Ophelia at the suggestion of her father and the other conspirators, comes in at this juncture and sounds Hamlet as to plighted love and gives back the gifts he gave her.
Hamlet pretending to madness still talks double and asks Ophelia if she be honest, fair and beautiful.
She says: "Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?"
Hamlet replies: "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 says: "Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so."
And then the fickle Hamlet says: "I loved you not," and with supercilious advice, exclaims:
_"Get thee to a nunnery! Why would'st thou 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 offenses at my back 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 heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us-- Go thy ways to a nunnery! If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry.-- Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow! Thou shall not escape calumny! If thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; For wise men know well enough what monsters women make of them! Go! get thee to a nunnery!"_
Hamlet thus plays the madman to the eye and mind of Ophelia, that she may report his lunacy; and believing her former lover deranged, after his exit utters this wail of grief:
_"O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! 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; That unmatched form and feature of blown youth, Blasted with ecstacy: O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see."_