Act 2 of Hamlet is an act of spies and performers: everyone at Elsinore is watching Hamlet and trying to explain his strange behavior, while Hamlet, acting mad, watches them back and finds in a troupe of traveling actors a way to test the ghost’s story.
This summary takes Act 2 scene by scene. It has only two scenes, but the second is one of the longest in Shakespeare. Each covers what happens, the key lines, and why it matters for the rest of the play. For the whole story, see our full guide to Hamlet. For what came before, see our Act 1 summary, and for everyone who appears here, see our guide to the Hamlet characters.
At a Glance
Here is Act 2 of Hamlet in brief.
Act 2, Scene 1: Polonius and Ophelia
The act opens with Polonius doing what he does best: arranging to spy on someone.
He sends his servant Reynaldo to Paris with money for Laertes, and with instructions to find out how Laertes is behaving. Reynaldo is to drop small, false hints about the young man’s vices among his acquaintances and see what they say back. Polonius is proud of the method: “Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth,” and so wise men “By indirections find directions out.”
As Reynaldo leaves, Ophelia rushes in, terrified. While she was sewing in her room, Hamlet appeared before her, “with his doublet all unbraced,” no hat, his stockings dirty and falling down, “Pale as his shirt,” looking as if “he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors.” He gripped her wrist, stared at her face for a long time, sighed as if his whole body would break, and left without a word, his eyes on her all the way out of the door.
Polonius has his answer at once: “This is the very ecstasy of love.” When Ophelia tells him that, as ordered, she has refused Hamlet’s letters and his visits, Polonius concludes, “That hath made him mad,” and hurries off to tell the king. The audience knows another explanation: Hamlet warned his friends in Act 1 that he might put on an “antic disposition.” Whether this visit is part of that act, or something more real, the play never says.
Act 2, Scene 2: The Spies and the Letter
The long second scene opens with the king and queen welcoming two of Hamlet’s old school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Claudius and Gertrude have sent for them to find out what has so transformed the prince. The two agree to help. The ambassadors return from Norway with good news: the old king of Norway has stopped Fortinbras from attacking Denmark and turned him against Poland instead, and asks permission for his army to cross Danish land on the way.
Then Polonius announces that he has found the cause of Hamlet’s madness. He takes his time about it. “Since brevity is the soul of wit,” he says, “I will be brief: your noble son is mad.” When he keeps talking, Gertrude cuts in: “More matter, with less art.” He reads out a love letter Hamlet wrote to Ophelia, with its little poem: “Doubt thou the stars are fire; / Doubt that the sun doth move.” Ophelia’s rejection, Polonius explains, drove the prince into madness. To prove it, he proposes a test. At a suitable time, “I’ll loose my daughter to him,” and he and the king will hide and watch what happens.
Hamlet and Polonius
Hamlet enters, reading a book, and Polonius tries to talk to him alone. Hamlet runs rings around him. He calls Polonius a “fishmonger,” warns him not to let his daughter walk in the sun, and when asked what he is reading, answers, “Words, words, words.” Every mad-sounding reply carries a sting, and Polonius half notices: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.”
Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and Hamlet greets them warmly. But he soon turns the talk dark: “Denmark’s a prison.” When they disagree, he answers, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.” Then he asks them directly whether they came of their own accord, and presses them, by their old friendship, to be honest. At last they admit it: “My lord, we were sent for.”
Hamlet tells them why before they can report it. He has lost all his joy. The earth seems a “sterile promontory,” the sky a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” And humanity, which should be glorious, leaves him cold: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!” It is “the beauty of the world” and “the paragon of animals,” and yet, “to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me.”
The Players
His friends mention that a company of traveling actors is on its way to the castle, and Hamlet brightens at once. Before they arrive, he drops a hint to his old friends that his madness is not what it seems: “I am but mad north-north-west.” When the wind blows from the south, he knows perfectly well what is what.
The players enter, and Hamlet welcomes them like old friends. He asks the leading actor for a speech he once loved, about the fall of Troy. Hamlet begins it himself, then the player takes over: the tale of Pyrrhus, who comes to avenge his father Achilles and cuts down old King Priam, and of Priam’s wife Hecuba, who cries out at the sight of her husband’s murder. As he speaks, the actor goes pale, and tears come into his eyes. Polonius asks him to stop.
Hamlet sends the players off to be looked after, but first draws the leading actor aside. Can the company perform The Murder of Gonzago tomorrow night? And could the actor learn “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines,” which Hamlet will write and insert into the play? He could.
“O, What a Rogue and Peasant Slave Am I!”
Alone at last, Hamlet explodes: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” An actor, in a mere fiction, just wept real tears for a character in a story: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?” What would that actor do if he had Hamlet’s cause? And Hamlet, with a murdered father, has done nothing and said nothing. He curses himself as a coward, then curses Claudius, then catches himself unpacking his heart with words.
Then comes a plan, and a doubt that explains it. “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil,” and the devil can take a pleasing shape to lead a grieving man to damnation. Hamlet needs better evidence. He has heard that “guilty creatures sitting at a play” have been so struck by it that they confessed their crimes. So he will have the players act out something like his father’s murder in front of his uncle, and watch his face: “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Our guide to Hamlet’s soliloquies reads the speech in full.
A Closer Reading: Tears for Hecuba
In Act 1, Hamlet said that outward shows of grief prove nothing. In Act 2, an actor’s outward show of grief moves him more than anything real in Denmark, and it gives him the idea that a performance can uncover the truth.
When his mother asked why his grief “seems” so particular, Hamlet scorned the word. His black clothes and tears, he said, are only what “seem,” “For they are actions that a man might play.” Real grief is “that within which passeth show.” Act 2 puts that claim to the test. Everyone in it is performing. Polonius sends Reynaldo to Paris to tell lies that will draw out the truth. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play old friends dropping in, until Hamlet makes them admit they were sent. Hamlet himself is playing a madman, with enough method in it that Polonius notices.
Then comes a real actor, and he does exactly what Hamlet said a man might “play.” He turns pale, his voice breaks, and he weeps real tears for Hecuba, a queen who never existed. The performance is genuine even though its cause is fiction. And Hamlet, whose cause is all too real, has shed no such tears and taken no action. The show he dismissed in Act 1 turns out to have a power his own inward grief lacks.
So he changes tactics. If a play can bring real feeling out of an actor, it can bring real guilt out of a king. The man who knew not “seems” will now use seeming to find out what is. It is a clever plan, and a telling one: when Hamlet finally commits himself to a course of action, it is to put on a play. Our guide to the themes in Hamlet follows appearance and reality through the whole play.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Act 2 of Hamlet, answered briefly.
What Happens in Act 2 of Hamlet?
Hamlet’s strange behavior alarms the court. Polonius believes he is mad with love for Ophelia, while the king and queen summon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out what is wrong. Hamlet mocks Polonius, forces his friends to admit they were sent for, and welcomes a company of actors, planning to use a play to test whether Claudius really murdered his father.
Is Hamlet Really Mad in Act 2?
He said in Act 1 that he might pretend to be mad, and in Act 2 he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he is “but mad north-north-west,” hinting that it is partly an act. Even Polonius sees “method” in it. But his despair in the scene seems real, and the play leaves the question open.
Why Does Hamlet Want the Players to Perform a Play?
He fears the ghost might be the devil in disguise, trying to trick him into murder. By having the actors perform a play like his father’s murder and watching Claudius’s reaction, he hopes to prove Claudius’s guilt: “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
Who Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?
Old school friends of Hamlet, summoned by the king and queen to find out what is troubling him. Hamlet quickly realizes they are working for Claudius and makes them admit it.
What Does “Brevity Is the Soul of Wit” Mean?
That intelligence is best expressed in few words. The joke is that Polonius says it in the middle of one of the longest-winded speeches in the play.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Hamlet further.