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"how his audit stands"
Context and Language Videos
Act 3,
Scene 3
Lines 79-86

A discussion of the different states of Claudius's and the dead King Hamlet's souls in Act 3, Scene 3 of myShakespeare's Hamlet. 

myShakespeare | Hamlet 3.3 “how his audit stands”

Hamlet

Oh, this is hire and salary, not revenge.    
He took my father grossly, full of bread,     
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May,
And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?    
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
'Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged, 
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?    
Video Transcript: 

SARAH: Hamlet is describing his father's spiritual situation when he was murdered. When he says that Claudius killed his father grossly, he means that his father died while enjoying the gross pleasures of life.

RALPH: The word gross has two connotations here. One is that King Hamlet was occupied with material instead of spiritual concerns at the time of his death. The other evokes eating and drinking to excess, being "full of bread" — the opposite of fasting, which was associated with atonement and piety.

SARAH: Because his father had not received absolution before his death, his sins were at their height, broad blown — or full-blown, as we would say.

RALPH: Blown is the past tense of the verb to bloom. Developing a flower imagery, Hamlet compares his father's full-blown sins to full-blown flowers in May, flush with color.

SARAH: But Shakespeare makes a pun on "flush" which also means swollen, adding an obvious sexual connotation to the king's flush sins.

RALPH: So King Hamlet's last days were occupied with the material pleasures of life — food, drink, and sex. Perhaps not so bad from an earthly perspective — but what would heaven think?