CLAUDIUS O, ’tis too true.
[aside] How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot’s cheek beautied with plastering art
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
O heavy burden!
POLONIUS I hear him coming – withdraw, my lord.
[King and Polonius hide behind an arras] (3.1.48-54)
O, ’tis too true, yes, Polonius, you’re so correct, so wise, people do often conceal things behind a veneer of piety, people are indeed hypocrites. Claudius is rattled: the whole speech is sometimes made an aside, but the next bit certainly is, his first aside in the play. He’s suspicious of what Hamlet’s up to, but he’s also starting to feel the weight of his crime, although he doesn’t give any indication here as to what that crime might be. How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! That was a bit close to the bone, that blithe, sententious acknowledgement of dissembling and hypocrisy! And then an appropriately ugly, misogynist conceit, appropriate to what Claudius and Polonius are doing: the harlot’s cheek beautied with plastering art—the whore, whose beauty is not even skin deep, but rather achieved cosmetically, laid on with a trowel, is not more ugly to the thing that helps it, is not more unattractive in comparison to that which is concealing it, than is my deed to my most painted word. Everything I say, all my fine speeches and rhetoric, my gracious diplomacy and elegant compliments: they’re just glossing over something intrinsically foul. (An early modern audience would assume that the prostitute is probably so thickly painted because her skin bears the marks of syphilis; her paint—which, as lead-based ceruse, will also have destroyed her skin—is a thin layer which conceals rottenness. It’s a recurrent conceit in the play.) O heavy burden! I’m weighed down by it!
Polonius is fussing: I hear him coming—withdraw, my lord. Come ON, we’ve got to hide. The arras is supplied editorially, but it’s referred to later on—and an early modern audience would probably expect them to hide behind such a wall-hanging, associated in many other sources with eavesdropping and illicit surveillance. And so Ophelia is left stranded with her book, waiting, and the audience wait with her.