Quote Analysis

Hamlet continues his meditation on the skulls, questioning whether human life amounts to nothing more than eventual material for casual games, and says his own bones ache in sympathy.

'Cost no more the breeding' treats life as an economic investment—all the resources spent raising a person—and 'play at loggets' (a game tossed with small bones or wood) names the return: casual objects for a tavern game. The question 'Did these bones cost no more... but to' sets up an imbalance the syntax can't resolve; the disproportion between years of life and this end use is built into the sentence structure itself. Hamlet's final 'Mine ache to think on't' suddenly makes the meditation physical rather than philosophical—his living bones respond to the sight of dead ones.

Use this to argue that Hamlet's graveyard reflections move between intellectual distance and visceral identification—the shift from economic language ('cost,' 'breeding') to bodily response ('mine ache') shows him struggling to keep mortality abstract when confronted with actual bones.