Act 3 of Hamlet is the turning point of the play: Hamlet contemplates death in “To be, or not to be,” proves Claudius’s guilt with a play, spares the king at prayer, and then, in his mother’s room, kills the wrong man.
This summary takes Act 3 scene by scene, from the trap set with Ophelia to the death of Polonius. Each scene 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 2 summary, and for everyone who appears here, see our guide to the Hamlet characters.
At a Glance
Here is Act 3 of Hamlet in brief.
Act 3, Scene 1: “To Be, or Not to Be” and the Nunnery Scene
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report to the king and queen that they have learned nothing. Hamlet admits he is troubled but will not say why.
They do have one piece of news: Hamlet is delighted with the players and wants the king and queen to see their play that night. Claudius agrees. Then he and Polonius put their own plan into action. They send for Hamlet and place Ophelia where he will meet her, holding a prayer book, while they hide and watch. Polonius remarks that people often use a show of devotion to “sugar o’er / The devil himself,” and the king, in an aside, feels the words strike home: “How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!” It is the first moment the audience hears Claudius confirm his guilt.
Hamlet enters, thinking he is alone: “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” Is it nobler to endure life’s troubles or to end them? Death might be like sleep, but what dreams might come in it? It is fear of what follows death, “The undiscover’d country,” that makes people endure their lives, and thinking too much that stops great enterprises from turning into action. Our guide to what “To Be, or Not to Be” means reads the speech line by line.
He sees Ophelia. She tries to return the gifts he once gave her. Hamlet turns on her with sudden cruelty. “I did love you once,” he says, and then, “I loved you not.” “I was the more deceived,” she answers. He tells her again and again, “Get thee to a nunnery,” attacks women and marriage, and asks where her father is. She says he is at home, which may be a lie Hamlet sees through. After he storms out, Ophelia mourns the man she thinks madness has destroyed: “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”
The king comes out of hiding unconvinced. “Love! his affections do not that way tend.” There is something dangerous brooding in Hamlet, and Claudius decides to send him to England. Polonius still believes in his love theory and proposes one more test: after the play, the queen should speak to Hamlet alone while Polonius listens in secret.
Act 3, Scene 2: The Play Within the Play
Before the performance, Hamlet gives the players a lesson in acting.
They should speak naturally, not rant or “tear a passion to tatters,” but not be too tame either: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” The purpose of playing is “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” Then he takes Horatio aside and praises him as a man ruled by judgment, not feeling: “Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core.” He has told Horatio what the ghost said. During one scene of the play, he asks, Horatio must watch the king’s face closely.
The court assembles. Hamlet lies at Ophelia’s feet and teases her with crude jokes, and remarks that his father died “two months ago” and is already forgotten. Ophelia corrects him: it has been “twice two months.” First comes a dumb show, acted without words: a king sleeping in a garden is poisoned through the ear, and the poisoner wins the queen. Then the play itself begins. The Player Queen swears she will never remarry if her husband dies. Hamlet asks his mother how she likes it, and Gertrude answers, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Claudius asks whether there is any offense in the play, and what it is called. “The Mouse-trap,” says Hamlet.
A new character, Lucianus, enters. Hamlet tells the court he is the king’s nephew. Lucianus pours poison into the sleeping king’s ears. Claudius rises, calls for lights, and rushes from the room, and the performance collapses. Hamlet is jubilant: “O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.”
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive to say the king is furious and the queen wants to see Hamlet. When they press him, Hamlet hands Guildenstern a recorder and asks him to play it. He cannot. Then how, Hamlet asks, can he think he can play on Hamlet? “Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Polonius comes with the same message, and Hamlet mocks him one last time with a cloud that looks like a camel, then a weasel, then “Very like a whale,” as Polonius agrees with each.
Alone, Hamlet feels capable of anything: “’Tis now the very witching time of night.” He could “drink hot blood.” But he is going to his mother, and he warns himself not to harm her: “I will speak daggers to her, but use none.”
Act 3, Scene 3: The King at Prayer
Claudius orders Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take Hamlet to England at once. Polonius reports that he will hide in the queen’s room to overhear her talk with Hamlet.
Alone, Claudius at last confesses: “O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven; / It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t, / A brother’s murder.” He wants to pray, but cannot. How can he ask forgiveness while he still holds everything he gained by the murder, “My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen”? Still, he kneels and tries.
Hamlet enters and sees him: “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.” He draws his sword, then stops. If he kills Claudius while he is praying, Claudius’s soul will go to heaven, while Hamlet’s father died without a chance to confess his sins. That would be “hire and salary, not revenge.” Hamlet decides to wait for a moment when Claudius is drunk, angry, or in bed with the queen, so that his soul will go to hell. He leaves. Claudius rises, and the audience learns what Hamlet did not: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” He had not been able to pray at all.
Act 3, Scene 4: The Closet Scene
In the queen’s private room, her “closet,” Polonius hides behind a wall hanging, the arras, and Hamlet arrives.
The exchange begins at full speed. “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,” says Gertrude, meaning Claudius. “Mother, you have my father much offended,” Hamlet replies, meaning the dead king. He forces her to sit and says he will set up a mirror to show her the inmost part of herself. Frightened, she cries for help. From behind the arras, Polonius cries out too. “How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!” Hamlet stabs through the hanging and kills him. “Is it the king?” he asks. Gertrude calls it a “rash and bloody deed.” “A bloody deed!” Hamlet answers, “almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother.” He lifts the arras and finds Polonius: “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!”
Then he turns on his mother. He makes her look at two portraits, one of her first husband and one of Claudius, and demands to know how she could leave the first for the second. His words overwhelm her: “Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul,” she says, and there she sees black spots that will not wash out. She begs him to stop, saying his words are like daggers in her ears.
The ghost appears again, visible only to Hamlet. It has come to remind him of his task: “This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.” It tells him to comfort his mother. Gertrude, seeing her son talk to empty air, is sure he is mad: “Alas, he’s mad!” When the ghost leaves, Hamlet insists he is not mad, and begs her to repent and to stay out of Claudius’s bed. He is, he tells her, “not in madness, / But mad in craft,” and she must not reveal it. “I must be cruel, only to be kind,” he says. He reminds her that he is being sent to England, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his escorts. Then he drags Polonius’s body from the room.
A Closer Reading: “Nephew to the King”
Hamlet designs the Mousetrap as a test of the king’s conscience, but one line of his own commentary turns it into something else: a public threat against the king’s life.
The plan is simple. The play will show a murder like his father’s, and Horatio and Hamlet will watch Claudius’s face. The play within the play, The Murder of Gonzago, shows a man poisoning a sleeping ruler and winning his wife. If Hamlet wanted only to catch Claudius’s guilt, the story is already a perfect mirror: a brother killing a brother. But when the murderer steps on stage, Hamlet introduces him to the court in his own words: “This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king.”
That changes what everyone else in the room is watching. The courtiers know nothing of the ghost or the poison in the orchard. What they see is the king’s nephew, the prince whose strange behavior has worried the whole court, staging a play in which a king’s nephew poisons a king, and narrating it as it happens: “you shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife.” To them, the Mousetrap is not an accusation of the past. It looks like a warning about the future.
Claudius hears both meanings. He has already sat through the dumb show, which acted out the whole murder in silence, and the text gives him no reaction to it. He breaks only when the nephew pours the poison while Hamlet talks over the scene. Hamlet takes his flight as pure proof of guilt, and it may be. But the next time we see Claudius, he talks about danger, not conscience: “I like him not, nor stands it safe with us / To let his madness range.” The kingdom “may not endure / Hazard so dangerous as doth hourly grow / Out of his lunacies.” Rosencrantz agrees that when a king dies, everything around him falls with him. In Scene 1, England was a plan for a troubled prince. After the Mousetrap, it is urgent: Hamlet must go “forthwith.”
So the play catches two people, not one. It shows Hamlet the king’s guilt, and it shows the king Hamlet’s intent, in front of the whole court. From this moment on, both men know what the other knows, and the contest between them is out in the open. Our guide to the themes in Hamlet follows appearance, performance, and truth through the whole play.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Act 3 of Hamlet, answered briefly.
What Happens in Act 3 of Hamlet?
Hamlet delivers “To be, or not to be,” rejects Ophelia, and stages a play that mirrors his father’s murder. Claudius’s reaction convinces Hamlet of his guilt. Hamlet then finds Claudius praying but decides not to kill him, and in his mother’s room he kills Polonius, who is hiding behind a curtain.
Why Doesn’t Hamlet Kill Claudius While He Is Praying?
He believes that a man killed while praying would go to heaven, while his father died without a chance to confess. He wants to kill Claudius when his soul will go to hell. Ironically, Claudius had not managed to pray at all.
What Is “The Mousetrap”?
Hamlet’s name for the play the actors perform, The Murder of Gonzago, to which he has added lines of his own. It shows a king poisoned through the ear, as Hamlet’s father was, and it is meant to catch Claudius’s guilty reaction.
Who Says “The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks”?
Gertrude, about the Player Queen, who swears too eagerly that she will never remarry. Early printings differ slightly: some read “The lady protests too much, methinks.” The line is often misquoted as “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Why Does Hamlet Kill Polonius?
Polonius is hiding behind the arras in the queen’s room to spy on Hamlet. When he cries out, Hamlet stabs through the hanging without looking, apparently hoping it is the king.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Hamlet further.