“O heavenly powers, restore him!” prayed Ophelia again.
“I have heard of your paintings, too, well enough,” continued Hamlet, with increasing violence. “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God’s creatures. Go to, I’ll no more on it; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages; those that are married already—all but one”—here he looked darkly towards the arras, where he knew the King was concealed with Polonius—“shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go!”
And with a furious gesture of dismissal Hamlet hurried from the room.
“Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” sighed Ophelia piteously. ”The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword; the expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion, and the mould of form, the observed of all observers quite, quite down! And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, that sucked the honey of his music vows, now see that noble and most sovereign reason, like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh! Oh, woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”
While Ophelia was musing thus sadly, the King and Polonius stepped from their hiding-place. The King was not at all satisfied that Polonius was right in his surmise that Hamlet had lost his reason because of Ophelia’s rejected love.
“Love! His affections do not tend that way,” he said decidedly. “Nor was what he spoke, though it lacked form a little, like madness. There is something in his soul over which his melancholy sits brooding, and I fear the result will be some danger. To prevent this, I have determined that he shall depart with speed for England, to demand there our neglected tribute. Haply the sea and the sight of foreign countries will expel this settled matter in his heart, about which his brains, always beating, makes him thus unlike himself.”
Polonius agreed that it would be a good plan to send Hamlet to England, though he would not give up his idea that the origin and commencement of Hamlet’s grief sprang from neglected love. He further suggested that after the play the Queen should have an interview alone with Hamlet, and try to get from him the cause of his grief, and that Polonius himself should be placed where he could hear their conference.
“If the Queen cannot discover the cause, send him to England, or confine him where your wisdom shall think best,” he concluded.
“It shall be so,” declared the King. “Madness in great ones must not go unwatched.”