What happens in Act IV of Hamlet?
Act IV begins right after Polonius's death. Gertrude informs Claudius about what happened, and he quickly realizes that Hamlet's threat is now known and cannot be controlled. He sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who carry sealed letters that secretly instruct the English king to execute Hamlet upon his arrival. Meanwhile, Ophelia enters the court in a state of utter mental breakdown—singing disjointed ballads and handing out flowers with hidden meanings—her madness a raw display of grief for her father and her lost love. Laertes returns from France, inciting the crowd and confronting Claudius with barely suppressed anger. Claudius, maintaining his cool, redirects that anger toward Hamlet. A letter arrives confirming that Hamlet has escaped from the trip to England and is back in Denmark. Claudius and Laertes plot to kill Hamlet during a rigged fencing match: Laertes will use a poisoned blade, and Claudius will prepare a poisoned drink as a backup plan. The act concludes with Gertrude's brief but heartbreaking announcement that Ophelia has drowned, her body found floating among flowers in the brook.
Analysis
Act IV is the engine room of Shakespeare's play, where the tragic momentum becomes unstoppable. The act's key technique is structural acceleration: scenes become shorter, entrances happen more suddenly, and the court's orderly ceremonial facade starts to crack under the weight of events it can no longer control. Here, Claudius’s political skills shine through, and Shakespeare intentionally uses this to create moral complexity; the king is never more impressive or more chilling than when he quells Laertes’s rebellion with just a few lines of flattery and misdirection.
Ophelia's madness introduces a tonal shift. Her songs—sometimes bawdy, sometimes elegiac, and often nonsensical—act as a kind of anti-language, expressing what the court's rhetoric tries to suppress: desire, grief, and betrayal. The flowers she hands out create a rich symbolic system, with each plant carrying a folk meaning that the other characters either overlook or fail to understand, highlighting the play's ongoing anxiety about interpretation and misinterpretation.
The motif of concealment reaches its peak: letters hidden within letters, poison concealed within ceremony, and murder disguised as sport. Claudius's poisoned cup, prepared as a backup plan, echoes the original fratricide and indicates that the entire Danish court now operates on the logic of hidden deadly objects.
Gertrude's account of Ophelia's drowning—"There is a willow grows aslant a brook"—serves as the act's tonal pivot: it's lyrical, almost pastoral, yet it recounts a death. The beauty of the language and the horror of the event refuse to reconcile, and that's exactly the point. Shakespeare doesn't allow the audience to grieve in a tidy manner.
Key quotes from Act IV
“There is a willow grows aslant a brook, / That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; / There with fantastic garlands did she come.”
Gertrude delivers her account of Ophelia's drowning to Laertes, the pastoral imagery making the violence of the death all the more unbearable.
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions.”
Claudius speaks to Gertrude as catastrophe compounds catastrophe—Polonius dead, Hamlet exiled, Laertes returned in revolt, Ophelia mad.
“To cut his throat i' the church.”
Laertes declares the absolute extremity of his vengeance to Claudius, who uses the line to test and then harness the young man's rage for his own purposes.