Quote Analysis

Hamlet concludes his speech about how one flaw can corrupt a person's entire reputation, summing up the idea with compressed, gnomic language.

The phrase 'dram of evil' uses a precise measurement term (a dram is a tiny unit) to suggest contamination works like poison—a single drop spoils the whole. The line's syntax is notoriously knotted, almost as if the language itself is 'breaking down' under the weight of the idea, enacting the corruption it describes. This compression makes the line feel proverbial, as though Hamlet is trying to pin down a universal truth, yet the obscurity also hints that corruption may be too slippery to name clearly.

Support a thesis that Shakespeare uses linguistic difficulty to mirror thematic confusion—this quote's near-unintelligibility reflects the play's central anxiety that moral corruption is impossible to isolate or understand fully.