SARAH: Polonius is clearly baffled by Hamlet's complex jokes — but he also understands enough to realize that the young man is attempting to rile him up about his daughter, perhaps in order to pay Polonius back for forbidding Ophelia from seeing him. Of course, this all helps confirm Polonius's interpretation of Hamlet's madness — that he has suffered a breakdown from his unrequited love for Ophelia.

RALPH: Polonius nevertheless tries again to strike up a conversation, this time he asks what Hamlet is reading.

SARAH: Hamlet's replies here constantly play on two different registers of meaning, taking the meaning intended by Polonius and substituting it for something quite different. First, he replies entirely too literally, by answering that he is reading words on a page.

RALPH: Then, when Polonius asks what the book is about, Hamlet takes the term "matter" to mean a subject in a dispute or debate. His reply, then, is to ask, who is this dispute between, as if Polonius had introduced the idea of a dispute.

SARAH: Yet even though Hamlet's clearly just playing with Polonius, and trying to confuse and perhaps humiliate him, there's something strangely poetic here as well — there's something almost sorrowful about the repetition of "words, words, words" — as if Hamlet were aware somehow that he is an actor on a stage, and that the "matter" in question is a play, made up solely of words on a page.