SARAH:  It sounds rather odd when Polonius suggests that he and Hamlet “walk out of the air.” Is he implying that it’s cold outside?

RALPH:  No Probably not — for them, inside was always better than outside. It’s only in modern times that we’ve come to think of being out in the fresh air as good for our health. Plagues ravished Europe throughout the middle ages, including during Shakespeare’s day. In one year, just a little while before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, over 10,000 Londoners — 5% of the city’s population — died of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, as they called it.  That’s one in every twenty people!

SARAH:  Long before it was discovered that fleas from rats spread the disease, miasmas, or noxious fumes in the air, were suspected to be the cause of the plague.

RALPH:  These days, we have a positive association with being outside, out in the sun for example. But that simply wasn’t true in Shakespeare’s day. A common Elizabethan saying from the time was, ‘from God’s blessing into the warm sun,” meaning going from a good situation to a bad one.  Being in the warm sun was something worth trying to avoid.

SARAH:  This might help us understand Hamlet’s response to a question that Claudius asked back in Act I, scene 2, right before Hamlet’s first soliloquy.  Claudius asks “How is it that the clouds still hang on you,” meaning how is it that you’re still depressed, and still mourning your father?  Hamlet replies, “Not so my Lord, I am too much in the sun,” meaning I’m still too miserable.

RALPH:  And, of course, Hamlet was punning in that earlier scene on the word sun: the sun in the sky,  the son of a father, and the king as the sun, meaning, “I’m miserable because I’m around you too much, Claudius…”