Laertes (Hamlet) match begins, Hamlet apologises publicly to Laertes for the wrongs he has dealt him. Laertes accepts the apology, so he says, but he proceeds with the scheme to kill Hamlet (though after Gertrude drinks the poisoned drink he expresses having an attack of conscience). Hamlet is eventually wounded with the poisoned sword. Then, in a scuffle, the swords are switched. Hamlet wounds Laertes with his own poisoned blade, and Laertes then falls as well. Only then does he truly seem to feel guilty, for he tells Osric he has been "justly killed" with his own treachery. As he lies dying,
Hamlet plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his "Poetics": that a drama should focus on action, not character. In "Hamlet", Shakespeare reverses this so that it is through the soliloquies, not the action, that the audience learns Hamlet's motives and thoughts. The play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of action, except in the "bad" quarto. At one point, as in the Gravedigger scene, Hamlet seems resolved to kill Claudius: in the next scene, however, when Claudius appears, he is suddenly tame. Scholars still debate whether these twists are mistakes or intentional additions to add