Lord. The Queene desires you to vse some gentle entertainment[20] Laertes, before you fall to play.
Ham. Shee well instructs me.]
[Footnote 1: 'Well, he is a young one!']
[Footnote 2: 'Com'ply,' with accent on first syllable: comply with means pay compliments to, compliment. See Q. reading: 'A did sir with':—sir here is a verb—sir with means say sir to: 'he sirred, complied with his nurse's breast before &c.' Hamlet speaks in mockery of the affected court-modes of speech and address, the fashion of euphuism—a mechanical attempt at the poetic.]
[Footnote 3: a flock of birds—suggested by 'This Lapwing.']
[Footnote 4: 'the mere mode.']
[Footnote 5: 'and external custom of intercourse.' But here too I rather take the Q. to be right: 'They have only got the fashion of the time; and, out of a habit of wordy conflict, (they have got) a collection of tricks of speech,—a yesty, frothy mass, with nothing in it, which carries them in triumph through the most foolish and fastidious (nice, choice, punctilious, whimsical) judgments.' Yesty I take to be right, and prophane (vulgar) to have been altered by the Poet to fond (foolish); of trennowed I can make nothing beyond a misprint.]
[Footnote 6: Hamlet had just blown Osricke to his trial in his chosen kind, and the bubble had burst. The braggart gentleman had no faculty to generate after the dominant fashion, no invention to support his ambition—had but a yesty collection, which failing him the moment something unconventional was wanted, the fool had to look a discovered fool.]
[Footnote 7: 'I shall win by the odds allowed me; he will not exceed me three hits.']
[Footnote 8: He has a presentiment of what is coming.]