To draw apart the body he hath killed: 
     O’er whom his very madness, like some ore
     Among a mineral of metals base,
     Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.

But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her son.  She has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying, ‘A rat! a rat!’, ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he heard something stir there, whereas we know that what he heard was a man’s voice crying, ‘What ho! help, help, help!’ And in this scene she has come straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated, shaken with ‘sighs’ and ‘profound heaves,’ in the night (line 30).  Now we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that said those things and others.  The only sign of relenting is in the words (III. iv. 171): 

                         For this same lord,
     I do repent:  but heaven hath pleased it so,
     To punish me with this and this with me,
     That I must be their scourge and minister.

His mother’s statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at III. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for Polonius.)

Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius’s body afterwards?  Well, in the next scene (IV. ii.) we see him alone with the body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings.  And his first words are, ’Safely stowed’!]

[Footnote 38:  Not ‘must cripple,’ as the English translation has it.]

[Footnote 39:  He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving (V. ii. 218).  His contrary statement (II. ii. 308) is made to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.]

[Footnote 40:  See Note B.]

[Footnote 41:  The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to me Shakespeare simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a very touching picture he draws.  Antonio’s sadness, which he describes in the opening lines of the play, would never drive him to suicide, but it makes him indifferent to the issue of the trial, as all his speeches in the trial-scene show.]

[Footnote 42:  Of course ‘your’ does not mean Horatio’s philosophy in particular.  ‘Your’ is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that ‘your water is a sore decayer of your ... dead body.’]

[Footnote 43:  This aspect of the matter leaves us comparatively unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance.  The Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious words to the King).  If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet’s mind.]