Ophelia mad

Word of Polonius's death and the obscurity of his burial has reached his daughter. Ophelia walks into the great hall mad. She sings fragments of bawdy songs that she would not have known sane — about a lover sneaking into a girl's bedroom on St. Valentine's morning, about a dead man whose grave is being trodden on. She gives flowers, picked from her hair, with hidden meanings — rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, fennel for flattery, rue for repentance. Her sentences begin and do not finish. Gertrude is shaken almost to silence. Claudius, harder, is calculating what her display will mean among the people who hear about it.

Then a louder noise. Laertes, returned secretly from Paris and gathered an angry mob from the people of Elsinore, breaks in at the head of them. He demands to know where his father is and how he died. Claudius — in one of the play's most impressive scenes of pure political nerve — invites Laertes to ask his questions; faces him alone; offers his own life, if Laertes can establish his guilt; and, by sheer composure, brings the boy down from violence to listening. Then Ophelia drifts back in, mad, and gives Laertes more flowers, and sings him a snatch of song about a buried man. Laertes is broken by it.

Claudius, taking advantage of the moment, promises Laertes he will be shown everything. Where Polonius is buried, why the burial was rushed, who killed him. If the king is found at fault, his crown and his life are forfeit. If not, Laertes must accept his explanation. The two leave together. Ophelia, alone on the stage with Gertrude, drifts off still singing.