A room of state — the new king's court

The first court scene. The hall is full. Claudius opens with a long, polished speech that reconciles, in two parallel clauses, joy at his marriage and grief at his brother's death — "our sometime sister, now our queen" — and gets immediately down to business. Norway is making threats; ambassadors are dispatched. Laertes asks leave to return to Paris and is granted it. Polonius, his father, signs off with stiff approval. Then Claudius turns to Hamlet, who is still in mourning black, and asks why "the clouds still hang on you." Gertrude joins the appeal: cast off your "nighted color"; do not seek your noble father in the dust.

Hamlet replies in clipped half-lines. He is contemptuous of the easy public mourning that Claudius and Gertrude have moved past. "I have that within which passeth show," he tells his mother — "these but the trappings and the suits of woe." Claudius lectures him on the unmanliness of excessive grief and asks him to remain at Elsinore rather than returning to Wittenberg. Hamlet, though it is his uncle's request, agrees only to please his mother. The court files out.

Hamlet, alone, speaks the first of his four soliloquies: "O that this too too solid flesh would melt." It is a confession of complete weariness — disgust with the world, with his mother's hasty remarriage, with himself for having to remain alive in this household. He has barely finished when Horatio and the soldiers enter and tell him, at last, what they saw on the wall last night. Hamlet listens. He insists on going to the watch tonight. "All is not well," he says. "I doubt some foul play."