Hamlet — Act 4, Scene 1

original text and modern English, side by side

A room in the Castle · King, Queen

Immediately after the closet scene, Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet, in a fit of madness, stabbed Polonius through the tapestry believing him to be a rat. Claudius realizes he could have been the one killed and that he will be blamed for having failed to restrain Hamlet, so he orders Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find the body and speeds up the plan to ship Hamlet to England. Gertrude protects her son by presenting the murder as pure insanity and stressing that he wept for it.

Enter King, Queen, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

King

There’s matter in these sighs.

There's something behind these sighs.

These profound heaves

You must translate;

You have to explain these deep groans of yours;

’tis fit we understand them.

we ought to understand them.

Where is your son?

Queen

Bestow this place on us a little while.

Give us the room for a few minutes.

To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who go out.

Queen

Ah, my good lord, what have I seen tonight!

Oh, my good lord, what I've seen tonight!

King

What, Gertrude?

What is it, Gertrude?

How does Hamlet?

How is Hamlet?

Queen

Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend

Which is the mightier.

As mad as the sea and the wind when they're fighting to see which is stronger.

In his lawless fit

Behind the arras hearing something stir,

Whips out his rapier, cries ‘A rat, a rat!’

And in this brainish apprehension kills

The unseen good old man.

In one of his uncontrollable fits he heard something moving behind the tapestry, pulled out his sword, shouted "A rat, a rat!" and in that crazed delusion killed the good old man he couldn't see.

King

O heavy deed!

What a terrible thing.

It had been so with us, had we been there.

It would have happened to us, if we'd been standing there.

His liberty is full of threats to all;

To you yourself, to us, to everyone.

Leaving him free is a threat to everybody — to you, to me, to anyone.

Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answer’d?

How on earth are we going to answer for this killing?

It will be laid to us, whose providence

Should have kept short, restrain’d, and out of haunt

This mad young man.

People will blame us: we should have had the foresight to keep this disturbed young man on a short leash, shut away, out of company.

But so much was our love

We would not understand what was most fit,

But we loved him so much that we refused to see what needed doing.

But like the owner of a foul disease,

To keep it from divulging, let it feed

Even on the pith of life.

We behaved like someone with a shameful disease who keeps it secret rather than have it known, and lets it eat him to the marrow.

Where is he gone?

Where has he gone?

Queen

To draw apart the body he hath kill’d,

To drag away the body of the man he killed.

O’er whom his very madness, like some ore

Among a mineral of metals base,

Shows itself pure.

Even in his madness a streak of pure feeling shows through, the way a vein of gold shows in a seam of cheap ore.

He weeps for what is done.

He's crying over what he's done.

King

O Gertrude, come away!

Gertrude, come away.

The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch

But we will ship him hence,

The moment the sun touches the mountains tomorrow we'll put him on a ship —

and this vile deed

We must with all our majesty and skill

Both countenance and excuse.

and we'll have to use all our royal authority and cleverness to both back this ugly business and explain it away.

Ho, Guildenstern!

— Guildenstern!

Re-enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

King

Friends both, go join you with some further aid:

You two, take some extra men with you.

Hamlet in madness hath Polonius slain,

And from his mother’s closet hath he dragg’d him.

Hamlet in his madness has killed Polonius and dragged the body out of his mother's room.

Go seek him out, speak fair, and bring the body

Into the chapel.

Go find him, speak to him gently, and take the body to the chapel.

I pray you haste in this.

Please hurry.

Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

King

Come, Gertrude,

Come, Gertrude.

we’ll call up our wisest friends,

And let them know both what we mean to do

And what’s untimely done,

We'll wake our most trusted advisers and tell them both what we plan to do and what has just been done, too soon.

so haply slander,

Whose whisper o’er the world’s diameter,

As level as the cannon to his blank,

Transports his poison’d shot, may miss our name,

And hit the woundless air.

Then perhaps gossip — whose whisper carries clear across the world, aimed as straight as a cannon at its target, and carries its poisoned shot with it — may miss our name and hit only the empty air, which can't be wounded.

O, come away!

Oh, come away.

My soul is full of discord and dismay.

My mind is nothing but turmoil and fear.

Exeunt.

Hamlet Act 4, Scene 1 summary

Who appears in this scene

King, Queen — A room in the Castle.

Famous lines in Hamlet Act 4, Scene 1, explained

“Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend / Which is the mightier.” (line 7): Gertrude describes Hamlet as a storm at war with itself — two enormous forces tearing at each other with no winner. The image matters because of what she leaves out: she has just been told by Hamlet himself that he is only pretending to be mad, and here she reports his madness as total and uncontrollable. Whether she believes it or is deliberately building his legal defense, her wording turns a deliberate stabbing into a natural disaster nobody can be charged for.
“Behind the arras hearing something stir, / Whips out his rapier, cries ‘A rat, a rat!’ / And in this brainish apprehension kills / The unseen good old man.” (line 9): This is Gertrude's careful account of Polonius's death, and every detail excuses Hamlet: he heard a noise, he thought it was vermin, he could not see who was there, and "brainish apprehension" means a delusion produced by a diseased brain. An audience that watched Act 3 Scene 4 knows Hamlet stabbed on the hope that it was Claudius and then said flatly that he took the man for his better. Gertrude has just chosen a side, and it is her son's.
“O’er whom his very madness, like some ore / Among a mineral of metals base, / Shows itself pure. He weeps for what is done.” (line 26): Gertrude keeps shaping the story: even Hamlet's insanity, she says, has something noble in it, like a vein of gold running through worthless rock, and the proof is that he is crying over the corpse. Nothing in the previous scene shows Hamlet weeping — he called Polonius a meddling fool and dragged him out by the heels. Her invented tears are the clearest sign that she has stopped reporting to her husband and started defending her son against him.
“His liberty is full of threats to all; / To you yourself, to us, to everyone.” (line 15): Claudius's first reaction to the killing is not grief for Polonius but the recognition that the sword went through the curtain where he himself might have stood. From this point on he stops treating Hamlet as a family problem and starts treating him as a target, and within two scenes the trip to England has secretly become an execution order. Note how he sells it as protection for everyone, Gertrude included, when the person actually in danger is Claudius.

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About this translation: the original text follows the public-domain Project Gutenberg Globe edition; the modern English translation was written in-house for Polytranslator and is reviewed on an ongoing basis (last revised August 2026). Free to print and photocopy for classroom use. Cite as: “Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 1. Polytranslator side-by-side translation, polytranslator.com/shakespeare/hamlet/act-4-scene-1.”

Studying the language itself? Our Shakespearean English course teaches thou/thee, the verbs, and the meter — free through Unit 2. Or try the Shakespearean English translator.