Better not drink the water, either

"............Hamlet, this pearl is thine;
Here's to thy health.
                [Trumpets sound, and cannon shot off within.
         Give him the cup."

                                                             Hamlet         (V, ii)

Hamlet has just scored "a hit, a very palpable hit" in his fencing duel with Laertes. King Claudius, in league with Laertes to kill Hamlet, has put poison in the drinking cup he offers the prince. Had Lady Macbeth been Claudius' wife she might have applauded; her immortal advice to her husband was to "....look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't...."

In the collection of Agecroft Hall is an ornate silver covered cup, German in origin and made c1600 (shown above). Most Shakespearean scholars believe that Hamlet was written at about that same time, although many also point to the possible existence of an earlier version of the play, perhaps by Shakespeare himself. In any case, the setting of Hamlet in the sumptuous court of a Danish king makes it easy to imagine such a fine cup as holding the proffered drink that would mean "the present death of Hamlet," doing what England never got its chance to do.

This silver cup is slightly over nine and one-half inches tall, with elaborate ornamentation depicting flowers and fruit. Much of the northern European continent was justifiably well-regarded for the quality of its metalwork, and German craftsmanship was no exception in the eyes of the English. German silver pieces were said to be rarely melted down for reworking due to their quality, according to archival sources.

In Hamlet, when the poisoned cup is offered the Danish prince, he politely declines it for the moment, and Queen Gertrude drinks from the cup instead. Interestingly, like so much of Hamlet, there have been contrasting interpretations of this scene in performance. The more conventional approach has the Queen quite oblivious to the fact that the cup is poisoned: by the time she realizes what has happened, it's too late.

An intriguing alternative interpretation (used by Diane Venora, for example, in the Ethan Hawke film version that was released in 2000) has the Queen, guilt-ridden and suicidal, suspecting the cup to be poisoned and using it to deliberately end her own life. That modernized take on Shakespeare's classic also has Laertes pulling out a pistol when his fencing skills prove inadequate to the task at hand.

Be all this as it may, there's one interpretation that hasn't changed in 400 years: Hamlet's a goner.