The closet scene; Polonius dies

Gertrude's bedroom. Polonius hides behind the arras. Hamlet enters. The conversation, from his side, opens at full pitch: he came in, his mother says, on her command; he is here to denounce her marriage. She is frightened by his intensity and calls for help. Polonius, behind the arras, foolishly cries out as well. Hamlet, hearing a man's voice in his mother's chamber, draws his sword and runs it through the curtain — "how now, a rat?" — and kills Polonius before he knows who it is. He pulls back the curtain. "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell. I took thee for thy better."

Then he turns on Gertrude. The whole long scene that follows is one of the most uncomfortable in the play. He compares her two husbands — produces miniatures of both, his father and Claudius, and demands she look at the difference. He accuses her of complicity, of lust, of corruption. She is overwhelmed; she begs him to stop. "These words like daggers enter in mine ears. No more, sweet Hamlet."

The ghost appears. It is visible only to Hamlet. It chides him: he is allowing himself to be distracted from his real task by anger at his mother. "Step between her and her fighting soul." Hamlet softens. He turns to Gertrude with new tenderness. She, seeing him talking and gesturing into empty air, is convinced he is mad. The ghost leaves. Hamlet warns Gertrude not to share his mother's bed with Claudius again, gives her a message about the trip to England (he suspects Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), and exits dragging Polonius's body. The act ends with Hamlet's terrible joke: "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room."