The scene starts off with Claudius and Gertrude talking about Hamlets spout into madness and find out that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot find out why Hamlet is so melancholy, However they do tell that hamlet is very excited about the player and Claudius and Gertrude agree to see the play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern then leave and Claudius asks Gertrude to leave and she exits as well. we find out that him and Polonius want to spy on hamlets confrontation with Ophelia, they both hear hamlets footsteps and hide. We then get the most famous soliloquy in the play where hamlet contemplates suicide and life or death
“To be, or not to be? That is the question— Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—No more—and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life.For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.—Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered”
Ophelia then comes back and says that she is deeply sorry and wants to get back with him back hamlet replies by saying that he doesn’t love her anymore and for her sake she should go to a nunnery or brothel because she isn’t going to find a better man out in the world because they are only after one thing (Sex).
Polonius and the king then come out and work that Hamlets madness is not caused by his love of Ophelia, Claudius then has the idea of sending hamlet to England to get away from all his problem with the loss of his father and him becoming his new father. Polonius agrees to the idea but still believes that he loves Ophelia and the scene ends.
React!