Spies, actors, and a plan

Scene summary

Claudius and Gertrude receive in the hall Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, childhood friends of Hamlet, and ask them to stay at court, distract the prince and find out what troubles him, with the promise of a reward worthy of a king. Claudius says he can imagine no other cause for the change in him than his father’s death. The two accept, and observe that kings could simply order them. Then Polonius announces that the envoys sent to Norway have returned successfully and that he has discovered the true cause of Hamlet’s madness. Claudius says he longs to hear the explanation, and Gertrude remarks that perhaps the main cause is the death of the father and her hasty marriage. Polonius asks that the envoys enter first. Voltimand and Cornelius tell that the king of Norway, learning that his nephew Fortinbras was raising troops, had them halted, found out that they were meant against Denmark, and rebuked him. Fortinbras swore never to attack Claudius, and the uncle, pleased, gave him an annual income of three thousand crowns and permission to use the same troops against the Poles. The Norwegian king now asks that this army be allowed to cross Danish territory, in a letter with the terms of safety and payment. Claudius says he will read it calmly and answer later.

Polonius, after a long detour in which he praises concision without managing to be concise, states that Hamlet has gone mad for love of Ophelia, his daughter. He reads a love letter the prince wrote to her, with the verses “Doubt that the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun doth move, / Doubt that truth is a liar, / But never doubt I love.” He says that he had his daughter lock herself in and refuse visits, gifts and go-betweens, and that, rejected, Hamlet fell into sadness, then sleeplessness, weakness and finally madness. As proof, he proposes to release Ophelia before Hamlet in a gallery, while he and the king spy from behind a tapestry; if the prince does not love her and is still mad, Polonius will give up his post as counselor. Hamlet enters reading, and the king and queen withdraw to leave him with Polonius. The prince calls him a fishmonger, says that being honest in this world is being one man in ten thousand, asks whether he has a daughter and advises him not to let her walk in the sun, and says he reads “words, words, words,” insulting the old. Polonius remarks that there is logic in that madness and leaves resolved to arrange the meeting with Ophelia.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and Hamlet greets them with delight. He says that Denmark is a prison, that nothing is good or bad except by thinking, and that he could live in a nutshell and count himself king of infinite space, were it not for his bad dreams. He realizes they were sent for and gets them to confess that the king and queen summoned them. Then he says he has lost all his joy, that the earth seems to him a barren promontory and the sky a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors, and that man, so admirable, no longer delights him. Seeing the two smile, he hears from Rosencrantz that, if so, the actors will be poorly received: they are the city's tragedians, whom he used to hear, and they come offering their services. Hamlet claims he is only mad to the north-northwest, and that when the wind blows from the south he can tell a hawk from a heron. When Polonius enters, he feigns madness again, calls him Jephthah, the judge of Israel who had one only daughter whom he loved very much, and Polonius understands that he is still speaking of Ophelia. Hamlet welcomes the actors and asks one of them for a speech about Pyrrhus, a Greek soldier, and Priam, king of Troy, and he recites the first lines himself. The actor performs as Pyrrhus, sword raised over the old king, hesitates a moment before striking him, and then reaches Hecuba, Priam's wife, running and weeping through the palace in flames. Polonius asks the actor to stop, seeing him pale and with tears in his eyes, and Hamlet ends the speech and asks Polonius to house the actors well, for they are the chronicles of the time, and says that if each were treated as he deserves, no one would escape the whip. He asks the leader of the troupe for the play The Murder of Gonzago for the next night, with a speech of twelve or sixteen lines that he will write. Alone, he calls himself a slave and a scoundrel: the actor wept for Hecuba, who means nothing to him, while he, with his father murdered, does nothing. Then he collects himself and plans to have the actors perform before the king something resembling his father's death, to observe his reaction, because he fears the ghost may be a devil that has taken a pleasing shape, and he wants surer grounds than the word of the phantom.