Dews of Blood

From Act 1/Scene 1, early on:

The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Love this. Love "dews of blood." Love "the sheeted dead." Love "the moist star." Horatio, Hamlet's good friend, has just seen the ghost of the King & thinks it's a bad omen. In the above, he's talking about how Rome purportedly looked right before Caeser was killed--how ghosts had appeared and run amok. Reminded me of "The Night on Bald Mountain" part of Fantasia. Completely and totally absorbed by that as a kid, LOVED it.

If I were filming Hamlet, I think I'd like this as a voiceover with a cold, hallucinatory depiction of what the speech describes. Like at the end of Nosferatu with Klaus Kinski, people feasting in the rat-and-Black-Plague infested streets.