There is further evidence of a dramatic increase in Hamlet’s cruelty in Act 3, when we see him killing Polonius following an argument with his mother, Gertrude, with her consequential cry for help alerting Hamlet to the figure behind the arras. He abuses her, and despite her cry of “O speak to me no more. These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet”, continues this, while the dead body of Polonius lies on the floor next to them. There are a number of issues presented in this exchange between Gertrude and Hamlet that would lead the audience to believe that Act 3 was a turning point. The coldness with which Hamlet treats the dead body of Polonius, saying, upon lifting the arras and finding it is not the King who lies dead behind it, “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell. I took thee for thy better.” This is not the same procrastinating Hamlet we have seen earlier on in the play, and this coldness and indifference towards the taking of a life leads us to believe that Hamlet has changed, and this is a turning point in the play. Furthermore, the disdainfulness he shows towards the dead body of his former love’s father is also shocking; we cannot believe that in spite of his earlier procrastinating he treats his murder so casually, “This man shall set me packing, I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room”. This emotionally detached view is certainly not the one that would have been taken by an earlier Hamlet who was so distraught at his fathers death that he considered taking his own life.
Moreover, the audience can observe Act 3 as a turning point because of the evidential proof that finally arises here. Although before Hamlet has always been able to access the “get out clause”, not killing Claudius because of being unsure of his guilt, here we are essentially given proof twice; once during the Player’s play, when he reacts to it by running away from the castle hall doubling as a theatre, and also when we see him praying, saying “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t- a brother’s murder”. This is the point where the audience is finally made fully aware of the revenge genre of the play, and that it is going to end nastily.
As is mentioned before, we see Hamlet in a more aggressive, nasty light in Act 3. In scene 3, he sees Claudius praying and realises that he can easily kill him then, drawing his sword, he says “Now might I do it pat, now a is a-praying. And now I’ll do’t”. He then describes his prospective murder of Claudius as “hire and salary, not revenge”, in a clinical fashion unlike the Hamlet of previous times. However, he then decides “And am I then reveng’d… At game a-swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in’t”, thinking that he must kill Claudius at a time when he is committing sin, so “that his soul may be as damn’d and black As hell, whereto it goes.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a critic, observed that he is here completely overstepping the bounds of Christian morality, and the audience feels as if Hamlet is now not pure and good, and should be as damned as the man who killed his father. However, this view could be misleading. Despite the posturing, Hamlet once again procrastinates and avoids killing Claudius, falling yet again into the trap of acting as “Hamlet the thinker”. Although he argues that he wants Claudius’s soul to go to hell, wanting the punishment to be sufficient, how can Hamlet ever hope to know the fate of Claudius’s immortal soul, considering that he says himself in a soliloquy that it is impossible to know death.
Furthermore, whereas I mentioned before that the cruelty that Hamlet shows towards other characters in Act 3 indicates that there is a turning point in the play there, it could be seen that this is not the case. Whilst it appears that Hamlet is being cruel to Ophelia; his comment that she should enter a nunnery rather than become a “breeder of sinners” in scene 1 is directed cruelly at her, it should also be said that he does also appear to be in emotional turmoil, and his confused statement that he both loves her, and has never loved her it all accentuates this, indicating that this cruelty is only a front and has no real deep meaning. Furthermore, although he speaks cruelly to Gertrude, he acknowledges that “I [Hamlet] will speak daggers to her, but use none” in scene 2, and so has consciously ‘put a lid’ on the venom with which he shall attack Gertrude, indicating relative compassion and love on his part.
Accentuating the argument that Act 3 is not a turning point in Hamlet is the content of the soliloquy he delivers here. The most famous one, which begins “To be or not to be”, obviously implies the question whether or not to kill oneself. The entire soliloquy suggests that he is toying with the concept of suicide and perhaps is trying to work up the courage to do it. Although he has recently had an insight into the afterlife through the visit of his father’s ghost to him to inform him of Claudius’s secret, he claims that everyone would commit suicide if they weren’t uncertain about the afterlife, which seems confused. It appears that he is, as he does so many times in the play, hide behind his procrastination to avoid any action, and it seems that Hamlet does not change. Furthermore, the soliloquy later observes that “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”. Here he acknowledges his weakness of considering his revenge too much, the problem which will plague him later on in the Act when he fails to kill Claudius despite the prime opportunity to do so. This leads the audience to believe that Hamlet has not change and the play will continue in the same vein, with Act 3 not being the turning point.
In conclusion, I do not think that Act 3 is conclusively the turning point in the novel. It is not until his return from England that we see a definitive change in Hamlet’s procrastination and his determination to kill Claudius. Polonius being behind the arras exposes the fallusy of revenge, as Hamlet is now guilty of the crime he is meant to be revenging. Although I think it is not irrefutably possible to look upon Act 3 as a turning point, there are several factors within it that may point to that conclusion; the definitive proof that Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father, an actual death on stage within the play. It is possible to observe the death of Polonius as ‘the beginning of the end’, and from that point of view it could be observed that Act 3 is when, most notably, there is a change within the play
