As if to prove that “my wit’s diseased,” Hamlet begins to babble in “wild and whirling words,” getting almost as lost in his verbiage as Polonius.

Is Hamlet still just playing mad? Or is this a suggestion that his feigned madness has become something more than an act (if it was ever just an act to begin with)? “Wit” here means rationality, intelligence, mental sharpness, but could also imply “witty humor”–Hamlet’s sense of humor is certainly quite dark.

Earlier in 2.2, Hamlet has admitted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that something “goes heavily…with [his] disposition”–weighs on his mind and mood. Of course, gloominess, anger, etc. are not the same as madness.

The nature of Hamlet’s “disease” is one of the play’s central questions. Harold Bloom, in a 1990 essay on Hamlet, compares Hamlet to “those brilliant skeptics gone rancid, Iago [from Othello] and Edmund [from King Lear],” and contends along with Harry Levin that “Hamlet thinks not too much but too well.”

Hamlet “welcome[s]” Guildenstern’s company, as if deliberately missing his point about Gertrude’s affliction.

We might compare (and contrast) Gertrude’s “affliction of spirit” with the “distempers” of Claudius and Hamlet, also mentioned in this scene. All three members of this family are deeply out of sorts–maybe even mentally or physically ill–for different but related reasons.

Again we see that at some point Hamlet has filled Horatio in on everything the Ghost told him. He has taken Horatio into his confidence, later allowing Horatio to “report [his] cause aright” (tell his story accurately) to those he leaves behind.

Here Hamlet also expresses a resurgence of confidence in the Ghost, whom he’d previously begun to doubt.

The parents' experience here resembles that of one of the husbands in John Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick (1984), who thinks:

Marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.

Hamlet’s triple repetition of this completely rhetorical request recalls his other triple repetitions in the play. It also signals his intent to badger Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–to bait and embarrass them in retaliation for their hypocrisy and disloyalty as friends.

Oddly parallels Hamlet’s “I did love you once” (and “I loved you not”) in his exchange with Ophelia in 3.1.

All of Hamlet’s close ties–except for his friendship with Horatio–appear to be disintegrating for one reason or another.

Do you have anything else to talk to me about?

trade: business.

Note the Prince uses the majestic plural here.

Guildenstern has earlier used the word “distempered” to describe Claudius–another subtle parallel between the characters.

We know why Claudius is out of sorts, and so does Hamlet. The “cause” of Hamlet’s malady is much harder to intepret: to understand fully would be to “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery.”