred
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks.

This speech at the start of Act 1, Scene 2 by Hamlet’s uncle, King Claudius, conveys to the audience the important information that Claudius has assumed the crown of Hamlet’s recently deceased father and hastily married his brother’s wife, Queen Gertrude. As the explanation for this quote in Quotes by Character: Claudius (the first quote) discusses, the absurdity of Claudius’s claim that he is simultaneously mourning his dead brother and celebrating his new marriage casts a shadow over Claudius that will not be lifted.

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not forever with thy vailèd lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know’st ’tis common. All that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

Using stinging words that hit home with anyone who has ever had a mother or a parent give them unwanted fashion advice (“cast thy nighted color off”), Gertrude tells Hamlet to move on from his father’s death and to stop disrespecting his uncle. This quote is explained further in Quotes by Character: Gertrude (the first quote), which also discusses how Hamlet’s mother’s perceived guilt or innocence in Claudius’s usurping of the throne is reacted to by other characters, and by extension, the audience of the play.

“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed “seem,”
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passeth show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

While Gertrude confronting Hamlet with what she sees as his excessive grieving for his father, she somewhat carelessly asks him why his mourning “seems” so heavy (“Why seems it so particular with thee?” instead of asking why “it is so particular.”) Hamlet immediately seizes on this verbal slip with this retort in which he admits that his morose behavior could be mistaken for an act, but that what can be observed by others is only a small part of his bereavement.

Hamlet’s remarks here raises an important theme that will recur throughout the play as is discussed in the explanation of this quote in Quotes by Theme: Performance versus Reality (the first quote). There is also a separate explanation of another aspect of this quote—how Hamlet seems predisposed to be more intense about everything than do the play’s other characters—in Quotes by Character: Hamlet (the first quote).

Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ’t, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this.
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr. So loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly.—Heaven and earth,
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet, within a month—
Let me not think on ’t. Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears. Why she, even she—
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes,
She married. O most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good,
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

This long quote from Act 1, Scene 2 is the first of several soliloquies from Hamlet in which he reveals his innermost feelings by saying things that he would not say if he were not alone. He wants to escape the linked corruption of his family and Denmark to return to Wittenberg to study, but Gertrude and Claudius have just asked him to remain in Denmark. This soliloquy comes prior to his initial encounter with his father’s ghost, so it is before the time when avenging his father's murder becomes his motivation. What comes through clearly here, even before learning of the details of his father’s murder, is his weariness with life and his disgust with his mother and uncle’s marriage, which triggers Hamlet’s misogyny.

You can read a longer explanation of this full soliloquy in Famous Quotes Explained. There are also explanations of excerpts from it in Quotes by Character: Hamlet (the second quote, which relates to Hamlet’s suicidal impulses) and Quotes by Motif: Misogyny (the first quote, which is the notorious “Frailty, thy name is Woman!” comment).

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