See note on Hamlet’s “direction” of other characters in this scene above.

i.e., Pick up where I left off.

Hamlet’s mini-performance is often played as being genuinely skillful, since he’s a lover of the theater. The 2009 David Tennant version makes the choice of having Hamlet look rather amateurish, so that Polonius’s reply looks especially insincere.

https://youtu.be/FnrKScWFR3M?t=45s

Clearly it lives in Hamlet’s memory. We might recall again his promise to his father’s ghost (in 1.5) to wipe away everything from his memory but the command to revenge. Instead of acting on that command, he is now acting.

Shakespeare does not give the Player any “good lines” or distinctive identity apart from his function as actor. He is his roles.

Hamlet pretends to have been conferring with his friends about some unrelated topic, rather than mocking Polonius.

https://youtu.be/J8C4gPU_hEU?t=7m56s

Hamlet now mocks Polonius’s tedious predictability. His “prophesying” here is a kind of comic manifestation of his “prophetic soul” (1.5).

Hamlet draws his friends close and speaks to them out of Polonius’s earshot:

https://youtu.be/J8C4gPU_hEU?t=7m48s

“Swaddling-clouts” are diapers. Hamlet’s insult may refer to Polonius’s “babyish” naivete or foolishness, or perhaps to physical features such as chubbiness or balding head.

Ophelia seems to believe that Hamlet’s first statement, “I did love you once,” was the truth. However, she’s silent as to whether or not she ever loved him (recall that her father and Claudius are watching).

Deceit is a major theme throughout Hamlet; with his “antic disposition,” Hamlet is deceiving his “uncle-father and aunt-mother,” as he confesses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and may be playacting with Ophelia here as well. Meanwhile, Ophelia is participating in the setup of Hamlet on which Polonius and Claudius are now spying.

Ophelia’s famous retort inspired the title of 20th-century poet Philip Larkin’s book The Less Deceived (1955). The phrase appears in a poem whose title is ‘Deceptions’.

maintains: supports, finances.

escoted: supported.

Not surprisingly, Hamlet takes Shakespeare’s side (or the equivalent within the world of the play) in the War of the Theatres. With skeptical irony, he asks who finances these faddish child actors and whether they’ll keep acting only until their voices change (“no longer than they can sing”).