Hamlet, 3.4

This scene, like the scene that opens Act 3, shows Hamlet encountering a woman who in his mind has betrayed him. Again, he has been sent for, and probably suspects that it is another setup like the one with Ophelia. He has just come from the play, ready to drink hot blood and to kill, and he is given his opportunity.

This is the first time that Hamlet and Gertrude have been alone together in the play, and in fact is the first scene in which Gertrude appears without her new husband. The bitter rage that has been boiling in Hamlet from the beginning of the play is here emptied at Gertrude, the prime object of his rage.

Polonius wants Gertrude to give Hamlet a good scolding – “be round with him” – and, bless her soul, she gives it the best she can muster. “You have your father much offended,” she begins. But of course Claudius is not Hamlet’s father, and, were Gertrude attentive to recent events, she would have recognized that Hamlet bristles at the relationship he has been forced into with Claudius.

Hamlet comes to the scene with intentions of his own. Marvin Rosenberg says, “He has come to be cruel. To shame Gertrude, to remind her of her incestuous marriage – if not her adultery – and perhaps accuse her of complicity in the murder of his father.” No doubt, he intends what he pours into Gertrude’s ears to be medicinal rather than poisonous, corrective words that will expose and dispel the lies of the serpent king who is her husband. He wants to set up “a glass where you may see the inmost part of you.” Does he mean to kill her? Perhaps he is Orestes here, believing the play has proven not only Claudius but Gertrude guilty.