[Enter HAMLET and Attendants.]

CLAUDIUS      Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET         At supper.

CLAUDIUS      At supper! Where?

HAMLET         Not where he eats but where ’a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes but to one table. That’s the end.

CLAUDIUS      Alas, alas.        (4.3.16-25)

Lots of ways for Claudius to play this—faux concern is probably easiest, softly softly, good cop all the way, especially if Hamlet is shaking off a couple of serious enforcers. Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius? A pleasant, low-key enquiry, just a simple request for information, and Claudius is using Hamlet’s name, no titles, no pulling rank. Hamlet’s ready: at supper. At supper! Goodness! Alright, let’s go with this, don’t argue with the madman (or else, genuine bafflement). Where?

And Hamlet’s off, with bitter glee: not where he eats but where ’a is eaten. Ha! (The goons, if present, can start to back away; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern begin to realise that they’re being outclassed, yet again.) A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Yes, it’s a quibble on the great doctrinal conference known as the Diet of Worms, appropriate for a man from Wittenberg—but it’s also all about the instability of register, the certain convocation (formal, even didactic, the idiom of the moral exemplum, or the police report), the absurdity of the politic worms, high to low, and a fleeting image of invertebrates engaged in earnest debate—then the colloquial violence of are e’en at him. They’re eating him, right now, and the worms rear up, with teeth. Another shift, confiding, lofty: your worm is your only emperor for diet, oh yes, they know what they like, only the best—but mostly it’s setting up the next savage observation: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Fat is blunter than feed, more transactional, without any sense of nurture. We fatten up animals to eat, and thereby we fatten up ourselves in order to be eaten by maggots. Maggots! Maggots! Nastier than worms, and visible too, because of those already-imagined worms, chatting away over their supper; these are writhing white, with their black pin-heads. (The goons could be looking queasy, Guildenstern and Rosencranz too.) Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes but to one table. It’s all the same in the end, whether you’re a king or a beggar, you’re going to be eaten by worms, and they won’t be able to tell the difference; it’s all just supper to them. Worms and maggots. Maggots! Worms! That’s the end. Got it? (And also, the end of all, of all of us.)

Alas, alas, responds Claudius, probably in faux concern, as if treating this as yet more evidence of poor dear Hamlet’s madness.