在剧情发展的第三部分中，当哈姆雷特与Ophelia交谈的时候，Claudius和Polonius准备谋杀哈姆雷特。那天晚上，演员表演了戏剧中好国王的死亡，哈姆雷特看到Claudius开始变得不安并且离开，哈姆雷特确信是他杀死了他父亲。哈姆雷特去看他妈妈的路上，看见Claudius一个人，毫无保卫。这是替父报仇的绝好时机，但是哈姆雷特犹豫了，他看见Claudius正在祈祷，哈姆雷特相信如果他此刻杀死了Claudius，他就会去天堂，哈姆雷特想让他去地狱。所以他没有杀Claudius。
　　当他在王后的房间和妈妈说话时，Polonius躲在一个帘子后面偷听，哈姆雷特听见了声音，以为是Claudius就把匕首刺了过去，Polonius倒地毙命。国王Claudius听说哈姆雷特刺死了他的探子Polonius，立即把哈姆雷特遣送到英国，并携带了一封给英国方面的信。信中说待哈姆雷特一到英国，立即处死。

　　以下的对白是哈姆雷特与情人Ophelia的交谈：
OPHELIA: Good my lord,How does your honour for this many a day?
HAMLET: I humbly thank you; well, well, well.
OPHELIA: My lord, I have remembrances of yours,That I have longed long to re-deliver;I pray you, now receive them.
HAMLET: No, not I;I never gave you aught.
OPHELIA: My honoured lord, you know right well you did;And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed.As made the things more rich: their perfume lost.Take these again; for to the noble mind. Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.
HAMLET: Ha, ha! are you honest?
OPHELIA: My lord?
HAMLET: Are you fair?
OPHELIA: What means your lordship?
HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

HAMLET: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.
OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET: You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.
OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.
HAMLET: Get you to a nunnery: why wouldn't you be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go your ways to a nunnery.Where's your father?
OPHELIA: At home, my lord.
HAMLET: Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool no where but in his own house. Farewell.
OPHELIA: Oh, help him, you sweet heavens!